When (Not) in Rome: Trapizzino at Home

Tramezzino, as an Italian word for a type of sandwich, hasn’t caught on outside Italy the way panino (or at least its plural form panini) has. Originally called paninetto, the tramezzino is a type of crustless, triangular sandwich that was dubbed tramezzino by Gabriele d’Annunzio, often described simply as an Italian poet. There’s more to it, and we dig into that a little bit in the previous post, but it is not important at this time for you to know every detail of the etymology. Tramezzini are popular all over Italy and especially in Venice, and the word is well known and (apparently) easily-portmanteaued in Italian.

Enter Stefano Callegari. After a decade-plus career as a flight attendant, he returned to Rome to open Pizzeria Tonda, where he developed a light, airy-but crispy crust and a tendency to combine it with unusual toppings. A few years later, he opened another restaurant called Il Trapizzino. Trapizzino, if you have not figured it out on your own by now, is a portmanteau combining pizza with the previously-mentioned triangular sandwich called tramezzino. My friend Daniel, who has blogged about his travels around the world for a few years now on his site The Wandering Hedonist, told me about them earlier this year and I immediately put them on the List.

The concept of a Trapizzino is this: a (rectangular) slice of pizza bianca, a Roman flatbread similar to a less-oily focaccia, is cut in half to form 2 triangles. One of those triangles is then slit open and stuffed with a popular local dish: chicken cacciatore; Garofolato, a type of Roman pot roast; anchovies with burrata cheese; etc. The Il Trapizzino website lists these and several other possibilities, including seasonal recipes. The NYC location, simply called Trapizzino, has a similar list on its menu. Sadly, I have time this month to visit neither Rome nor NYC, but luckily for me, Serious Eats posted an article gushing about these sandwiches last year along with a recipe for the bread.

The recipe is adapted from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s pizza bianca recipe but scaled up and with plenty of olive oil added, which takes it back toward something more like a focaccia. It is delicious though, airy and crisp, and reheats spectacularly well in the oven when I’m ready to make a sandwich. The triangles it creates are less regular than what I’ve seen of Il Trapizzino’s, but they’ll do for my purposes.

To prepare one of these triangles to become a trapizzino, one simply has to wrap it in wax paper–the fillings are mainly hot and saucy and could otherwise be quite messy–and cut open a slit down the middle.

The bread is crisp-crusted, with an airy interior that is sturdier than it looks. Still warm from the oven, even from reheating, it is a delight to eat even unadorned, the flaky salt with which it’s seasoned enhancing the natural flavors provided by its long slow fermentation. I could spend a week simply eating these, or using them to sop up soup remnants, happily.

However, between the US and Italian locations, and not including unnamed seasonal or special items, there are a number of suggested fillings available:

• Pollo alla Cacciatora (Chicken Cacciatore, both US and Italy)
• Lingua in Salsa Verde (Tongue in green sauce, Italy only)
• Polpetta al Sugo (Meatballs in red sauce, both US and Italy)
• Doppia Panna e Alici (Burrata and Anchovies, both US and Italy)
• Parmigiana de Melanzane (Eggplant Parmesan, both US and Italy)
• Trippa alla Romana (Roman-style Tripe, Italy only)
• Picchiapo (braised beef, Italy only)
• Pollo con i peperoni (chicken with peppers, Italy only)
• Garofolato (Italian-style pot roast, Italy only)
• Misticana alla Romana (braised greens, US only)

Not listed above, the one that immediately caught my eye, on both the US and Italian menus, was called Coda alla Vaccinara. Now if you’ve studied any music you know that a coda is the end of a piece of classical music, what we might call the “outro” in a pop song. So the end of… vaccinara? It turns out, no, this is not an antivax recipe–“coda” means tail, and “vaccinara” is based on “vacca,” old Roman slang for a butcher. Thus, “coda alla vaccinara” means oxtails, served “butcher-style,” or braised with pancetta, aromatics, and some warming spices.

I am constitutionally unable to pass up a chance to eat oxtails. Even, it seems, if I have to cook them myself.

@sandwichidiot Homemade Trapizzino with Coda alla Vaccinara #trapizzino #pizzabianca #oxtails #codaallavaccinara #homemade #delicious ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer

I used a New York Times recipe for coda alla vaccinara and after serving it to my family over polenta for dinner on a Sunday evening, ate it in a trapizzino with Parmesan Reggiano for lunch the next day.

