Sicilian sfincione (onion, anchovy, breadcrumb)
Palermo's street-cart pizza — a thick, spongy pan slab under slow-cooked onions, melted anchovy, tomato and toasted breadcrumbs. Soft on purpose.
Recipe by Priya Patel · Published
Sfincione taught me that not every good pizza is a crisp one. This is Palermo street food, sold by the wedge from carts at room temperature, and the whole thing is supposed to be soft — a thick, spongy, focaccia-adjacent slab under a wet topping. The sauce is the argument: onions cooked down slowly until they are sweet, anchovies melted into the oil until they stop tasting like anchovies and start tasting like depth, tomato stirred in at the end, breadcrumbs on top instead of cheese. I baked my first four of these too hot and too fast, chasing colour, and got a browned rim over a raw middle every single time — a pale, floppy base is exactly that trap. Moderate heat, low rack, long bake. King Arthur Bread Flour at 12.7% protein is the right backbone: enough gluten to hold a tall open crumb under a heavy topping without the slab turning tough or bready.
Flour: King Arthur Bread Flour (12.7% protein) — read the review
Dough Formula
| Ingredient | Grams | Baker's % |
|---|---|---|
| Flour (12.7% protein) | 450 g | 100.0% |
| Water | 315 g | 70.0% |
| Salt | 10 g | 2.2% |
| Yeast | 3 g | 0.7% |
| Oil | 20 g | 4.4% |
| Sugar | 5 g | 1.1% |
Makes 1 ball of ≈803 g
Ingredients
Dough
- •1 ball Pizza dough (see formula above) — One 33×23 cm pan's worth
- •generous drizzle Olive oil for the pan
Onion and anchovy sauce
- •500g Yellow onions — Halved and sliced 3 mm — thicker than you think, they cook right down
- •45 ml Extra virgin olive oil
- •8 pieces Anchovy fillets in oil — Drained; roughly 30 g
- •300g Crushed tomatoes
- •2 g Dried oregano
- •4 g Fine sea salt
- •freshly cracked Black pepper
Cheese and crumb
- •150g Caciocavallo (or aged pecorino) — Half cubed for the dough, half grated for the top
- •50 g Dried breadcrumbs — Coarse, not fine — fine crumbs turn to paste
- •15 ml Extra virgin olive oil for the crumb
Instructions
- 1
Mix the flour, water, yeast and sugar to a shaggy mass and rest 20 minutes. Add the salt, then work the olive oil in until the dough is smooth.
💡 Sugar is not for sweetness — it feeds a fast rise and pushes the crust toward the deep brown that a moderate oven struggles to produce.
- 2
Knead 6-8 minutes by hand, then bulk ferment covered for about 2 hours at room temperature, until roughly doubled.
- 3
While it rises, cook the onions in the olive oil over low heat for 25-30 minutes with a pinch of salt, until sweet, collapsed and barely coloured.
💡 Low and slow. Browned onions taste of caramel; sfincione wants them sweet and almost dissolved.
- 4
Add the drained anchovies and stir until they break apart and disappear into the oil, about 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes, oregano and pepper.
💡 Cook the anchovies until you can no longer see them. That is the point at which they stop tasting fishy and start tasting like the sauce.
- 5
Simmer 10 minutes until thick enough that a spoon dragged through leaves a clear channel, then cool to room temperature.
💡 A loose sauce is the single most common reason the topping slides off the slab when you cut it. Reduce it properly.
- 6
Oil the 33×23 cm pan well. Press the dough out toward the corners, cover, and proof 90 minutes to 2 hours until it fills the pan and looks pillowy.
- 7
Heat the oven to 230°C (450°F) with a rack in the lower third, for at least 30 minutes.
- 8
Press the cubed caciocavallo down into the proofed dough at even intervals, then spread the cooled sauce over the whole surface, edge to edge.
💡 Cheese under the sauce, not on it — that is the Palermo order, and it keeps the cheese from burning across a 30-minute bake.
- 9
Toss the breadcrumbs with the grated cheese and 15 ml olive oil and scatter them evenly over the top.
- 10
Bake 25-30 minutes, until the crumb topping is deep gold and the underside lifts away from the pan cleanly on a spatula.
💡 Check the bottom, not the top. Lift a corner at 25 minutes — if it is pale and soft, give it another 5 minutes on the lowest rack.
- 11
Slide onto a rack for 15 minutes, then cut into squares and serve warm or at room temperature — never straight from the oven.
Tips
- →Hands-on time is about 45 minutes — the mix, the onions and the assembly. The rest is two rises.
- →Sfincione is meant to be soft. If you are chasing a crisp shatter you are making the wrong pizza.
- →Cool the sauce before it goes on. Hot sauce on proofed dough deflates the crumb.
- →Coarse breadcrumbs, tossed in oil first — dry crumbs scorch before the base is done.
- →It is better the second day, and it is traditionally eaten at room temperature.
- →No caciocavallo nearby? Aged provolone is the closest supermarket swap; pecorino is sharper but works.
How to Make Sicilian sfincione (onion, anchovy, breadcrumb)
Video coming soon
Shop this bake
Flour
King Arthur Bread Flour
The first bag to buy if you bake in a domestic oven. At 12.7% protein with added amylase on the label it gives you chew and colour at 250 °C, which is exactly what an unmalted 00 will not.
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Check price on Amazon →Read the review →Ingredient
Cento All Purpose Crushed Tomatoes
Crushed in the tin instead of by hand, and sold as one can rather than a case — the low-commitment way in when a six-tin case is what stops you buying at all.
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Check price on Amazon →Read the buying guide →Ingredient
SAF Instant Yeast
Instant, so it goes in dry with the flour: no warm-water step means no step at which the yeast can be cooked, which is where an active-dry dough most often dies.
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Check price on Amazon →Read the review →Equipment
Greater Goods Single Sensor Baking Scale
One model behind one listing, on the maker's own page: 5 kg (11 lb) of capacity, reading down to 1 g. What the listing sends is what the maker documents — rarer here than it ought to be.
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Check price on Amazon →Read the buying guide →Equipment
Anmarko Stainless Steel Bench Scraper
Rigid where a plastic bowl scraper flexes: a blade under a millimetre thick gets under wet dough flat and still divides a batch in one press.
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Check price on Amazon →Read the review →Equipment
KitchenStar 18-Inch Pizza Rocker Blade
Buy it after the scraper. A blade longer than the pizza cuts in one downward press — for pies you lift onto a board, not ones you cut in the tin.
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Check price on Amazon →Read the review →
If this goes wrong
Pizza base is pale and floppy
The surface of your base never got hot enough for long enough to brown. Bake on a fully preheated steel at maximum, bake it longer than feels right, and switch to a malted bread flour or add 1–2% sugar so there is something there to brown.
Pizza crust is dense and bready, not chewy
Dense crust means the gas never got in or never got out of the dough into the crumb. Proof to the peak, keep the rim untouched, stop adding bench flour, and bake on a surface hot enough to give you real oven spring.
Toppings slide off when slicing
Molten cheese is a liquid and cannot grip anything until it cools back through roughly 55–65 °C (130–150 °F). Rest the pizza 2–3 minutes, cut down through it rather than dragging a wheel across it, and stop building a layer of oil and water between the cheese and the dough.
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