The Lost Deep Dish Pizza Recipe Made for Italian Royalty

Until around the Second World War, pizza as we know it today was a food made almost exclusively amongst the lower classes in Neapolitan society. The Italian upper classes looked down upon this street food and would generally avoid it (what a mistake that was!), but this doesn’t mean that they didn’t find a way to get in on the pizza action in some manner.

Today we’re looking at the (almost) lost pizza recipe that the Neapolitan nobility thought was fit for a king!

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#pizza #italianfood #historicalrecipe

Before we get started, I need to give a quick little recap of the history of pizza. Pizza comes from uh Naples, the city of Naples, and the area around it, Kana. And actually, a lot of people don’t know this, but has a really long history there. In fact, some of you might know that recently there were some fresco discovered in the ancient Roman city of Pompei that literally show pizza. So, it goes back really far. However, the dish’s popularity was really restricted to that region. And furthermore, it was really restricted by class. The pizza that we’re familiar with, you know, flat dough, some toppings on top, was a very, very poor dish. It was what like peasants living in the slums of Naples ate. The upper classes of Italian society wouldn’t dream of eating pizza. It actually wasn’t really until uh World War II when the Americans came through and we didn’t care what we ate. We ate the poor peasant food. We ate the pizza and we’re like, “Dang, this stuff is really good.” And we kind of popularized it around the world. Even though pizza was this very poor dish, it doesn’t mean that the nobility in Italy didn’t find a way to get in on the action a little bit, though. Naples was the sort of capital of its own little southern Italian kingdom before Italy was unified. But the nobility there, they had their own version of pizza. A version of pizza that is almost extinct today and you’ll basically never find it. But we really want to try it. We want to see what this royal pizza tasted like. And we’re going to see if it’s really fit for a king. All right. So, how do we go about making this royal pizza? The first step is to make what in Italy we call levitino which is a fermented starter. Is it kind of like a pish? H sort of. What we need to make this ledino is flour, yeast and this case milk. Because don’t forget this is a royal pizza which means that they splurge on the ingredient. They are not happy with water. They need milk. It’s important that your milk is warm. So you can put in the microwave just for 15 seconds. I said warm, not boiling. So 50 sec 50 seconds should be 15 15 windy. Once the milk is warm, you melt yeast into the milk. Give a stir and we can go in with the flour. We cover with plastic paper and we let it rise in the oven with the lights on for 1 hour. Just for those who might not be familiar, the this this is to create a warm rising environment. The oven is not on. No, it is off. Just the light. Just the light. Oo, look at that. So after an hour, our leino should look like that. As you can see, is very well risen. Now we can do the actual dough for our pizza, which means that we need the flour, salt, a little bit of honey, eggs, the leino, and some lard. Well, it is a Neapolitan recipe. Got to have some lard. Absolutely. Yes. It’s a very easy dough because the only things that we need to do is put together everything except the l. And we start to mix all together to form a dough. When the dough is formed, it’s time to add the lard a little bit at a time, a spoon at a time. And we will add the second spoon after the first one is all well incorporated. When the dough doesn’t stick anymore to the bowl like mine, it’s ready. What we do now is taking a bowl, just close it a little bit to give a little bit more strength to the dough. So, this is really more of like a bio than a traditional pizza dough. Huh. It’s pizza for the royalty. So, they want a very rich dough. And now we place in the bowl. We cover with plastic paper and we let it rise in the oven with the lights on for 2 hours. Wo, that rose well. After 2 hours, your pizza dough should look like that, which means it should The plastic is bubbling up. I know. It should triple in size. Oo, it smells good. M. I know. It looks very beautiful. So, what we are going to do now is grease with some lard your surface. And we need also to grease our spring form. Spring form for a pizza. Interesting. Okay, that has a few implications that I can guess at. To me, that suggests a a nice thick pizza. Am I right? Did the kings like thick pizza? Every person who has good tasting life like thick pizza. And now we can transfer the dough. Now what we are going to do is divided this in three part which means at the beginning we are going to use two3. So, more