Cafe Lula

Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Chri-iis, happy birthday to you!

Today is Chris’s birthday! He is way old (25. I know, it’s so gross.) and nearly a real grown up! Birthdays mean lots of food and for one of his birthday teas Chris chose calzones.

I know the title is far too long but sometimes it’s difficult to decide what to have in calzones, so we just went with pretty much everything. There was chicken, sausage, parma ham, spinach, mushrooms, jalapenos and some people (Chris) even had olives. I did not. Olives are gross. If someone put them in my calzone I would throw it at them. Maybe. Maybe I’d just fish the olives out. Would they make the rest of the calzone taste olivey though? That would be awful. I’d probably cry a bit.

The dough recipe is from Jamie Oliver and it is absolutely brilliant. The calzones we made for Chris’s birthday were amazing but you can use whatever ingredients you have to hand and I am sure it’d turn out ace.

Happy birthday, Chris 🙂

Chicken, sausage, parma ham, mushroom and spinach calzone

A Cafe Lula recipe, using dough recipe from Jamie at Home by Jamie Oliver

Makes 6 calzones

Ingredients:

For the dough:

1kg strong white bread flour

1 tbsp fine sea salt

2 x 7g sachets dried yeast

1 tbsp golden caster sugar

4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

650ml lukewarm water

For the filling:

olive oil, for frying

1 large shallot, chopped

1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed

400g chicken breast, cut into chunks

5 chipolatas, skins removed and cut into small pieces

250g chestnut mushrooms, sliced

2 good handfuls fresh baby spinach

1.5 tsp oregano

5 slices parma ham, torn into pieces

a few green olives, sliced (optional)

a few slices jalapeno, chopped (optional)

400g passata or tinned crushed tomatoes

black pepper and salt, to season

125g mozzarella ball, sliced

200g grated cheese (I used a cheddar and mozzarella mix)

First, make the dough. In a jug, measure out the lukewarm water and then add the yeast, sugar and olive oil. Give it a quick stir with a fork and then leave it for a few minutes.

Sieve the flour and salt into a large bowl and make a well in the middle. Pour in the yeast mixture and use the fork to swirl the flour into the liquid, starting in the middle and gradually working your way out to the edge, drawing more flour in until it is pretty much all mixed in.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour and tip the mixture out. Scrape any rogue flour out of the bottom of the bowl and tip it onto the dough mixture. Start mixing with your hands, pulling the dough apart and kneading the dough together until it is well mixed. Once you have a fairly even dough, knead it until smooth and springy (3-5 minutes of kneading).

Dust a clean, large bowl with flour and put the dough in it. Dust the top with flour, then cover the bowl with a damp tea towel and put it in a warm spot for an hour, until the dough has doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to full heat (for me this is 240C/460F using a fan oven). In a large pan, heat the olive oil over a medium-high heat and fry the shallots for 4-5 minutes until softened. Add the chicken, sausage and garlic and fry until the chicken and sausage are cooked through, then turn the heat down and add the mushrooms and 1/2 tsp oregano. Stir every so often. While the mushrooms are cooking, prepare the risen dough.

Tip the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it briefly to knock out the air. Divide the dough into 6 equal pieces (I weighed each to check they were the same, because I am a huge geek) and roll each piece into a rough circle around 3-5mm thick. I roll mine fairly thin but this does increase the chance of it splitting during cooking! The dough is fairly elastic and does seem to shrink a lot once you’ve rolled it out. Just keep rolling it and eventually it gives up. Place each rolled out piece of dough on a baking sheet (I placed two on each baking sheet).

Season the mushrooms with salt and black pepper and add the spinach. While the spinach is wilting, heat the passata with the other 1 tsp of oregano and some salt and black pepper.

Divide the passata mixture between the calzones, spreading it over the whole circle of each one. Then divide the mushroom mixture between each, only covering half of each circle. Scatter over the mozzarella, grated cheese, jalapenos, olives and parma ham. Fold the uncovered half over so that you have six semi-circles and press the edges of the top and bottom together, sealing them so that the filling can’t escape. Crimping the edges is a good way to stop the filling getting out.

Cook on the bottom shelf (and the next bottom shelf if you’re cooking several in one go) for 10-15 minutes. If you are cooking several at the same time on different shelves, switch them around halfway through or the ones on the higher shelf will cook much quicker and may burn. Mine took 12 minutes at 240C.

Serve! Don’t burn your face though, they get SO hot.