Hi everyone! Welcome to episode 4 of the Explorations series! This week, we’re making the fluffiest pizza ever, the Sicilian style!! Our first rectangle for the series, this is the original from which all other rectangles are made! Come along, and let’s make this most fluffiest of pizzas!
Sfincione: Sicilian Style Pizza
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:47 Starting Dough
03:43 Making Sauce
05:48 Finishing Dough
07:00 Cheese/Baking Pizza
10:30 Pizza’s Done!!
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 4 of the exploration series. In this series, we pick a familiar favorite and explore some different versions of it from around the world. I’m Amy and in this episode, we are heading to the beautiful island of Sicily to make a fabulous and timeless Sicilian style pizza. Now, the origins of this pizza are actually a little mysterious, and it’s possible it originated in Polarmo, but there are also accounts that it came from Bulgaria, just outside Polarmo, or possibly at the former monastery of Sanvito. But they all agree that the most well-known modern descendant of the Sicilian style pizza is based on, a thick spongy crust that dates back to the 17th century. And today, we’re going to make it. Now, this dough is deceptive, but in the absolute best way. The incredible flavor and texture of this dough would make you think it’s crazy complicated to make, but it’s quite possibly the easiest dough that we’ve made yet. First, we need to activate our yeast, which sounds technical, but it’s not. It’s really very simple. We need three things: active dry yeast, sugar, and warm water between 105 to 110 F. Take 1/4 cup of warm water and add 1 teaspoon of sugar for our yeast to have something to eat and 1 tbsp of active dry yeast. Whisk that all up until everything is mixed and set this to the side for 5 to 10 minutes or until the mixture gets nice and foamy on the top. That means your yeast has decided to rise and shine and will make your dough nice and fluffy. If it doesn’t get foamy though, then the yeast is not active and the dough won’t rise. Unfortunately, you would need to get some new yeast in that situation. While the yeast is over there doing its thing, we’re going to move to our stand mixer. To the bowl, add 3 and 3/4 cups of high gluten or bread flour. I’m using bread flour here and it works out beautifully. Add 2 tbsp of sugar and 1 and 1/2 tsp of salt. Using the dough hook attachment, give these a little stir so the sugar and salt don’t stay sitting in a pile. We want it to get all nice and mixed up together. Next come our wet ingredients. And we want 1 and 1/2 cups of warm water, 2 tbsp of olive oil, and our yeast mixture, which as you can see is nice and foamy. That is some happy yeast. And that is exactly what we want for this. And that is everything for the dough. Now, just mix this by hand with a spatula for a moment so the flour starts to incorporate. And then set the mixer on a low speed and mix it with the dough hook attachment for about eight minutes. If you don’t stir this up with a spatula first, the liquid will just swirl around in a well in the center and the flour will stay at the bottom. So, you want to get that flour to start mixing with the liquid and then use the mixer to finish the job. The dough should start coming away from the sides and it’ll be pretty sticky, but avoid the temptation to add more flour. Adding more flour can make the dough more dense. And while this dough is thick, we want it to be thick and spongy, not thick and dense. While this mixes, grab a large bowl and lightly coat it with oil. When the dough is ready, use a spatula to transfer it from the mixer bowl to this oiled bowl. You’ll want to put a little oil on your hands so the dough doesn’t stick to you, cuz this dough sticks to everything. And roll it around so it has a nice oil coating. Then put a lid or some plastic wrap on this. And now you can go one of two ways. You can let this sit out to rise until it doubles, which should be about an hour to an hour and a half, and then make this pizza all in the same day. Or if you want a more flavorful dough, put this in the fridge for at least 24 hours. All right, day two and we are ready to make our pizza sauce. Just a few simple ingredients, and this sauce is absolutely scrumptious. Now, traditionally, Sicilian pizza includes a healthy amount of onion, and it is one of the key flavors in this sauce. For this pizza sauce, we want half of a medium onion or an entire small onion. Dice this up into smalish pieces. Maybe about the size of your thumbnail. Large enough to retain their shape and not fall apart, but small enough to not be a gigantic bite of onion. We also need to mince up one clove of garlic and roughly chop up about six basil leaves. I didn’t have any fresh basil at the moment, so I’m using some dried leaves here. Since the basil simmers in the sauce, though, the dried leaves worked just fine. We’re going to heat up two tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan like this one. When the oil is nice and shimmery, add in the onion and we’re going to sauté this. Give the onion a good stir and make sure to add a good pinch of salt and some black pepper. This is to taste, though, and you can add more later if you need to, so I wouldn’t be too heavy-handed right now. Then just saute these in the oil until they are soft and translucent, stirring them occasionally so they don’t end up sticking to the bottom. For me, this took about 5 to 6 minutes. When they’re nice and soft, we’ll add the garlic and stir continuously for about 30 seconds at most or until the garlic gets fragrant. You won’t smell much at first and then all of a sudden the garlic smell will just smack you right in the face and the garlic is fragrant. When that garlic smell hits you in the face, pour in one 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes, a tablespoon of sugar, and our chopped basil leaves. Stir this up. Bring it to a simmer. And you’re going to want to simmer this, stirring occasionally for 10 minutes. At the 10-minute mark, you’ll see everything has thickened up nicely, and this has become a beautiful chunky tomato and onion sauce that’s going to be absolutely amazing on this pizza. remove it from the heat and set it to the side to let it cool a little bit while