Posted in Baking, Lunchbox, Main Meals, Recipes, Vegetarian
Tags: Andrew Whitley, Baking, Pie-Technology
More adventures in baking with Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters book. This time I tried out some Italian pie technology (or is it pizza technology?). The calzoni were really fun to make and tasty too.
You need:
* 160g of basic savoury bread sponge – there’s plenty of recipes for this on the web.
* 120g plain white flour
* 40g stoneground flour
* 75g water
* pinch of salt
* about 10 ml olive oil
Mix all the above together, knead until smooth and leave to rise for an hour.
For the filling I used (apologies for the lack of quantities, I can’t remember exactly how much)
* castello blue cheese (Andrew uses gorgonzola which Sainsbury’s didn’t have, but I think would work better)
* green peppers
* mild sweet peppadew piquante peppers, which we’re really addicted to at the moment
* red onions
I fried the onions, then added the green peppers, and finally mixed in the piquante peppers and the cheese.
To construct the calzoni you need to divide the dough into four and roll gently into rounds. Leave to relax for 2 minutes and then roll out into a circle about 15cm diameter. This bit was the really fun bit. The dough is so nice and soft and stretchy and quite forgiving. You can throw it around and pretend you work at dominos.
Brush the edges with egg, put a dollop of filling in the middle and fold over. Finally brush the tops with beaten egg and leave to prove for an hour. Bake at 200C for 15-20 minutes.
To be honest the filling wasn’t a huge success. The creamy blue cheese, bitter green pepper and sweet and spicy red peppers clashed a bit. However the dough was so nice and soft and light that they were gone within 5 minutes flat. Even the two I’d made for lunch the next day.
I’ll definitely try this again but experiment with some different fillings. They taste fantastic fresh, but they could also be good things to make a batch of at the weekend for lunch during the week.
Any suggestions for fillings? Andrew says it’s better to go for things that don’t change in size dramatically when cooked otherwise you end up with an empty calzoni.
