Panuozzo
- 1 minute ago
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Around 40 years ago in 1983, 2 years before my divine birth, a pizza guy in Gragnano, just outside Naples, looks at his pizza dough and thinks this could be a sandwich too. His name was Giuseppe Mascolo, and the story goes he was just making his kids something other than the same round pizza every night. The kids named it — the panuozzo.
But here’s the trick: instead of folding toppings into raw dough like a calzone, Mascolo baked the dough hollow, sliced it open, and loaded it up with some of Italy’s great sandwich ingredients.
Today, one of my favorite chefs, Evan Funke, has a version called the La Mortazza, the roman slang word for mortadella at his LA restaurant Mother Wolf. He rolls the dough out like a pizza, folds it on itself, and bakes the dough empty first, it comes out of the oven smiling at you, filled with ricotta mortadella pistachios to create one of the most beautiful sandwiches I’ve ever seen.
I know its crude to say this but It’s something that feels like a pizza, eats like a taco, but is a sandwich and something everyone who loves making pizza should know of as a way to use leftover pizza dough. This is Evan Funke’s La Mortazza. And we’re making it with the sponsor of today’s video, Gozney.