we work on our dough. Okay, let’s turn our lump of dough into pizza crust. Just look how well this rose in the fridge since yesterday. And what are we going to do? We’re going to deflate it. This isn’t quite as sticky as yesterday since the dough has had 24 hours to fully hydrate and come together, but I did still put a little water on my hand to make sure it didn’t stick to me. We want to add 2 Tbsp of olive oil to our pan. And this is a 10 by4in Sicilian pizza pan I got on Amazon, but you could also use a regular baking sheet. The crust will just be a little bit thinner. Swirl this around. Although it doesn’t have to be perfect at the moment. Just a rough coating. And then we’ll put our dough lump into the pan so we can get it shaped. Now to shape this dough, get some oil on your hands so it doesn’t stick to you and work the dough toward the sides of the pan with your fingers. Since this is a high gluten dough, it’s going to want to just keep shrinking back. So, this could take several rounds of stretching. If it’s shrinking too much, just put it to the side and let the dough rest for 10 minutes and then do it again. Resting the dough lets the gluten relax and it makes the dough easier to stretch. This took me two, three rounds to get the dough to fill out the pan. While the dough was resting in between my stretches, I preheated my oven to 375 F, and I’m going to work on my cheese. Traditionally, Sicilian sincion uses aged kacio cavalo cheese, tuma cheese, or pecarino romano. Unfortunately, kacio cavalo and tuma are not commonly available in Arizona, but I was able to find a regular ramano cheese, so I decided to use that since it was the closest cheese I could get my hands on. We only need about a half a cup of this cheese, so I just shredded this one up by hand. So, mozzarella is definitely not traditional, but as this pizza became popular all over the world, it has become a common addition to this dish. The author of the recipe I’m referencing for this pizza says adding mozzarella has become a new tradition in their household. Since we are also going to incorporate this new tradition, we need to shred up 12 oz of mozzarella. And for this, I’m using my food processor because it makes really quick work of this block of cheese. As always, watch your partner like a hawk because they will totally steal your cheese. Then just set this to the side for later. Another tradition is that the Sicilian pizza normally includes anchovies between the dough and the sauce, but we really don’t like anchovies unless we’re talking Caesar. So, yeah. No. And with that, we’re also making another departure from tradition by adding some other toppings to this pizza, namely pepperoni and Italian sausage. But I only had sausage links, so I grabbed two and removed the casings. And then I cooked them up really quickly until they were not quite cooked through. They will finish cooking in the oven since this pizza bakes for a total of 30 minutes. Now, I’m doing my last stretch. And as you can see here, the dough is now holding its shape really nicely. So, let’s get this pizza put together cuz I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. Since we are not including anchovies, we’re going straight to that amazing sauce. Spoon the sauce over the dough. Spread it out until you have a good layer, leaving about a/2 in crust around the edges. It’s likely you will not use all the sauce we made, but for me, I’m just going to throw it in the fridge and make another pizza later to use the rest up. Now, we’re going to sprinkle 1 to 3 teaspoon of dried oregano over the sauce. I used about 1 and a/4 and it was just perfect. Now, we sprinkle our shredded Romano evenly all over the sauce. And we definitely want to use the entire half2 cup of this because cheese. Okay. And now to ruin this. This is way out of traditional, but I’m adding the pepperoni and the Italian sausage. Add the pepperoni first so it gets nice and crispy because crispy pepperoni on a pizza is the best. Next, I added the Italian sausage, but in hindsight, I should have added this on the second round of baking as the sausage did get a little darker than I would have liked. I mean, really, it’s just mainly aesthetics, though, because this is now a top contender for favorite pizza so far. So, yeah. Anyway, when the toppings are on, pop this bad boy in the oven at 375 for 15 minutes. When that 15-inute timer goes off, pull this out of the oven and sprinkle all of that wonder mozzarella cheese on top along with the sausage. if you take my advice and wait on that. I also sprinkled some cheese over the crust so we could have that nice crispy crunchy cheesy edges. Then pop this back in the oven for another 15 minutes so the crust can finish baking and the mozzarella gets nice and melty and browns just a little on top. And after that second 15inute timer goes off, you should have this. Tell me that is not the most amazingly awesome thing ever. It is absurd how great that looks. My husband said this looked like cake with pizza toppings on it. Now, let’s get this out of the pan so we can check out this crust. But before we slice it up, can we just take a moment to acknowledge this crispy cheese? [Music] Okay, time to slice this up. And this pizza is insane. I think this is the fluffiest, thickest pizza crust ever. Or at least it’s the fluffiest pizza crust I’ve ever made. I mean, look at how fluffy and spongy that crust is. And the sauce, the best ever. Tangy and sweet. The onions were soft and flavorful. Just perfect. If you only ever make one pizza from this series, the Sicilian pizza has got to be the one. Thank you so much for watching Explorations Sicilian Pizza. Please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this video. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Stay tuned next Wednesday because we’re leaving Europe and heading even further east for a unique twist and our first example of an iconic pizza that does not include tomato sauce. Come with me to Thailand and let’s explore a pizza that is unlike anything we’ve made so far. Also, come hang out in my kitchen on Sundays for some comforting home cooking, and you’re going to love what we’re making next week. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you next Wednesday for some more exploring. Bye.
Dining and Cooking