Spicy Buffalo Chicken Calzones

The buffalo wing sauce we started making a few weeks back has turned out great, and we've since experimented using different base hot sauces and differing amounts of ingredients. One thing that came to mind was a thicker and creamier version of wing sauce we had served with calzones at a restaurant once, so more experimentation was in order to try to replicate it. For our calzones, we started out by slicing up one inch strips of chicken breast.

To get the thicker consistency, which is almost like a dip, we made the sauce almost the same way as in our previous blog, but used extra ketchup and heated it up with about half a container of sour cream. After simmering for 45 minutes we got this brightly colored end product that was a perfect balance between dip and sauce.  Unfortunately we made it far too spicy using a different base hot sauce, so it needed to be diluted down with something else before going in our calzones.

To cut down on the heat and make a filling for our calzones we cooked the wing sauce with the chicken strips and a package of cream cheese.

Everything is mixed together in the crock pot and then put on low heat for several hours.

At the end we had a no-fuss filling ready to go that didn't take much effort at all.

For the calzone dough any pizza crust recipe will do. We like to use this one because it gets a little crunchy on the outside while still being fluffy on the inside.

The filling is first spooned out out over half of the calzone dough...

...and then the other half is folded over to create the crescent calzone shape.

After baking for about 15 minutes we've got two finished piping hot calzones fresh from the oven.

It's an oozing molten volcano of wing sauce, cream cheese, and chicken in there!

Our calzones were pretty basic as we were trying something new and quick, but there's a lot of variations that could be done here. If you don't want to go the crock pot route, instead cook the chicken strips with some veggies (green bell pepper and onion would be great!) on the stove for a few minutes and then spoon the filling with the sauce onto the calzone dough. If you want a fun pizza style night, use any leftover dough to make bread or cheese sticks along with the calzones.