For example, when you read books based in the US or watch a US TV show they sometimes refer to things you just don't eat in Australia, but it makes you curious. Cornbread was one of these. It intrigued me. I tried a cornbread recipe from Marie Claire Breakfast and it was awful, all gritty and nasty, so these experiments don't always turn out. I still want to try another recipe though.
Calzones were another thing I've always heard of but had never tried. I had a couple of recipes in my cookbook:
A bread machine calzone recipe
An easy peezy pizza dough recipe
And another recipe for a BBQ chicken calzone that I can't find at the moment.
I didn't really feel like a chicken pizza-type thing, but I like the BBQ idea, so I decided to give the bread machine calzone recipe a go and a meatlovers-type filling for it. I didn't make my BBQ sauce either and just used a bottle of BBQ flavoured bought pizza sauce.
I made these fairly late on a Saturday afternoon before we had friends over for dinner and I really don't think my attention was there, and they didn't turn out all that well. I didn't roll out the dough enough, so they were all doughy and not enough filling.
I tried again the next day using the easy peezy dough. I fired up the breadmaker and set it to work and this time really tried to focus on making proper parcels (thanks to Google, which found me a little step-by-step instruction guide, which I have lost the link to).
They turned out a little bigger than I would have liked, but I didn't think the filling would fit properly in a smaller parcel. The dough made nine fairly large calzones.
In our new house we have an oven that's a little bit smaller than the ones I'm used to and I'm still trying to find my optimal shelf levels. I stuffed up this one, and the ones on the top shelf were just too close to the top of the oven.
I didn't want to waste them though, because I only had three on the other tray, so I just turned them over and readjusted the height of their tray and tried again.
Only two leaked!!! They freeze quite well too, and I've been reheating them in the oven.
While they weren't bad, they weren't what I was expecting either. I think I would like something a lot more saucy than these were, and I still think that it was too much dough not enough inside. And there was no way I could have rolled that dough out anymore or stuffed any more filling in.
I would still like to try a professional one but I don't think I'd make these again. Neither of the boys ate any of them, and were much more excited about the little pizza subs I made to use up the rest of the meat/cheese filling (just some halved hotdog rolls with pizza sauce topped with the meat and cheese and put in the oven with the calzones until the cheese melts).
In hindsight, I think I was more excited about the pizza subs in the end too.
Sarah had a restaurant Calzone in Adelaide a few years back. It was a spaghetti bolg type filling with cheese on top. The actual Bread thing it was wrapped in was more like a cooked naan bread. As if they plopped the filling and cheese on top grilled it and then folded part of the bread over and kind of toasted it a wee bit like a kebab. She loved it and has raved about it ever since.
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