Tonight was pizza night at home for my wife and I.  I had thawed some pizza dough I had picked up at DiPietro awhile back and decided I wanted to do something a little different and attempt emulating something Pizza Hut makes, a panzerotti style pocket called a P’Zone.  Now I don’t know what necessarily know what the difference between a panzerotti, calzone or stromboli.  From what I can tell they’re simply the same thing by a different name, though if any commenter wants to enlighten me, feel free.

Now what makes a P’Zone different from the aforementioned pockets is that it puts all your favourite ingredients inside, but omits the tomato sauce, which is instead served on the side for dipping.  To me this just seems to sort out some of the inherent issues with panzerottis.  I find typically you start eating at one end and by the time you get to the other end all the tomato sauce has squeezed to the opposite end.  If you have any meats in there they typically just add more grease and just make for a pretty soggy mess by the end of your meal.  Taking the tomato sauce out seems to perfectly solve this problem.

Previously I had made baked panzerottis but was never quite happy with the results, so tonight I pulled out the trusty deep fryer and thought I would try my hand and making a deep fried panzerotti.  I’m guessing that the Pizza Hut P’Zones aren’t deep fried, but that doesn’t really matter per say.  I’m a pretty straight forward meatatarian when it comes to pizza, so I kept things pretty simple and given pizza ingredients can be so subjective.

Homemade Panzerotti

• 1/2 bag of fresh pizza dough (either homemade or store bought works)
• mozzarella cheese
• sliced pepperoni (I used Pillers)
• chopped, cooked chicken
• fresh herbs from the garden (rosemary, oregano, basil)
• sundried tomatoes
• tomato sauce
• Frank’s Red Hot Sauce

Heat up your deep fryer to 375f.  Roll out your dough on a cutting board sprinkled with flour.  Make sure to get all the air out of your crust, you can hear the air pop as you roll it out.  I rolled mine into a 10″ circle then added all my ingredients except the tomato sauce.  Best to build a pile to one side of the dough and leave about an inch away from the edges.  Fold over the dough and pinch the edges tightly together.  Make sure there are no holes as your pocket needs to be tight so it won’t let in any of the oil.  You’re now ready to put it in the deep fryer.  Cook for roughly 10 minutes, flipping the pocket as needed until evenly golden brown.  Put the tomato sauce in a bowl and heat in the microwave for a minute.  They you should be ready to serve.

I was really happy with the final product.  If I had ordered that from a pizzaria I would have been satisfied paying money for one of those.  The outside was beautifully crispy, while the inside was nice and doughy without being greasy.  Paired with the tomato sauce it was excellent.  The dough expanded to sizes well exceeding the size of a Pizza Hut P’Zone, but I’m not complaining.