Supplì

A supplì is an oval of rice, 80 to 110 grams, cooked in tomato sauce, cooled, shaped by hand around a piece of mozzarella, dipped in beaten egg and breadcrumbs, and deep-fried.

It is counter food. You buy one in a Roman pizza-by-the-slice shop or a friggitoria, alongside salt cod fillets and fried courgette flowers, and eat it standing up while the pizza is being weighed. In the Roman order of things it is a snack or a starter, never a meal, which is the practical difference from a Sicilian arancino, a thing that weighs two or three times as much.

The traditional recipe cooks the rice in a tomato sauce made with finely chopped chicken giblets. That version survives in the older friggitorie; most counters today use plain tomato, sometimes with a little minced beef.

The nickname 'al telefono' is also a quality test. Break one in half: if the mozzarella does not pull into a string, the supplì has failed.

Tomato and cheese, in that order. The rice is savoury and slightly acidic, with a background of onion and a salty edge from pecorino, and it eats denser and wetter than the inside of an arancino: closer to a chilled tomato risotto, which is essentially what it is.

The crust is thin and fine-crumbed rather than sandy, and it should give way immediately rather than crunch. Then the middle: molten fior di latte, mild and milky, which is why the tomato needs to be assertive.

The old-fashioned version with chicken giblets adds a mineral, offal-ish depth that most people cannot identify but immediately notice is missing from the plain-tomato ones. The gourmet versions (carbonara, cacio e pepe, amatriciana) taste exactly like the pasta dishes they are named after, wrapped in rice.

Cook the rice in the sauce, never separately. Soften onion in oil, add finely chopped chicken giblets if you are doing it the old way, then passata; add the rice and cook it risotto-style with stock, keeping it drier than a risotto. Finish off the heat with pecorino, spread it on a tray and chill it completely, ideally overnight.

Warm rice is the main reason supplì burst in the fryer. It must be cold and firm enough to slice.

Drain the mozzarella. Batons of fior di latte, thirty minutes in a sieve, no exceptions. Shape each supplì with wet hands around the cheese, into an oval rather than a ball.

Egg, then fine breadcrumbs, twice if they are large. Fry at 175-180 °C / 345-355 °F for three to four minutes, a few at a time so the oil holds temperature. Drain on paper and eat within five minutes: the string is at its best in the first two.

Freeze them raw and breaded rather than cooked: straight into the fryer from frozen at 165 °C / 330 °F for six or seven minutes. No sauce on the side; the tomato is already inside.

Shaped and breaded but not yet fried, they sit on a covered tray in the fridge for about a day, and the rice actually firms up there as the starch sets, so they hold their shape better in the oil. In that raw state they freeze well: spread apart on a tray until solid, then bagged, they keep a month or two and go into the fryer straight from frozen at a slightly lower temperature so the centre catches up with the crust.

Once fried the clock is short. The crust stays crisp for half an hour or so, then steam from the rice works outward and softens it, while the mozzarella cools and sets so the thread stops pulling. In a container in the fridge they hold a day or two, the coating going soft and the rice drying and hardening. Ten minutes in a 180 to 200°C oven or an air fryer dries the crust out again and loosens the centre; a microwave leaves both soft. Never seal them while hot, because the trapped steam saturates the breadcrumbs.

A supplì is an oval, roughly seven to nine centimetres long and weighing 80 to 120 grams, breadcrumbed and deep fried to an even light brown. Break one open and the rice inside is orange rather than yellow, because it is cooked risotto style with tomato or a long ragù, and there is a core of mozzarella that pulls into a long thread as the two halves separate. That thread is the whole point of the Roman nickname supplì al telefono.

The thing it is constantly confused with abroad is the Sicilian arancino, which is round or cone shaped, considerably bigger at 150 to 250 grams, often built on saffron rice that reads yellow, and filled with ragù and peas under a heavier coating. Potato crocchè are the other neighbour on the same fryer counter and contain no rice at all. In Rome you find supplì in pizza al taglio shops and friggitorie at 1.50 to 2.50 euro each; abroad the same thing lands at 3 to 5 euro or 4 to 7 dollars in an Italian bakery or aperitivo bar.

Supplì barely exist as a retail product outside Italy, which makes this one of the dishes most worth making at home. In the US, Roman-style pizza al taglio shops in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC often have them at the counter for 3 to 5 dollars, and a few Italian delis sell them frozen and raw.

In the UK, London's Roman-style pizza counters (the pizza al taglio wave of the last decade) carry them at 3 to 4.50 pounds. Otherwise, Italian delicatessens will point you at arancini instead.

In Rome itself, 1.50 to 2.50 euros at a pizzeria al taglio, 3 to 4.50 for the gourmet versions, and over 5 at stations and airports where they will have been reheated rather than fried to order.

The things to buy for making them: round Italian rice such as Originario or Carnaroli, fior di latte rather than buffalo mozzarella, fine dry breadcrumbs, and a thermometer. The oil temperature is the whole game.

Rome, and the test is not the neighbourhood but the frequency of frying: good counters fry in waves through the day, mediocre ones fry once in the morning and reheat.

Supplizio, on Via dei Banchi Vecchi, is the shop that put the supplì back at the centre of the conversation, serving the old giblet version alongside experimental ones. In Trastevere, the long-standing counter on Via San Francesco a Ripa has been feeding the neighbourhood for decades and takes the locals before the tourists.

Pizzarium in Prati and the wave of pizza al taglio shops that followed it turned the supplì into a test piece for pizzaioli, rethinking the rice and the crumb.

Outside the centre, the friggitorie of Testaccio, Pigneto and Torpignattara are where a supplì still costs under two euros and still tastes of a fryer that has been running since lunch. Order one with a salt cod fillet: that is the historic pairing, and it is a meal.