We finish the pizza series with Pizza Siciliana, or Sicilian Style, also known as Sfincione. It is made with the same dough from Episode 170, but this pizza is thicker than Napolitana and it is square. Also, it is cooked in a pan instead of on a stone and we do not use the radiant heat from the broiler. Why? Because being thicker the dough needs more time to cook through and we don’t want to burn the top or the bottom, so it is more like a bread than the Napolitana style.
Using a pan with sides, put a goodly layer of oil on the bottom, which will result in the crust getting very crispy. Then spread the dough using your fingertips right out to the edge. If you don’t have enough dough to fill the pan, don’t force it if that would make the pizza too thin (with the slick surface of the oil, you would have a hard time doing that anyway). And don’t obsess with making the shape perfect.
Once you have the dough spread in a (roughly) square shape, add your toppings - as much as you like. Be generous because the crust is thick. Today I am using:
• Nduja sausage (this is a spreadable pork sausage from Calabria, just across the straight from Sicily, that is best eaten heated)
• Roasted plum tomatoes
• Grated Scamorza cheese (I sometimes like to use the smoked variety for extra flavor)
• Grated Romano cheese
• Freshly ground black pepper
Some of the typical ingredients used on Pizza Siciliana that you can add or substitute are onion, anchovy, tomato sauce, olives (regular or oil-cured), caciocavallo cheese (really hard to find in the US), and even toasted bread crumbs.
The pizza goes into a 425-degree oven for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes.
What you end up with is a wonderfully chewy pizza with that really crisp bottom from the olive oil. The flavors from the toppings really get absorbed by that crust, in particular in this case the Nduja, which gives up all of its fat for the betterment of the bread. I do recommend that you use some kind of fatty sausage for this reason. And of course, cheese. Lots of melty cheese.
15 окт 2024
