Camper Van Cooking features 70 recipes to suit any outdoor cooking scenario, including camping the NC500.
Camper Van Cooking by Claire Thomson & Matt Williamson (Hardie Grant, £20) Photography: Sam Folan
Frying pan calzone with mozzarella and chilli
Calzone is a pizza that has been folded into the shape of a half moon and cooked. Making fresh dough for pizza on a camping trip is a step too far for many, I feel. In which case, buy good-quality naan bread or Italian-style, sturdy flat breads for this recipe – shop-bought tortilla wraps are too thin. You want a bit of puff; enough doughy-ness to fold and ape a pizza crust. The result is a short-cut calzone with dough that takes enough time to melt the mozzarella and soften the tomatoes a little. You could call this a toasted sandwich… you could, but I’m not going to.
Serves 4
1–2 tbsp good olive oil
2 cupfuls cherry tomatoes (about 250g)
big pinch of salt
4 large flat breads or sturdy wraps
2 x 125g balls of mozzarella, drained, then roughly chopped and patted dry
dried oregano, to taste
dried chilli flakes, to taste
Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over a moderate heat. Add the tomatoes and a big pinch of salt and cook for 3–5 minutes, until the tomatoes have softened but still hold a little of their shape. Remove from the heat, drain and set the tomatoes aside.
Wipe out the pan, ready to cook the calzone.
Lay out each flat bread on a clean surface. Distribute the cooked tomatoes, mozzarella, oregano and chilli flakes equally over each flat bread, leaving a good border of at least a couple of centimetres around the edge to prevent anything seeping out when you fry. Fold each flatbread over in half to create a half
moon shape.
Working in batches, in a dry frying pan, fry each flat bread over a moderate-low heat, for about three minutes on the first side, until the bread on the underside takes on a nice colour, is even blistered in places, and the mozzarella has melted sufficiently.
Flip over the calzone and cook on the other side for three minutes.
Remove from the heat and cut into quarters to serve.