or less something like that. It’s so soft. It looks soft. And now we need to spread this. You can do with your hands. You can do with mozzarella rolling pin. Sorry. Longtime pasta gramarians know what mozzarella means, but not everyone does. And we need to understand if is okay for our spring form. You wanted to be able to cover the whole thing. Yes, we need to cover the whole thing like that. It’s a very soft dough. So don’t worry. It’s like it’s tough. See, you can stretch it. See? And now we stuff the pizza. And we’re going to stuff the pizza with, if you’re in Italy, rotocot. If you’re in America, ham. What would ham be without cheese? See, actually is is a very good combination. And because we have And because this is a royal pizza, we put more ham. Just leave that ham there. I wasn’t going to leave it there. Some king’s chefs could be executed for that, but I’m not the chef of a king, so that’s okay. I’m safe. Now, what we need to do is take this other part, spread it, because we are going to cover it. All the excess of dough we need to trim out. Trim off. Trim off. We need to close very well. So it’s just ham and cheese. There’s no like tomato or anything. Did I say that? We are done. Ar. Oh, sorry. Sometimes you are very very impatient. And now we cover with plastic paper. Actually, do you call it plastic paper? Uh, like plastic wrap. Okay. Wrap. It’s been like 5 years. I’ve never corrected you when you call it plastic paper. Right now I’m thinking plastic paper after 5 years. Yes. I find it cute when you call it plastic paper. So now we go we close it. We cover it with plastic wrap and we let it rise for about 2 hours. In the meantime, we are going to prepare the tomato sauce because we need the tomato sauce. Oh, interesting. Are you actually cooking the tomato sauce? Yes. For the pizza? For this pizza, we need a cooked tomato sauce and needs to be very, very dense. So, it needs to be what we say in Italy, in Italian, rest. So, very thick. Here you have a choice. You can use as I’m going to use garlic or you can use onion. Despite what the word means think no means I think. I love garlic more than onion. That’s why I’m going to use it for my tomato sauce. But feel free to skip the garlic with the onion. This is a very simple tomato sauce. There is nothing complicated, which is usually the case with the best tomato sauces. See, a clove of garlic, olive oil, a ton of basil, and whole peeled tomatoes. It’s obvious that you need also salt. And we let it cook for at least 25, 30 minutes or until your tomato sauce is very shiny, thick, good, and lost all the water. It looks fluffy. It looks very fluffy. It looks very, very fobble there. Now we need to finish our pizza, which means that we are going to add on top the mozzarella and the tomato, the tomato soup, the tomato sauce. Now I’m going to do something that you American are very familiar with, which means put before the mozzarella and then the sauce. Oh, like a Detroit style pizza. Like a Detroit style pizza. Ah, and you see that actually nothing is invented, but everything is going back to neighbors. When you first stuffed this, I thought, “Oh, okay. So, it’s going to be kind of like a pie with a crust, and it sort of is, but it’s stuffed, but it’s topped like a pizza.” Mhm. So, it’s kind of like the ultimate stuffed crust pizza. The whole crust is stuffed. That’s awesome, ladies. Remember that is a pizza for the royalty. So we want to be generous. I don’t think that the royalty was in a diet. It’s good to be the king. I don’t think so because sometimes the kings they don’t do a very good uh they don’t have a very good end usually. So maybe I said it’s good to be the king. It’s good to eat like a king. Not to end good to end being the king. Eat like a king. But then actually to live like live like a normal person maybe it’s better. So our very thick and good tomato sauce is ready. So we can place all on top. And now it’s time to bake it. And this time we don’t preheat the oven. I was actually going to ask. Yeah, the oven’s not on at all. Nope. So, we will bake it at 350° F, which is 180° C, for about 35 minutes, 40 minutes, but with a cold oven. So, you wait. So, you put that in. I put it in, then I turn on the oven at 350 and it will cook. So, 40 minutes from the moment in which I put this into the oven. Okay, that’s a deep dish pizza. This is the pizza for the royalty. That’s a pizza pie. Look at that. That is pizzaco. Pizza. What is it? Pizza Franco. Alampo Franco. No, it’s called pizzao Franco because it was invented by Ammonsu back in Milo. I don’t know. Do you say Milo in English? The 1800s. Yes. By Ammonsu for the family of the prince of Luci Pali Franco. They were one of the most royalty novelty families during the kingdom of the tici and this monso was the chef invented this pizza. It is also known in Italy as in Italy actually