The most Neapolitan version of pizza, the fried one
ingredients for 4 small pizzas and 8 montanaras (cost about 3 Euros pp with organic flours)
- 500 g flour from soft wheat
- 300 ml mineral water
- 10 grammi di sale
- 4 g di lievito secco
- Olio di semi di girasole EV per friggere
- 1 confection of ricotta cheese
- 100 g parmesan
- plenty of basil leaves
- 150 g thick pizza sauce
- 4 fette di prosciutto
Sicily or Naples? Which city has the best street food on earth? The eternal question of the food lovers has not a clear answer. I should vote Naples, as I have never been in Sicily. I know I have to.
Neapolitan street food is monumental. On the narrow streets of the old city we can find hundreds of different preparations, all of them extremely tasty. Fuck, every time I visit Naples, I return home at least 3 kgs heavier.
By the way, have you ever seen a Vittorio de Sica film “L´ oro di Napoli”, which means Naples Gold? You must see it, just to admire the God´s most beautiful creation ever, Sophia Loren at her best. Sophia is a street pizza maker, not of baked, but of fried pizza (plain, with no filling). The combination Sophia – fried pizza hardens on even eunuchs and anorectics!!! Just have a look
So, what a fuck is this fried pizza? Well it is practically a calzone (for those who don´t know calzone is a “stuffed” pizza) not baked but fried in abundant seed oil. Pizza fritta is the solution I suggest for homes, as common ovens cannot reach at the required temperatures for an excellent baked pizza. But pizza fritta has also two important minuses. It fills home atmosphere with oil smoke and it is more fattening that the baked one.
Apart from the stuffed pizza fritta, Neapolitans also prepare montanare, fried pieces of dough, used as bottoms for similar raw preparations.
Let´s start at last.
Pizza fritta has quite the same dough with the common one. Which means:
We start by sifting the flour and stirring it with the yeast. We add the water and the salt and we start kneading the dough by hand, or even better we put all the ingredients to a mixer bowl.
We knead in the stand mixer fitted with the hook attachment for 6 minutes in low speed and 6 more in medium to high. We cover the bowl with film and we wait for 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the room temperature and having in mind that, ideally, this should be around 23 Celsius degrees.
After the first quick half-hour rising, we cut the dough in pieces forming 4 pieces of about 100 g (for the pizzas) and 8 of about 50 g (for the montanare). We form them to balls, adding some air by folding them, we put them in an airtight container and we keep them in fridge for at least 8 hours, waiting for the dough to “mature”.
When we want to prepare our pizzas we remove the dough from the fridge and we wait for half an hour. We form the balls to rounds and we leave them for 5 minutes, allowing the glutens to tighten.
Now we have to do something different than in common pizzas. When we prepare oven pizzas we start forming the pizza bases moving from the centre to the periphery and trying to create a thinner center and thicker borders. On the contrary, when we prepare pizza fritta we have to do the opposite and leave the centre of the circle thicker than the periphery as it must resist to the high temperatures and the internal humidity and keep the stuffing in the dough during the frying process. So with our fingers we start extending the dough by making thinner the external parts of the dough.
We are ready to prepare our first fried pizzas, we are ready to do what Sophia did!!!! Usually the fried pizzas are larger but we start with smaller ones, which are easier to prepare.
So, we preheat EV sunflower oil to 195 Celsius degrees. We start filling the pizzas one at a time. DO NOT PRE FILL all pizzas together with the stuffing as the humidity of the ingredients will provoke hollows at the dough, which means a disaster. Just the last minute. I forgot to tell you that we should have strained the ricotta to remove the excessive humidity.
So moving quickly, we mix 50 g of parmigiano in the ricotta and we put a very large spoonful on one pizza base, just at the centre. We continue adding 2-3 leaves of basil and some tomato sauce. We spray a little bit of water at the periphery of the dough circle and we fold it trying to completely seal it.
This is the most crucial point, the sealing of the dough, so when we close the pizza, having created a half moon, we beat intensively with our hand the sealing points to unify the two layers of pizza to one and to create a completely sealed interior.
We hang the pizza from its two edges, trying to stretch it and we put it in the hot oil. Immediately with a ladle we start pouring hot oil to the upper surface of the pizza. We turn the pizza once or twice and when it becomes golden we remove it and we continue with the rest.
We do the same thing with the montanare, which are much easier to prepare them as they have no filling and so there is no danger that we fuck the whole preparation. I would suggest you to start with montanare (they are the same tasty) and to continue later, when you will already have an experience with fried dough, with the pizzas. To prepare montanare we just have to form thin rounds of dough and to fry them at about 180 Celsius degrees.
When the fried pizzas are ready we cut them and we eat them immediately, adding if we wish some more parmesan or even better pecorino cheese.
When the montanare are ready, we push them lightly at the top, trying to create a cavity. We fill this (exterior) cavity with pizza sauce, basil leave, parmigiano and prosciutto.
The stuffing presented today are only indicative as we can also use other QUALITY and ITALIAN products, such as salame napoletano, mozzarella, spinach etc.
My favourite? Pizza fritta with ricotta, parmesan, lemon zest and black pepper. I could die for it
