The NY Sicilian Demo with Mike Vittorio

The first time I ever made a Sicilian pizza, I was about 12 years old. I had my father in the kitchen. American style is different from where it originated from in Sicily. In Sicily, it's called a spingione. Tomato sauce with caciocavallo cheese, which is a type of provolone, and bread crumbs. Delicious. When it got introduced here in America, mozzarella cheese got added to it. It's a thicker pie as opposed to the thin crust New York style pizza that everybody knows about. It's one of my favorites, and that's what we're going to do today. We have 640 grams of flour, 445 grams of water, three and a half teaspoons of salt, five teaspoons of olive oil, and a half teaspoon of yeast. All right, so we're going to add the flour first. Lock it, load it. What are we doing here? We're oxidizing the flour a little bit. We're going to get some air into it. And also a lot of times when you take the flour out of the package, it's tight, so you want to loosen it up. That's what we're doing here. A few seconds of that, you add your yeast right in there. Let that incorporate very nicely, and then you add your salt. Some people say don't mix salt and yeast together because the salt actually slows down the rise of the dough, but it's all in there anyway. So it doesn't matter, to me at least. But you have these professionals. It really doesn't matter. And we're going to start adding the water little by little. So we're letting it incorporate. It's coming together. Once there's hardly any flour left to see, you add the olive oil. You want to put it on speed number four. What that does is not only does it mix a little bit faster, but it also works the gluten and makes the dough tighter, and also you get another crispier crust. Lower it, and then you start adding your oil. Total mix time about six to eight minutes. The perfect Sicilian to me is crispy on the outside, the crust, the bottom, and tender on the inside. That's what's trying to recreate today. Dough is done. You know when the dough is done, when it starts the side of the bowl is nice and clean. Here's the dough. It kind of rips. That means it needs to relax because the gluten still needs to be formed. So if you let it relax just for 10 minutes, everything will just all come together. Do a couple of stretch and folds. Build up that gluten. Put it down. A little olive oil. Massage that in. Let it sit there for about 10 minutes. Let it sit here for about 10 minutes, and then we'll come back, and we'll divide and shape. The dough is ready to be cut, portioned, and balled. We're going to cut the dough into 525 grams. Perfect. Perfect. So basically here at the pizzeria, this is how I normally roll, but if you want to get fancy, do it one hand like this. Don't get confused and think that you're kneading the dough. The dough is already kneaded. You're just shaping and balling the dough, and you want to try to get as much air in there as possible. That's how we do it at the restaurant, but you could do something easier where you could just roll it like this and pull it towards you to create some tension, and it works just the same. Once that's done, you oil the bowl. You put the bowl in the bowl, and you cover it with some film. Now you have to oil the bowl. You have to make sure you oil the bowl because if you don't, it's not going to come out, and if you try to take it out, you just deflate the whole bowl. I don't want to say it's ruined, but it's ruined. Now you leave this at room temperature for about two hours. It's got to double in size if you're going to use it that day. If you're not going to use it that day, you still leave it out for two hours, let it rise, and put it into a refrigerator, and you can use it the next day. So now this is what the dough looks like after it's been proofing for two hours, rising for two hours. See, nice and fluffy. See the little bubbles, fermentation bubbles? What we do is we take it out nice and gently, and place it in the pan. You just begin to stretch it out. Don't worry about it. Don't be gentle. Be a little gentle, but not so gentle, and just get all the corners. You want to make sure you put just enough oil, not a lot of oil, because it'll just spring back. You make sure you get all the corners. You don't really want to push it down too hard. Once you get it to this point, you have to let it proof again. So we're going to cover it, and the reason why we cover it is because it creates heat as it's rising, and you want to keep the heat inside. Also, you don't want to create a crust on top of the pizza. So now you take this, and you put it someplace hot in your kitchen. Let that proof for about another hour and a half, and you parbake it. So we're going to parbake it. Okay, so like that. When you're ready to use it, it won't take as long to cook, and when you recook it, you just get a lot of a more crispier crust. So we're going to put this in the oven right now. That's going to be in there for about six, seven minutes at 550. And if your oven goes to only 500, don't worry about it. Just let it cook. This is the color you're looking for. No whiter and no browner. Exactly like this. You take it out. Take it off out of the pan. Beautiful bottom. You put on any kind of string you have at the house so the air gets underneath it and doesn't get wet, and let it cool down. Now everything cooled down, now we're going to assemble the Sicilian pie. So you take it, you put it back into your pan, all right? I like to put the mozzarella on the bottom and the sauce on top. It kind of just a little ode to the spingione. And this is a low-moisture mozzarella. You could pick it up in a supermarket, but I wouldn't get the shredded kind. It has a lot of anti-caking agent in it, and the cheese doesn't melt and affects the taste of the pizza. So just ask the cheese monger for sliced low-moisture mozzarella. They have it. You could get it. We'll just start putting it all on. You could put as much or as less cheese as you want. Now I have a tomato sauce here. It's an onion-based sauce. It's on the sweet side. Again, as much or as little as you want. Now you don't have to worry about covering the whole thing evenly because it's going to melt all over anyway. The tomato that I use is chow tomato. It's imported from Italy. It's one of the best tomatoes you could buy. I think you could pick it up at a supermarket. You could definitely pick it up online. I would highly suggest using it, buying it. It's a great investment if you want to impress your guests. Chow tomatoes. What I do is, it's fresh plump tomatoes, and I reduce it until it gets nice and thick. It brings up all the natural sweetness out of the tomatoes. I like to hit the sauce with a little bit of olive oil, not much. We're using a pecorino. Pecorino is on the salty side. It's a little pungent, but between the sweet, it complements it beautifully. I like to be very generous and add copious amounts of pecorino. No spinjone is complete without Sicilian oregano. I would suggest you buy the ones that are on the stems. You gently squeeze the bag and get it on there. This is what it looks like so far. We're going to throw it in the oven. I'm putting it in a 550 degree oven, and it's going to go in here for about 10 minutes, a few more minutes, and it'll be all set and ready to go. All right, here it is. It's all set. This is the finished product. Beautiful, nice and golden. Cheese is melted, caramelized sauce. We're going to cut it up and have a taste. We're going to slice it up in six. So one down the middle, and each side gets a cut. You have six slices there. Now we're going to try, we're going to taste. Personally, I love corn myself. Nice rise, those fermentation bubbles. Wow, this is delicious. Listen, I appreciate you taking the time and watching this demonstration, and hopefully your pizza will come out just as good as mine.