Mozzarella in Carrozza

Carrozza, short for Mozzarella in Carrozza, is a type of pan fried cheese sandwich. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a slightly-less-healthy take on the grilled cheese. But, as I found out, it’s more. Much more.

Googling around for a recipe, I found many more than I’d expected for a sandwich I’d never heard of. The recipes differ in a lot of details–fresh vs regular mozzarella, flour vs breadcrumbs, crusts on vs. crustless, butter vs. olive oil (vs. straight-up deep-frying the things). Various additions and/or dipping sauces. The main things they all agreed upon were some form of mozzarella cheese enclosed in some form of bread, coated in some form of egg wash, and fried in some manner.

Most of the recipes I saw, though, leaned toward breadcrumbs. And if you’re going to use breadcrumbs to fry something, take a tip from me: always use panko.

There was a time when I probably would have tried every variant under the sun, but these days I have to pace myself. I’m fully on board with the bread crumbs, pan-fried, butter/olive oil combo. I once took a stand against cutting the crusts off of sandwiches but that ship has long since sailed, so I’ll try them crustless, but I’ll try some with crusts on as well. I’m a huge fan of fresh mozzarella

But we ought to give standard mozzarella a chance too. What I’m most excited about though is the extras. Some recipes call for having marinara sauce for dipping, some call for pesto. Some call for putting basil leaves in the sandwich (but the pesto would make that redundant I think, so I’ll skip it). One recipe I found has an excellent sounding “Anchovy sauce,” which is basically a lemon butter with capers and anchovies to drizzle over the sandwiches. Many people would not get excited about anchovies. I am excited about anchovies.

For the anchovy sauce, I differed from the recipe on the page linked above in that I did not have any parsley on hand, so I did not use it. I did, on the other hand, add garlic, because it sounded delicious. The sauce is not attractive or photogenic, but it is salty and rich and bright from the lemon, and reminds me of chicken piccata.

For the marinara, I wanted to keep things simple. As much as I’d like to perfect a killer marinara recipe, I decided to buy the best commercial example I could find. I googled best jarred marinara sauce and found this HuffPo writeup (apparently as unreadable in a full browser as it was on mobile), which listed a Giada de Laurentiis brand only available in Target as #1. Unfortunately, my local Target did not carry that brand, but it did carry HuffPo’s #2 brand, Rao’s homemade. I was quite pleased with it, and even our 9yo, who normally eats his pasta sauceless with just a bit of Parmesan on spaghetti nights, really enjoyed it.

I had picked up a jar of pesto at Aldi some time before and figured I might as well use it for this. Earlier in life, I was never a fan of pesto, but at some point in the past 8 years I really developed a taste for basil, and now I can’t get enough of it.

I made four sandwiches total–Two with the crusts cut off, fresh mozzarella on one and standard on the other, and two with the crusts left on with the two different cheeses. To assemble, I covered the bottom slice of bread to 1/2″ from the edge with the cheese and placed the top piece, then placed the sandwich in a shallow dish of egg wash (beaten eggs with a little milk) before pressing it into a plate full of panko bread crumbs. I repeated the process for the other side of the sandwich, then pan fried it for about 4 minutes per side in a cast iron skillet with a roughly 50/50 mixture of melted butter and extra virgin olive oil.

First up was the crustless sandwich with standard mozzarella. A note on handling: crustless bread does not maintain its shape very well, even less so once you’ve dipped it into an egg wash. These sandwiches were very hard to bread. The result was outstanding though.

The standard mozzarella is more solid than fresh mozzarella, and doesn’t melt quite as easily, but once the sandwiches were made and the dipping sauces were engaged, I finally realized what we had here. This is a bready mozzarella stick. It was delicious, scooping up big gobs of marinara with one of these sandwiches, and the anchovy sauce, while thin, had a big hit of flavor that worked really well with what is essentially a fairly mild cheese, but the pesto is really where the standard mozzarella shone I thought. That sweet, nutty, aromatic, nearly licorice-like flavor of basil and pine nuts, the fruitiness of the olive oil, the salt and garlic–I’m not sure why most places default to marinara when this would be an excellent accompaniment to mozzarella sticks.

Next was the fresh mozzarella, which of course is much softer and more easily meltable than standard mozzarella. If you’ve never seen a pizza with fresh mozzarella, the cheese is placed in discrete chunks on the pie and melts into oozy circular pools, stretchy like standard mozzarella but less elastic.

These sandwiches were great with the pesto as well, but the milder flavor made them an excellent platform for the extremely potent anchovy sauce. Of course, the 9yo and the 16yo both preferred the marinara (again, so strange that neither one of them are big fans of tomato sauce on spaghetti night, but if there’s mozzarella involved, they’re in!). Mindy liked the anchovy sauce the best as well, and we both favored the fresh mozzarella, while the kids both liked the standard.

With crusts, the sandwiches were much easier to handle. Apart from the ease of handling though, I don’t have a clear preference. I enjoy a crusty bread, and I used a nice crusty Italian loaf for these sandwiches (from usual suspects Breadsmith), but the egg wash softens the texture of the crust, and the most obvious difference is that the final product more clearly resembled a sandwich.

I say “resembled” a sandwich somewhat incorrectly–after all these are sandwiches. Bread, filling, the elements are all there.

But I really began to think of these as more of a hybrid, the blessed union of mozzarella stick and grilled cheese. I started to think of how I might improve other grilled cheese sandwiches by coating them in bread crumbs before frying them. American cheese, Muenster, havarti, all those amazing cheeses. Why is it that mozzarella is the popular choice for this treatment? Sure, there are other cheeses that get breaded and fried and served with ranch dressing, but gross. Ranch dressing? How about a breaded fried cheddar sandwich with a nice stone ground mustard sauce, or Oaxacan cheese with chipotle sauce, or Manchego with a nice fruit jam?

I’m going to get myself in trouble with all these thoughts. I can’t try them all right now. I’ve got some good ideas though, and perhaps I’ll share some with you here when I get around to making them. In the meantime, you should try this sandwich. Adding breadcrumbs to a grilled cheese sandwich is a little messy, but it’s easier than making mozzarella sticks from scratch, and I’m telling you, you’re going to like it.