Portable deliciousness
Calzones offer hand-held nourishment
These days, most of us aren’t hosting dinner parties or meeting friends at our favorite restaurants. We’re greeting friends outside for socially distanced picnics.
Sandwiches, paradigms of the hand-held genre, are well and good for a picnic, but there are so many other highly portable, satisfying recipes.
Buns and flatbreads travel well, require no utensils, are equally good warm or at room temperature and are even excellent the next day (or the day after that). You might even share them with your friends someday.
Enthusiasm for handheld foods is nothing new. As long as people have been eating, they’ve found ways to make nourishing food portable.
Consider, for example, the knish carts that once dotted Coney Island. Think about yakitori, hot dogs or kati rolls. Or better yet, calzones.
In this recipe for calzones, mozzarella, basil pesto and tomatoes are united again.
The tomatoes are roasted, which concentrates their flavor. Too much moisture can make the interior of a calzone soggy, so there’s also a practical reason to roast, just as there’s a practical reason to opt for a firmer whole-milk mozzarella over a milky one you might use in a caprese salad.
A hot oven ensures a crispy crust, and a pizza stone helps, too, if you have one.
Try these calzones first with the suggested fillings. But don’t be surprised when your mind wanders and remembers the leftovers in your fridge.
Anything is possible, but one thing’s for certain: In a world that feels out of hand, you may as well eat that way, too.