neighbors like pizza rafinada. Does that mean like refined pizza? See refined pizza, elegant pizza. Not for the poor peasants. This is for the refined upper class. This is for the nobility. Lard and ham and cheese. Refined. Nowadays is not common to find in any restaurant in Asia. Yeah. I’ve never seen it because then the poor pizza the pizza for people took conquered everything like usually it happens in history. But this you can still find in some family who can keeping this tradition making this refined pizza. We should probably explain what mansoo means. Monsu mans. Monsu. Monsu. It’s it’s the Neapolitan dialect version of like the French msure, right? Yes. And that’s because the Neapolitan nobility back in the day, they would bring all of their chefs in from France because at that time France had all the the fancy food and the the refined food, the technical chefs, all that stuff. And which is why actually to this day Neap the Neapolitan food that we know today is really extraordinary, especially like you look at their pastries and stuff like that. Baba. Yeah, exactly. It’s because it was a a melding of the sort of French technical side that these royal chefs brought in combined with the folk food like pizza stuff like that of the Neapolitan people. So this is like a piece of that sort of evolution of Neapolitan food. Absolutely. It’s a piece of history right here. We should see how it tastes. Now I don’t think that it can taste bad. I don’t think so. But there is nothing wrong about that. It’s historically interesting. Let’s make sure that it’s gastronomically interesting. Let’s see if Napoli deserve to bring back this refined pizza. It’s much more solid than I was expecting. I thought it would be more sort of sloppy. I thought you might have to eat it with a fork or something. I don’t know. But it’s knew what they were doing. Very gastronomically interesting. Tell me it is not delicious. That’s really good. Mama, I kind of love that. I hope that there will be someone in Naples being this part of the history of Nables that can be someone in Naples. We can actually start to do this and offer because we are losing something here if we don’t keep it. It is really good. Wow. It’s that kind of food that personally I can eat. I know. I know. I’m almost done with my piece and I barely even said anything about it. So the the dough is so fluffy. Yeah, it’s totally obviously it’s like a bio. It’s totally different from normal pizza dough, but as a thick pizza, you know, like a lot of people who love, for instance, like Chicago deep dish pizza, it works so so well. It’s rich, but it’s light at the same time. It doesn’t have that fatty taste actually. No, you’re right. It’s surprisingly light. Like, I’m powering through this. I feel like I could eat that whole pizza and not even like feel like that brick in your stomach, you know? Wow. Oh, man. Wow. We have visited the topic several times of like seeing if we could figure out maybe some ancestor of American deep dish pizza. We need to enter this as a candidate because like look at it. 10 out of 10. I was literally about to say 10 out of 10. 10 out of 10. Totally fit for a king. For a king and also for me. It’s also like I know that you need a stand mixer and it uses a few more ingredients than normal pizza, but this is another example of a recipe that is much easier to make at home than real Neapolitan pizza. And if you have guests over or something and you want to blow them away with something very unusual and really delicious and cool, you will not go wrong with this. If you want to change the stuffing a little bit, you can also change. Yeah, you can put anything you want in there. So, right now, I’m thinking about pineapple. I’m thinking about a layer of gonzola mozzarella. That is a recipe that is worth keeping alive and I know that you and I will at least because that we will be making again for sure. Speaking of rich food food versus poor food, this pasta gramarian Killian made an example of one of the poorest dishes probably in Italian history. I don’t know. It’s like it’s it’s way down there, but it is so good. The name he made, which is this pasta with a fried egg on top. The name literally means pasta for the poor people. Pasta of the poor people. Yeah. Of the poor man. When you go and cutting that fried eggs that mix with the pasta. Yeah. You cut the egg and the yolk kind of becomes the sauce of the pasta. It is super simple. It’s amazing. Well done, Gillian. If you try this pizza recipe and do it. We highly recommend it. Uh we’ll put it down in the description below. By the way, if you try it, tag us in a picture on Instagram or Facebook, pasta grammar. Let us know what you think. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already, and we’ll see you next time. Ciao. I need another slice of that. We are not the only one. Sorry. Give me your plate.