I’ve spent many years playing with pizza recipes – my wife and I even created our own “How to make Pizza” recipe poster on our honeymoon.
So when Now Then magazine put out a call for vegan recipes, it seemed a good opportunity to provide my Calzone recipe. Here it is, in all its glory: enjoy!
Disclaimer: I am a proud member of the chuck-it-in-it’ll-be-fine school of cooking. I firmly believe a happy cook just throws stuff in a pan, rather than measuring 18g of this and 3.5 medium egg yolks of that; so take my measurements with a pinch of salt, so to speak. This recipe makes around 3-4 calzones.
Ingredients
About 200g of strong bread flour (around 12% protein is best).- Warm water.
- Few spoons of salt.
- Few spoons of sugar.
- Dried instant yeast (assuming you aren’t a brand of vegan that cares about fungi. If you do, miss out the yeast, it’ll still work, but the bread won’t be as tasty).
- Tomato passata (the own brand stuff from Co-op works fine).
- Veg.
- Herbs/spices.
- Vegan mozzarella style cheese.
- Soya milk.
Recipe
Dough
- Prewarm the oven to 70°C (If you want to get the dough ready quickly. It’ll be tastier if you leave it to rise over 4 hours without extra warmth, but it’ll take 4 hours.)
- Mix the salt, sugar and yeast in a bowl.
- Stir in the flour, so it’s all nicely mixed.
- Carefully add water, mixing by hand, until you have one non-sticky ball of dough.
- Knead it on a floured surface for about 5 minutes, until your hands ache.
- Turn off the oven, chuck the dough back in the bowl, cover the bowl with a teatowel, and put the bowl in the oven.
- Leave to rise for an hour.
- Take it out, knead it some more, and roll it into flat round pizza bases.
Filling
- Fry a load of onions, peppers, mushrooms, garlic, chilli, spinach, soya mince – whatever you want in your calzone.
- Mix in some herbs & spices – I usually use mixed herbs, paprika and mild chilli powder (but loads of it, so you get the taste of the chilli coming through).
- Put a few dollops of passata in with the veg.
- Heat the rest of the passata in a pan/microwave.
Putting it all together
- Preheat oven to 230°C – the higher the better.
- Pop a pizza base on an oven tray.
- Dollop veg in to the middle.
- Cover the veg in cheese – you can use soft cheese, or nothing, if you prefer.
- Using a pastry brush, make the edges of the base wet with milk.
- Fold it over, and squidge the edges together to seal it.
- Paint the whole top with milk, to make it go extra brown in the oven.
- Cook for 10ish minutes, until brown.
- Serve with hot passata on top
Then eat all yours, then eat what your wife couldn’t manage, then look longingly at the one saved for tomorrow… Man, do I love pizza…
