Pizza Diavola
Ask for this expecting American pepperoni, and you will be handed something related but not the same thing -- ours is cut thicker, cured differently, and carries real heat instead of the mild paprika sweetness most people mean when they say “pepperoni.” My brother Salvatore, who runs the kitchen most nights, takes a certain quiet pleasure in watching a customer's face the first time they bite into a piece that's actually spicy, rather than spicy in name only.
Ingredients
- 1 ball Impasto per Pizza a Lievitazione Lenta, risen and at room temperature
- 100g canned San Marzano tomatoes, crushed by hand
- 100g fresh mozzarella (fior di latte), torn
- 60g spicy Italian salami (spianata calabrese or another salame piccante), thinly sliced
- A pinch of dried chili flakes (optional)
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Fine sea salt
Makes one 12-inch pizza.
Cookware Required
- la pietra o l'acciaio refrattario (pizza stone or steel)
- la pala per pizza (pizza peel)
- una ciotola piccola (a small bowl, for crushing the tomatoes by hand)
Method
Heat your oven and stone as you would for the Margherita. Crush the tomatoes with a pinch of salt, stretch the dough, and transfer it to your floured peel.
Spread the tomato thinly, leaving the rim bare, and scatter the mozzarella. Lay the salami over the top in a single layer, not overlapping -- overlapped slices steam instead of crisping, and this pizza wants crisp, curled edges on every piece.
Slide onto the hot stone or oven floor, and bake until the crust blisters, the cheese melts fully, and the edges of the salami have begun to curl and darken -- this is the sign the fat has rendered properly, which is most of where the flavor comes from.
Quando Va Storto
If the salami stays flat and pale instead of curling and crisping at the edges, the slices were cut too thick, or overlapped, trapping steam instead of letting the heat reach them directly. If the pizza tastes hot in a flat, one-note way rather than complex, you added chili flakes on top of an already-spicy salami without tasting the salami alone first; good spianata rarely needs help. And if it isn't spicy at all despite everything, you were sold something labeled “diavola” that never earned the name -- taste your salami before it goes anywhere near the dough.
Una Storia dalla Sala
A young man sent back his pizza diavola, politely but firmly, insisting it wasn't nearly hot enough for something with that name. Salvatore, who does not take well to being told his chili hand is timid, remade it with double the amount and fresh chilies scattered on top, and carried it out himself specifically to watch. Four bites in, the young man's face had gone the color of the sauce, and he asked, with what dignity he had left, whether anyone might bring him some milk.
He finished perhaps a third of the plate, tipped generously anyway, and told Salvatore on his way out that he'd learned an important lesson about asking kitchens for things he didn't actually want.