Recipe #13 and #14: Pizza Crust and Cowboy Calzones

Recipe: Pizza Crust
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hr 10 min (or longer, dough can be refrigerated for up to 2 days)
Ease: 1
Taste: 8
Leftover Value: No leftovers! (But again, dough can be make ahead of time and will keep for 2 days)
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

Recipe: Cowboy Calzone
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: With pre-made dough, 50 minutes
Ease: 7
Taste: 9
Leftover Value: 8
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

I'll be using this dough a few more times as I cook through The Pioneer Woman Cooks when I make her two different pizzas, so I'll learn quickly if this dough is versatile enough to be used for pizza and calzones.

So far, it's a winner.

Any dough stacked with ingredients or too many steps isn't worth making.  This dough is simple, taking under ten minutes to mix together.

Just be prepared to wait an hour before you can begin making your calzones.

Then the dough will look all puffy like this:

About a half hour through the wait time is when you'll want to begin making the meat for the calzones.

Unless you're smart and make your dough ahead of time.

Unlike me.

The meat mixture is so easy, and as it begins to combine you will want to scoop it from the pan and eat it right there.

But wait, because there is an equally as tempting cheese mixture to be combined next.

The meat mixture should cool a little before being combined with the cheese mixture, I assume to keep the cheese from instantly melting.  I used this time to start separating my dough into eight portions for my calzones.

This part was the most difficult, and perhaps that is because these weren't a typical calzone in the Italian sense of a calzone.

The calzones I've always enjoyed have been as big as half of a pizza.  Though these were obviously smaller, after rolling out the dough according to the specifications, it felt like I was over packing them with meat.  In the end, I still had leftover meat in the bowl.*

*It didn't go to waste since my garbage disposal brother, Joel, was over to enjoy these for lunch.

They felt especially large when I closed them up.  I expected the dough to stick a little to the table (even though I floured it beforehand) or start to rip apart when I picked up each calzone so I used a spatula to pick them up.

But they lifted fairly easy.

The next problem I ran into was that I could only fit 2-3 on a pan.  I'm still working on a solution for that problem.

If you like a crisper shell, you'll want to bake these for longer than the 12-15 minutes baking time.  We were pretty hungry so the first six calzones were devoured without a golden brown crisp about them.

Regardless, the dough wasn't too doughy and the center was piping hot and delicious.

I might have been just a little too excited to get a great picture.  PW doesn't say to serve these with any sauce, but it seemed like a necessity to me.