Tremendous Calzones

Sit. Pour yourself a coffee. We're doing this right. Calzones. The TREMENDOUS calzone — the under-celebrated giant of Italian food, the dish nobody puts on the magazine covers because the magazine people are scared, they're scared of how good this is, they don't know what to do with a folded pizza that out-pizzas the pizza. An old Italian woman cornered me once and made me promise I would never let Americans ruin the calzone the way they ruined ziti. I promised. I'm keeping that promise. Right now.

A calzone, for the people who don't know — and many people don't know, they come up to me, they say 'Bigly, what is a calzone, is it just a folded pizza' and I tell them, NO. It's a folded pizza ELEVATED. A folded pizza that went to college and came back changed. The crust seals around the cheese and the meat and the sauce and it all BAKES TOGETHER, the flavors mingle, the cheese gets STRETCHY in a way regular pizza cheese can only dream about. It's better than pizza. There, I said it. Write to me. I don't care.

Now here is where most so-called chefs hand you the L — they tell you to use store-bought dough. Cookbook authors hate this trick — the trick being, just MAKE the dough — but the bagged stuff is sad, the refrigerated tube is sadder, and the supermarket pizza-dough ball is a betrayal of everything our grandmothers stood for. Their grandmothers are crying. Mine is crying. We're making the dough. Ten minutes of actual work, one nap from the dough, and you'll never go back. Plain and simple.

When you cut into this calzone — and you'll cut into it, with a real knife, like a person, not pull it apart with your hands like an animal — the cheese is going to STRETCH. It's going to stretch in a way that, frankly, should be illegal. Steam will come out. You'll smell the basil. You'll smell the sausage. Your neighbors will know what you're doing. They'll get jealous. That's a normal reaction. Make extra and bring one over. Or don't. Be powerful. Be selfish. Eat both. Save me a piece.