No bread is an island

...entire of itself. (With apologies to John Donne!)
I live and breathe breadmaking. I’m an evangelist who would like everyone to make his or her own bread. I want to demystify breadmaking and show it as the easy everyday craft that it is. To this end I endeavour to make my recipes as simple and as foolproof as I possibly can.

I call my blog 'No bread is an island' because every bread is connected to another bread. So a spicy fruit bun with a cross on top is a hot cross bun. This fruit dough will also make a fruit loaf - or Chelsea buns or a Swedish tea ring...
I'm also a vegan, so I have lots of vegan recipes on here - and I'm adding more all the time.

Saturday 19 February 2011

Calzone in the chiminea

Firing up the chiminea today, so I thought I'd make a calzone or two.

I still haven't quite figured out how to bake a straightforward pizza in there, yet, so calzone it is - simply because you can turn it upside down to cook the top - not recommended with a pizza!

Made up a sponge earlier on this afternoon - 5g fresh yeast, 125g water and 50g each of wholemeal and white.

Mixed it together into a sloppy dough, covered it and left it whilst I attended to a few things.

When I came back after a couple of hours it had risen to a smooth soft, very thick batter.

To this I added another 50g each wholemeal and white, plus:
1 teaspoon bouillon powder
1 heaped teaspoon hot curry powder
1 teaspoon mixed herbs
4 sun-dried tomatoes, chopped small
25g oil from the s-d-tomatoes

Mixed this into a dough, kneaded it for about 20 seconds and put it in the bowl, then covered with a cloth.

Started the fire, and, when it was going nicely, I covered it with charcoal and came back into the kitchen to shape the calzones.

I roughly kneaded the bread, which was very soft, and quite sticky - but for a dough you're going to roll out, using lots of flour, it was fine.

I divided the dough into two pieces and rolled them out into circles, working on them alternately.
Here's one of them, rolled into a bit of an oblong - but hey, who cares? Then placed on baking parchment.
Then I spread half of each of them with Pateole (a very tasty vegan mushroom spread) and pesto. On this I placed 40g (roughly) of chopped vegan polony, sprinkled this with some Sheese (a vegan cheese substitute) and finally a dessertspoon of nutritional yeast and some black pepper.

The dough smooths out as it rises.

Then I lifted up the side of the dough with nothing on it and brought it over the filling and tucked it in all round. As you can see, your circles can be quite rough, but by folding the dough over the top they don't look too bad.

When I'd shaped both calzones, I covered them with a tea towel and went to check on the fire.

It was glowing hot, so I put the calzones in the top oven for a minute, just to give them a blast of heat.

After ten minutes began baking in earnest.

Took me a lot of fiddling about with various implements, but eventually I finished up with this one:

Nicely done on top
And this is what it looked like when cut open:

It tasted wonderful - and the tang of wood smoke only added to the flavour 
I had (almost) a whole one with a baked potato and some spicy lentil and tomato sauce - just gorgeous.

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