The Most Beautiful Sandwich Ever Made

Now around 40 years ago, two years before my divine birth, a pizza guy from Galliano, just outside of Naples, looked at his pizza dough and thinks, that could be a sandwich. His name was Giuseppe Mascolo, and he stumbled upon it while thinking of other ideas to serve his kids besides pizza. And the kids named it panozzo. One of my favorite chefs, Evan Funke, has a version called la mortazza at his LA restaurant Mother Wolf. He rolls the dough out like a pizza, then folds it onto itself in a half moon, and bakes the dough empty first. It comes out of the oven almost smiling at you, and then filled with ricotta, mortadella, and pistachios to create maybe the most beautiful sandwich I've ever seen. This is Evan Funke's la mortazza. And we're going to be making it today thanks to our sponsor today, Gosney. Now to make this, it requires a dough more in line with a margarita, Neapolitan style dough, which we had to start a day or two ahead. All right, so let's quickly run through the dough, which I'm simply going to take the dough I used for the ice pizza and the stuffed crust pizza, remove the bread flour and the sugar, replace it with double zero pizza flour, and a little diastatic malt. So I have my starter here. If you don't have one, it's really simple. A day or two before you want to make pizza, take a container, combine 120 grams of warm water with 120 grams of double zero flour, and then anywhere from like two to four grams of instant yeast. Stir it up, place a little rubber band at the bottom to know where it is and to see how much it has grown, and then place it in the fridge overnight or a couple days, and then you've got your starter here ready to make pizza. First up, I'm going to take my dough hook, I'm going to set up a KitchenAid, then we're going to take 370 grams of warm water, I'm going to weigh about 220 grams of the starter, and I should have some left over, you can feed that with flour and water, then you can keep that going. Then get that in, then we're going to turn it on, start to break up that starter into the water. After about 30 seconds, we're going to add in our olive oil, about 15 grams, 2 grams of our diastatic malt powder, which contains enzymes that convert starches into simple sugars, but it improves its rise, its oven spring, and helps it achieve this nice golden brown color. And then we have 615 grams of flour, and I'm just going to, in small batches, slowly work it in. And I'm looking to get it mixed until the point where there's no visible dry flour anywhere. Don't mind this, it's just pure American ingenuity. Now I can see there's no dry bits. We've held off our salt, now what we're going to do is a little bit of an auto-lease, a period of time we're going to let this dough rest before we add the salt and continue. 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, add the salt, we're going to turn it on low, and we're going to let this go for about 6 to 10 minutes, and we're looking for all that dough to sort of pull off the sides of the bowl. Now after about 10 minutes, I'm going to cover it again, let it rest for 5 minutes, and then do that one more time for another 5 to 8 minutes. 5 minutes is up, we're going to let it go again for another 6 minutes. We're going to let it rest, 5 minutes, then we're going to see if it's ready. Now what you want to do is you want to take some and start to stretch, and if it can stretch, and you can see light through it, that's what you want. It's definitely on the stickier side, as it's close to like a 68% hydration, so I'm going to take it like this, get my hands under the top, pull it up, and then slap it and fold it onto itself like that. Then I'm just going to repeat that a couple times, it's going to just build some nice tension in the dough before we bulk ferment it. Cover it, leave it at room temp, and it should proof, get about 1.5 to 2 times bigger, minimum 2 hours. Now she's looking beautiful. Now we're just going to turn it out onto the board, you can take a metal bench scraper and sort of do this motion, you turn it from the side to the top and then back to create tension. Now I've got a scale, we're going 200 gram dough balls. Place these in the fridge, 2, 3, 4 days, and we'll see you outside at Studio B in a couple days. I was actually one of the very first people to ever cook in a dome by Gosney back in 2022. And ever since then, I've been completely in love with the thing. This thing has taken outdoor cooking to a whole new level. It's a complete evolution of the original, packed with new features, and as somebody who genuinely thinks cooking in a wood-fired oven is the most satisfying way to cook, having this in the backyard is a literal dream come true. A few of the upgrades is this new digital screen that shows both the temp of the dome, the temp of the stones, and it's got two external thermometers to measure two different types of meat. It's got better shelves, feels more durable, and is just so much larger, more room to cook more things at once. And I know it sounds hyperbolic, but it is the most fun thing I cook with. If you're anything like me and the moment you've laid eyes on this, you need it. Check out the link down in my description. Now let's get into the dough. We got road work, guys. I don't know what to tell you. We're going to have to deal with it. Now our dough is fermented, our pizza oven is heating up. In the meantime, we can make a few little things. First up, the rigota. I've got about a cup of rigota in here. I'm going to hit it with a little bit of olive oil first, then we're going to grate some lemon zest, a little bit of salt, then we're just going to whip it up and try and smooth that consistency out. Take the rigota, fill up a piping bag. We're going to keep it in the fridge because it's like 100 degrees out. Next we got some pistachios. We're just going to shell them and then dice them up into a little crumble. You don't want to go too fine. You want to still have a little texture, a little bite in the nuts. Now our oven's hot. It's a good time to start switching over to some wood. So I've got the propane that I've been using to preheat the oven so I don't waste wood. Now I can build a little canoe. Now you could just put the wood in with a fire starter and heat this oven up like normal. Using the propane is just a little trick I like to do. I think it's just kind of fun. Then we can turn the propane off and then let that wood burn down a bit. So I've got my dough here, nice and jiggly. It smells amazing. I'm going to take a little bit of the flour, hit the edges, scoop under, flip into flour. Coat it in flour, remove, and then place on your counter. Just like a pizza, we're going to sort of punch out a crust, push down the center, flip it, repeat on the other side, then we'll do a few slap and folds. And we're really just trying to stretch this out to about an eight-inch round. I'm going to take my pizza peel, get a little flour on there, transfer the dough onto the pizza peel, then a little bit of olive oil right into the center. And the trick then is we're going to fold it, just like a half moon, and then a little bit of olive oil on top. Next I'm going to throw in an extra piece of wood to get that flame ignited. Then I'm going to slide the dough right into the center of the wood-fired oven. Now just like a pizza, I'm letting visuals guide me. I'm looking for the dough to puff, to get a little oven spring, and then I'm looking for color developing around it. So my strategy is to kind of just rotate it almost like a rotisserie. You can move it closer to the fire to get a little bit more color in some spots, move it further away to kind of slow it down. Once you've got it kind of browned, toasted around all sides, it's nice and puffy, and the dough almost looks like it's smiling at you, that's about time to pull it out. First we're going to open it up and add some rigota. Now here's how to fold the mortadella. Fold it in half, fold it into a triangle, then spin it into a rose petal. Then you're going to go in and start adding the mortadella, and you're going to sort of layer them. I'm going to go in with one straight line and then start adding some height to it. I'm going to take that rigota and start kind of just piping in little dots, maybe a little bit inside of the rose petals of the mortadella. We're going to top it with a pistachio, a little lemon zest, a little flaky salt, and a little bit more extra virgin olive. The combination of the mortadella, the rigota, the pistachio, such a classic and simple combination but it always hits. A little hint of the lemon keeps it fresh. This dough is out of control good. You know, the way that I see it is we go through such lengths to make great pizza doughs and to seek out great pizza doughs, why aren't we also using it as bread? It's the perfect vehicle for a sandwich. You want to make this, the link's going to be down in the description. That's all that I have today. I'll see you next time. Until then, take care of yourself and go feed yourself.