After finding this place online, I knew that it might be
slightly more upscale than what I have generally been used to. The price on the
internet, and even the menu, wasn’t at all as it is in the store. Online, it
appeared that there were a few “pre-built” options for a Calzone, which I
generally choose. Many restaurants will allow you to “build your own” calzone,
or at least add ingredients for an extra fee. However, Pie-tanza’s whole angle
on Calzones is to build your own. Upon looking at the menu, there didn’t appear
to be any pre-built options but, for $12.79, I was allowed to choose up to
three fillings from the very large array of ingredients they had. The dough and
the mozzarella are standard, so I chose domestic mushrooms, Italian sausage,
and ricotta cheese. It didn’t take them long to make it. There was a giant
wood-fire oven in the center of the restaurant, but it didn’t appear that they
used this to make my calzone. They may have, and I was just not paying
attention. The calzone was in the medium-large range as far as size goes, and
it was served with a small carafe of marinara sauce that was delicious. I could
describe the marinara as “earthy”. It had a lot of basil flavor and chunks of
tomato in it. Suffice to say it went pretty quickly. As I am learning, a
standard difference between Calzones and Strombolis are that a Calzone tends to
have more dough. This was definitely the case here. The calzone had a “rolled”
edge in a classic fashion, which made a lot of bread to eat around in order to
get to the pocket. The dough was literally perfect. I may have had dough that I
liked more because of its sweetness or texture, but this dough was, technically
speaking, perfect in every way. It was not overly sweet or unsweet. It was
cooked to perfection all the way through, it was both thin and crispy but had
enough volume that it maintained a level of softness. The ricotta used in the
pocket was a creamy high-quality cheese. The mushrooms tasted like canned ones
that had been cooked (to be expected), the mozzarella seemed to not be a
low-moisture kind. There was a lot of moisture in the pocket. I didn’t seem to
get a whole lot of the Italian sausage that I asked for, and it was “wet”
inside the middle. The wetness of the sausage and the mozzarella was not
overbearing, but it did leave the bottom of the dough ever-so-slightly soggy,
as described about other Calzones on this blog. All in all, this was a very
good Calzone. I would score this one a
B+, although it’s probably due for an A- as far as flavor goes, but the high
price of almost $13 brings the score down because of the bready-ness of it and the
wetness of the fillings.
No comments:
Post a Comment