Scaccia Ragusana

Scaccia is a flatbread that has been stuffed and folded over onto itself a few times to create an alluring layered effect in the finished loaf. The dough is rolled out very thin prior to folding so that when it’s baked the outside crust become hard and bread-like while the inside dough, absorbing moisture from the tomato sauce and cheese, retains the soft consistency of a baked pasta. It’s for this reason that scaccia (or scacce, plural) is sometimes referred to as lasagna bread. The dish is a Sicilian specialty native to the southern province of Ragusa.

I was initially alerted to the existence of scaccia by Saveur magazine in this article and knew immediately that I had to give it a try. Their recipe suggests baking the bread in a loaf pan, which looks very pretty in the article photos, but I opted for the more traditional free-form approach. When researching the dish further I also couldn’t find a hard and fast rule on the proper bread dough recipe so I used my basic pizza dough to keep things simple.

Rolled out dough.

Initial topping (onion, olives, ricotta, and tomato sauce mix).

Turn in the sides.

Fold 1 and add additional topping.

Fold 2.

More sauce mix.

Fold 3 and more sauce added. The final step is folding the whole thing in half.

Bake at 400℉ (205℃) for about 1 hour, until the crust sets and begins to char.

 

You get to choose whatever you want as the filling ingredients; I watched many Italian scaccia videos on YouTube that included things like eggplant, sausage, Ragú, hard boiled eggs, or just plain cheese. For my first attempt at the dish I mixed together marinara, sauteed onions, chopped black olives, and homemade ricotta cheese to form the filling. While tomato sauce and ricotta are standard in the most basic scaccia when all was said and done I found myself wishing I had been a bit more bold, perhaps adding a healthy dose of garlic or thinly sliced salami.

Maybe next time.