Scaccia Ragusana

A peasant bread of the Ragusa countryside, traditionally dated to around the 17th century, built for the farm table and the field: a way to fold an entire meal of dough, cheese and whatever vegetables were to hand into one flat, sturdy loaf that travelled well and ate well cold. The name is generally derived from «schiacciata», a flattened bread (from «schiacciare», to flatten or press), describing the thin, pressed-out sheets, though in Ragusa scaccia has become a craft of its own in the rolling and folding. Its identity is bound to the local cheese, the cow's-milk Ragusano DOP, a stretched-curd cheese long known simply as caciocavallo and one of Sicily's oldest. It remains a staple of Ragusan home baking and bakeries, with particular versions tied to Christmas and other feasts.

Cut across a slice and you see the structure: a crisp, browned, blistered crust top and bottom, then a stack of thin pale dough layers ribboned with tomato and melted cheese. The outer skin shatters and chews; the inner layers are soft and tender, slightly chewy, almost like fresh pasta where they have drunk up the sauce. The filling is bright and savoury — sweet-acid tomato, the sharp pull of melted Ragusano, a back-note of basil. Eaten warm the cheese strings; at room temperature it firms and slices cleanly. A good scaccia has many distinct thin layers and a dry, crisp shell; a bad one is rolled too thick and bakes into dense bread, or is overfilled and turns soggy and heavy in the middle.

The layered, part-crisp-part-soft texture comes from rolling the durum dough paper-thin and folding it so the loaf is built of many sheets with filling between them. Durum semolina is high in protein and forms a strong, extensible gluten that can be stretched almost translucent without tearing — exactly what lets the dough be folded into many fine layers. In the oven the outer surfaces lose moisture fast and crisp and brown through the Maillard reaction, while the inner layers, sealed between damp filling, steam rather than dry out and so stay soft and pliant. The tomato and cheese give up moisture that the surrounding dough absorbs, which is why the innermost sheets turn supple and noodle-like. A hot oven is needed to set the crust before the whole thing dries out; rolling thick or skimping on the fold collapses the layered effect into ordinary bread.