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Sfincione — Palermo's spongy tray pizza with onion-anchovy sauce and breadcrumbs

Sicily's other tray pizza — a thicker, spongier crumb than Sicilian-American, built on a robust tomato-onion-anchovy sauce and finished with a breadcrumb topping rather than a conventional cheese-forward layer.

For Sfincione in Domestic fan (convection) oven. One standard rectangular tray (approx. 33x23cm), cut into 8-12 squares.

Dough spec

Flour
Semolina rimacinata (finely re-milled durum semolina)
Hydration
75%
Salt
2.2%
Oil
6%

Scale this guide

Pan area
875 cm²
Dough (typical)
963 g
Range
788-1138 g

Thick, airy pan styles such as Detroit-style or Sicilian-American.

This dough is sized to the tray, not a per-pizza ball weight — use the pan/tray dough calculator with your tray's dimensions and the thick_pan loading band (the same band this catalogue uses for Sicilian-American's similarly thick, airy crumb) for a different tray size. Open the full dough calculator for more control, or the fermentation schedule builder to work backwards from a target bake time using this guide’s room temperature long fermentation approach.

Steps

  1. MixHand or machine mix flour, water, salt, and oil to a soft, enriched dough — semolina rimacinata alone is usually too weak-gluten to work with on its own, so this dough is conventionally blended with a bread flour rather than used as a single flour (see editorial note).
  2. Bulk fermentBulk ferment at room temperature for 2-4 hours, until visibly risen.
  3. ShapePress the dough by hand into a generously oiled rectangular tray, working it out to the corners — a soft, forgiving dough similar in handling to Sicilian-American's.
  4. Final proofProof briefly in the tray, around 1-2 hours, until puffed.
  5. TopSpread a robust tomato-onion sauce enriched with anchovies over the dough, then scatter pieces of provolone or caciocavallo across the surface — unlike Sicilian-American's full mozzarella layer, sfincione's cheese is scattered sparingly rather than laid as a continuous cover.
  6. TopFinish with a generous scattering of dry breadcrumbs over the top — this is sfincione's defining and most distinctive step, with no equivalent in this catalogue's other tray-pizza guides.
  7. BakeBake at around 220-250C for 20-30 minutes, until the breadcrumb topping is toasted golden and the base is well risen and cooked through.
  8. RestRest briefly in the tray before cutting.
  9. ServeCut into squares and serve warm or at room temperature, in keeping with its traditional festive, room-temperature service.

Bake notes

The breadcrumb finish is what most reliably separates a genuine sfincione from a plain tomato-and-cheese tray pizza — don't treat it as an optional garnish.

Sfincione's traditional flour is a semolina rimacinata/bread flour blend, not semolina alone; PizzaHQ's build-guide schema supports only a single flourSlug, so this guide names semolina rimacinata (the style's traditional, defining flour) and expects it blended with bread flour in practice — the same flour-blend simplification already used for Chicago deep-dish's guide. Sfincione shares Sicilian-American's thick_pan dough-loading band since both are thick, airy, oiled-tray bakes at a similar dough weight per tray area — the two guides differ in hydration, sauce tradition (onion-anchovy vs. plain tomato), cheese (provolone/caciocavallo scattered vs. a full mozzarella layer), and the breadcrumb finish that has no Sicilian-American equivalent, not in overall dough weight per tray.

Generally accepted · Regional convention

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