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When cooking a pizza or a calzone, the oven must be extremely hot, which means that the first thing you need to do is duly fill up the brazier. When the food is cooking, it's important to always keep the temperature as high as possible and put in a few at a time.

If you've got the right temperature, pizza cooks very quickly, less than five minutes and the crust swells up immediately. Instead a pizza that struggles to cook and a crust that remains low means that the oven isn't hot enough.

Here is a recipe to make a calzone, a sort of folded pizza that blew away visitors at the Heart&Home event in London, thanks to the quality of J.Corradi range cooker.

Calzone

Ingredients

Dought

Strong white bread flour: 500 gr 

Salt: 2 tsp 

Dried easy blend yeast: 2 sachets 

Olive oil: 2 tbsp + some more for drizzling

Cold water: 400 ml 

Filling

Cherry tomatoes: 150 gr (halved)

Buffalo mozzarella: 200 gr (roughly chopped)

Assorted Italian cold meats: 200 gr (for example: salami, ham, speck)

Grated parmesan: 30 gr 

Preparation

1. For the dough, sift the flour into a bowl. Mix water and yeast together in a separate bowl.

2. Add the yeast mixture to the flour and mix together to form a dough. Knead the dough for five minutes on a floured surface. Add the olive oil and knead again to combine. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave somewhere warm for two hours.

3. Preheat the oven to 230-250°C. Place a backing tray into the oven to preheat space. Add the salt to the dough and knead again, then divide it into four equal portions and roll into balls.

4. Place each ball onto a floured work surface and roll out into 20 cm circles. For the filling, place all the filling ingredients into a bowl and mix together well. Place one quarter of the filling mixture onto one half of each dough circle, leaving 2 cm gap around the edge.

5. Brush the clean edges with water then fold the other sides over to cover the filling and pinch the edges to seal the four parcels. Place the calzones onto the preheated backing sheet and transfer to the oven to bake for eight minutes or until the dough is well cooked.

Chef Hugh Mc Givern

In his 30 years of experience as an Executive Chef, Hugh McGivern reached the four corners of the world. Originally from Glasgow, he served his apprenticeship in the army and then continued as Food Manager for the Carnival Cruise Lines, constantly travelling and adding international flavours and ingredients to his cuisine. From Michelin restaurants in London to the personal chef to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan, he also cooked for Barack Obama and most of the European Royal Families. Heavily involved in nutrition and rules for preparing health food, he has developed programs for people with dementia in collaboration with 3 English Universities.

The cooker that was tested by Chef Hugh McGivern is the J.Corradi model Country 180 LGE. It is a combined range cooker that works with wood logs/gas/electricity, with firebox, wood-burning oven, multifunction electric oven, cast iron cooking grate, stainless steel customizable hobs. This cooker is available in the "thermo" version also, in order to have hot water for radiators or underfloor heating.