Calzone Dough Recipe

Couple brings Chicago-style pizza to Brownsville

First, the irony: Blanca Mendiola, master pizza chef at Mamma Blanca’s Chicago Style Pizza, doesn’t like pizza — in fact, she doesn’t even like cheese.

This doesn’t prevent her, however, from turning out a deep-dish pie steadily winning converts among Brownsville’s pizza-eating public.

“Mamma” Blanca first tried making pizza as a teenager, using her mother’s flour tortilla dough and American cheese. She honed her craft living in Chicago with her husband, Alfonso Mendiola, a Chicago native and the restaurant’s owner, and their children.

“I like to experiment with recipes,” she said. “Since they are pizza lovers, my husband and my kids, I’ve always made pizza for them. We spent way too much money on pizza.”

Say ‘cheese’

The Mendiolas relocated to Brownsville from Chicago in 2003, a move Blanca’s parents had made a couple of decades earlier. Her homemade pizzas became a hit with friends — enough so that the family began to see an opportunity.

“We started getting demands for pizzas, so that’s when we decided it’s time to open up a business and introduce Chicago-style pizza to the Valley,” Alfonso said.

Mamma Blanca’s opened Feb. 1. in Arch Plaza at 1393 E. Alton Gloor Blvd. The restaurant has just five tables and a scattering of Windy City-centric ornamentation.

The restaurant is Brownsville’s only source for authentic Chicago-style, deep-dish pizza. Most of their business during the week is carry-out, though diners fill the tables on weekends, Alfonso said.

“Our number one hitter is the deep dish, because it’s something unique,” he said. “It’s unique because it’s a family recipe. We make our own sauce. We make our own Italian-style sausage.”

Ingredients are purchased fresh daily and the dough made each morning, Alfonso said. Other than pizzas made to sell by the slice, each order is made from scratch when a customer calls.

Because deep-dish is so thick — three pounds of cheese alone — each pie normally takes 45 minutes to an hour to prepare.

And because Blanca is the only member of the kitchen crew, at least for now, occasionally things stack up to the point that a pizza takes two hours — game days for instance.

In any case, the restaurant calls customers a few minutes before their pizzas are out of the oven, so they can start heading that way.

Olive oil bread and calzone

A recipe for a good simple loaf of bread is hard to find.  I am sure there are many out there.  That is the problem.  Which one to choose?  It is a veritable tyranny of choice out there!  Simple should be easy.  Yet I fear dull, dry and dreary when it comes to simple breads.  Recipes need to inspire.  I need a source I can trust.  Enter Brydie's step by step guide to making olive oil bread .  Having made four batches of this bread over the last month, I can highly recommend it. I have made it in the evening when we haven't managed to get out and buy a loaf of bread.  What I love about this bread is it uses ingredients I have on hand and it is works in with my lifestyle.  I have tried adding wholemeal flour.  I have left it rising while I go to the supermarket and get chatting to a friends.  I have paused to photograph the salt hog because my new celtic sea salt reminded me of the sand on the beach and then I have forgotten how much salt I put in.  I have made it with canola oil rather than olive oil.  I have tried making it using the sponge method that Mollie Katzen favours.  I have made it between Sylvia's bath and Downton Abbey on the telly. I make it in my bread tin.  It comes out with a gorgeous golden brown crust.  It looks just like a regular loaf of bread we might buy from our local bakers.  It slices easily.  It makes excellent toast.  It keeps well for a few days.  It is a joy to wake up to a fresh loaf.  The recipe is adapted from The Bourke Street Bakery cookbook.  I was interested to find another adaption of the same recipe for Parmesan Breadsticks where they say that the recipe works fine with regular flour. I was a bit unsure how to prepare the calzones.  Pinching it together to seal it was quite different from making pasties.  Bread dough is far more robust and flexible than pastry.  The calzones were huge.  E and I enjoyed ours.  I ate another one for lunch over two days and  still have one in the freezer.  Sylvia had a plainer one with just mozzarella and didn't eat heaps but maybe a small amount was enough for her.  Definitely something with which I would like to experiment further. 2. At the end of the 10 minutes add olive oil and salt, and the rest of the flour if you didn't add it all at the start.  Stir to combine as much as possible.

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