Panzerotti

A panzerotto is a disc of leavened pizza dough rolled to three or four millimetres, filled on one half, folded into a half-moon, sealed by hand and deep-fried for two to three minutes. The standard Puglian filling is tomato and fiordilatte mozzarella with salt and oregano. Everything else is a regional or family variation.

The name comes from panza, dialect for belly. Steam trapped inside during frying inflates the pocket, so a properly made one arrives taut and rounded. A flat panzerotto was either overfilled or badly sealed.

Size is part of the definition. It fits in one hand and is eaten walking: roughly 100 to 120 grams of dough and 60 to 80 grams of filling, twelve to fifteen centimetres across before frying. It is street food and rosticceria food, sold alongside pettole, fried olives and sgagliozze, never a sit-down dish.

Because the base is dough, tomato and cheese, the standard panzerotto is vegetarian, though the cheese is usually made with animal rennet unless the producer says otherwise.

The first thing is texture. The crust shatters and gives way immediately, with a thin, open crumb underneath rather than a dense layer of bread. Fried dough at the right temperature does not taste of oil, it tastes toasted, faintly sweet from the flour, with a slight tang from the long rise.

The filling is deliberately plain and hot. Tomato that has been reduced and salted in advance is concentrated and slightly sharp, and the fiordilatte inside is milky and mild rather than salty, pulling into strings as you bite. Oregano is the only aromatic in the classic version.

What it is not is greasy. A panzerotto from a competent friggitoria leaves a light mark on the paper, not a slick. If it feels heavy in the hand and the crust bends instead of cracking, the oil was too cool.

Eat it two or three minutes after it leaves the fryer. Straight out, the cheese is hot enough to burn, which is the most common way visitors to Bari ruin their afternoon.

Make the dough the day before. Bread flour cut with ten to thirty per cent fine semola, 55 to 60 per cent water, a small amount of yeast, salt and a spoon of olive oil; rise four to six hours at room temperature or overnight in the fridge. Divide into 100-gram balls and let them relax for thirty minutes before rolling.

Dry the filling first, and take this seriously. Cube the mozzarella and leave it in a sieve in the fridge overnight. Reduce the tomato in a pan with salt until a spoon dragged through leaves a clear track. Wet filling is the reason panzerotti burst.

Roll each ball to three or four millimetres, put the filling on one half leaving a two-centimetre border, fold, press the air out with your palm, seal the edge with your fingertips and then crimp it with a fork. Do not wet the edge; damp dough seals worse, not better.

Fry in peanut oil at 170 to 180 C, two to three minutes per side, two or three at a time in a narrow deep pot rather than a wide pan, which loses heat faster. Let the oil recover between batches. Drain on a rack, not on paper, and wait two minutes before eating.

A panzerotto is a ten-minute product, and everything about keeping one is damage control. Left a few hours at room temperature under a cloth, the crust softens as steam from the filling works outwards through the dough. The fridge does the same thing faster and stiffens the dough on top of it.

The way to plan ahead is to freeze them raw. Shape them, space them well apart on a tray, freeze for two hours, then move them into bags. They hold about three months, after which the dough surface dries out and the edges take on freezer smells. Fry straight from frozen, dropping the oil to 160 to 165°C (320 to 330°F) and stretching the time to four or five minutes a side.

Already fried ones go back into a conventional oven at 180°C (355°F) for eight to ten minutes, sitting on a rack rather than a tray so the base does not sweat. An air fryer does it in five minutes at the same temperature. A microwave softens the crust and nothing brings it back.

A well fried panzerotto is puffed, evenly golden, and lighter in the hand than its size suggests. Small blisters and a few darker patches on the surface are normal and show dough that genuinely rose; flat, uniform colour with no blistering means underproved dough or a sheet rolled too thick.

The crust should crack audibly and give way at once, showing a thin open crumb inside rather than a compact damp layer. Dough that crumples and goes rubbery met cold oil. Look at the paper underneath: fried at the right temperature it leaves a light mark, not a spreading patch. The seal says a lot too, a thick even fold pressed shut, never glued with water or egg. Inside, the mozzarella should pull into strands and hold together instead of collapsing into a watery pool, which is what undrained cheese does.

The lookalike abroad is the calzone: baked, bigger, often plated with sauce. A panzerotto is fried, hand-sized and eaten off paper. Pizzerias in Toronto and New Jersey sell much larger fried versions under the same name.

Outside Italy, fresh panzerotti are a delicatessen and bakery item rather than a supermarket one. In the US, Italian-American bakeries in the New York and Philadelphia areas sell them at 4 to 8 dollars each, usually under the panzarotti spelling, and frozen boxes are widely stocked in the Delaware Valley. In the UK they are hard to find at all outside a handful of Italian delis, where they run 3.50 to 6 pounds each.

The better route abroad is to make them, since every ingredient is easy: strong flour, fine semola, yeast, tinned tomatoes and a block of low-moisture mozzarella. A kilo of flour makes about twenty pieces.

In Italy, friggitorie in Bari charge 2 to 3.50 euro for the classic and up to 5 for elaborate fillings. Milan's Luini sits at 3.50 to 4.50. Supermarket frozen packs are 6 to 10 euro per kilo and have deliberately dry, thickened tomato fillings.

If you buy them frozen and raw, fry from frozen at 160 to 165 C for four to five minutes per side. Thawing them first guarantees a leak.

Bari is the place, and specifically the old town between Piazza Mercantile and the basilica of San Nicola, where friggitorie run continuously from late morning into the evening. The same counters sell sgagliozze, fried polenta squares, and pettole, and a walk through those streets is the fastest way to understand Puglian fried street food as a category rather than a dish.

Milan is the unexpected second address. Luini, in via Santa Radegonda behind the Duomo, has been frying panzerotti since 1949, opened by a family from Puglia, and is the reason most Italians outside the South know the product at all. There is almost always a queue on the pavement.

In the Salento and the Valle d'Itria, rosticcerie sell panzerotti alongside the rest of the local fried repertoire, generally in a smaller format with a drier filling. Lecce is a good base for that version.

The best ones, though, are domestic and seasonal. Puglian households fry panzerotti in quantity at Carnival and on Christmas Eve, and no counter matches a kitchen production line running for twenty people.