Braising is the most natural method for preparing oxtails, traditionally one of the cheaper cuts of the cow due to the high ratio of bone and connective tissue to actual meat. Over the several hours of cook time, that connective tissue is slowly rendered into gelatin, as the vegetables and even the pancetta disintegrate into the tomato sauce and white wine, thickening the braising liquid into a coarse slurry that absorbs the gelatin and fat from the oxtails.

This is autumn in a stewpot, a glut of glutamates, between the tomato and meat, the pancetta and Parmesan, made all the more seasonally perfect by a hint of those warming spices, just enough cinnamon and clove to enhance the whole. In sandwich form, the sauce is divorced from the pleasure of gnawing the meat from the bone and scraping it for half-rendered remnants of gelatin, but the pizza bianca provides its own delights. The crisp-crusted bread houses an open but chewy crumb that absorbs sauce without falling apart or leaking it… much. (That’s what the wax paper is for!)

It was, frankly, as good as I thought I could possibly make this sandwich. And yet I had a handful of other fillings lined up to try.

Unable to source burrata to combine with anchovies–I tried! I like anchovies, I like burrata, this should be a no-brainer–I bought some fresh mozzarella and prosciutto di Parma instead, thinking I would do something with that. After watching a TikTok video in which an Italian chef called the common bruschetta topping with tomatoes and basil “bullshit,” I was inspired to add a little bullshit bruschetta mix to this combination.

And it was terrific, fresh Roma tomatoes from one of my garden’s final harvests of the year mixed with chiffonaded basil and dressed with a mixture of olive oil, garlic, and white balsamic vinegar. Tomato, basil, and fresh mozzarella are a combination repeated in Italian cuisine–pizza margherita, caprese salad–and represent not only il Tricolore of the Italian flag but a natural combination of flavors, the versatile tomato bridging the sweetness of basil with the savory cheese. The juiciness of both these raw garden tomatoes and the fresh mozzarella taxed the bread as much or more than the hot oxtail gravy had, yet the warmth and richness of that gravy filled out the crumb more memorably, I thought.

So I returned to hot fillings, which most trapizzini appear to feature in any case. These small, ping-pong-ball-sized meatballs were just the right size to fit three in a single trapizzino, and the pecorino Romano was as good a garnish as the Parmesan had been for the oxtails. I haven’t had a meatball sub in a while, but this bread seems a better fit for that purpose than the hard rolls offered by most Italian delis. Again, the crumb absorbs the sauce without becoming too soft or gummy, the crust remains crisp yet flexible, and the shape of the bread holds everything in better than a split demibaguette could hope to.

Better yet, eggplant Parmesan. I bought this from my local Italian deli, Frangella, and it was terrific, offering multiple slices of roasted eggplant sandwiches between layers of a bright red sauce and cheese. (I added the layer of mozzarella at the top out of my own personal sense of gluttony.) The layers did not transfer as neatly to the bread as I’d hoped they would, but all the flavors did–the fruitiness of the roasted eggplant, its slight firmness, the gush of hot cheese, the acidity of the tomato sauce. I will be getting this eggplant parm again.

But the best filling I made this month, even better maybe than the coda alla vaccinara, was the simplest–broccoli rabe, blanched for a couple minutes in salted water, sautéed in extra virgin olive oil with plenty of garlic and a good few pinches of red pepper flake. I have made this a number of times, and have usually combined it with roasted pork (or porchetta) and sharp provolone to make a sandwich. For the first time, I tried it on its own in one.

In a word, it was breathtaking. The few minutes the broccoli rabe spent in boiling water were enough to tame some but not all of the vegetable’s natural bitterness. Bitter flavors can be good–ask a beer drinker. That bitterness was the star of this sandwich, enhanced by the sweetness of cooked garlic and the mellow heat of the sauteed dry chilies. The water expressed by the vegetable and the olive oil it was cooked in were all the sauce it needed; pork and provolone, as good as they are, only steal from broccoli rabe the spotlight it deserves.

A spotlight that the trapizzino and its base of pizza bianca are perfectly suited to provide.