Day one hundred twenty eight

Calzone with salad and tomato sauce

What is Calzone?

Today was an interesting experience for me. It was the first time since I have started the school, that I came to class having no idea what we are cooking. There was a discrepancy between a production grid and recipes package. The dish we had on the grid was not in our package and vise versa. My sous chef was not able to get in touch with the chef and clarify this.

What we found is that production grid was right and our dish is calzone with mushrooms, spinach, two types of cheeses, green salad on the side and tomato sauce. That was a relief at least to know what we are cooking, but what the heck is calzone?

I found out that a calzone is an Italian dish,
sometimes called a closed pizza. To prepare calzone the pizza dough is usually used and feeling is pretty much the same as for the pizza (put everything you have and like).

The recipe for the dough

First thing was to make a dough. This is a recipe we got from the chef.  He got it from the baking shop and at the first look it seems like puzzle. However, it's really easy - left column the list of ingredients with baking percentage (it is never 100% in total, because the flour is 100% itself and all other ingredients are in percents to flour). So flour was 100%, water 68% of the weight of flour, yeast 1%, salt 2% and extra virgin olive oil 20%. The right column is the amount of ingredients to make 3 kilo of the dough. The dough came out to be very good and not difficult to prepare. You should mix it for about 10 minutes to develop gluten and then proof it twice until doubles in volume.

Then we sautéed mushrooms, grated cheese, assembled calzone and baked them about 10 minutes at 500F (very hot oven).

The final dish was great, I liked it (may be because I love a good pizza).

Feeling is in

Ready to be baked