Monza style pizza: the recipe

Each city has its own specialty, its favorite dish, but in Monza tradition has it that pizza is really tasty because here it is eaten with sausage, onion and parmesan. In this column on regional pizza recipes we will go into more detail on pizza alla monzese, we will see the stages of its preparation and, finally, how to cook it more quickly and perfectly as in a pizzeria with the use of pizza ovens.

Monza is an Italian town of 123,409 inhabitants, the third town in the Lombardy region by population, preceded by Milan and Brescia.

Regional specialties: Monza style pizza

Each region and each city fills the pizza in its own way, with the typical ingredients of its territory, so much so that at school you could also study geography through the declination of the tastes of this typical Italian dish, which varies so radically in its toppings depending on of the latitude referred to. It is known, in fact, that the gastronomy of a territory is a revelator of its own characteristics, habits and culture. So here we are in Lombardy and more precisely in Monza to discover the details of the recipe for pizza alla monzese, a white pizza full of flavors.

Ingredients of Monza style pizza

The ingredients of the pizza alla Monza do not differ much from those of any other pizza, what characterizes it instead is the filling with chopped onion, a nice layer of stracchino, the sausage and the final sprinkling of parmesan cheese. Yes, because these are precisely the products of which Monza can say it is proud. Stracchino is a typically Lombard cheese, made with the milk of cows returning tired ("stracche") from the mountain pastures. Sausage is also a typical product of these parts, called "luganega", and the same goes for grana padano, a seasoned cheese famous all over the world, which in the Milan-Monza area finds one of its major centers in Lombardy. But for those who want to know the recipe and doses, here is a practical list with the quantities needed for 4-5 people.

• 500 gr flour
• 250 ml water
• 25 gr yeast
• 5 gr salt
• 10 gr extra virgin olive oil
• 300 gr stracchino
• 300 gr pork sausage
• 50 grams of Grana Padano
• 1 onion

How to prepare Monza style pizza

Let's start by preparing the dough. Mix the water with the flour, add the salt and extra virgin olive oil and knead until you have created a nice smooth dough. Many in the Monza pizza recipe also add 1 or 2 sachets of saffron to the dough to make it tastier and golden. Close the dough in a bowl sealed with cling film and wait until the leavening has doubled the volume. It takes at least 2 hours, but also 4 or 5 if the temperature is not very high.

While you wait, prepare the filling: sauté the finely chopped onion and the sausage into small pieces in a pan. At this point, place the dough on the pan (lined with parchment paper or well greased) and spread it out with your hands. After waiting another 30 minutes, stuff the pizza with stracchino, sausage and onion and bake at 230 in a preheated oven. Cook for 20-25 minutes and add the parmesan flakes only after taking the pizzas out of the oven. That's it: you can present your pizza alla Monza still steaming on the table!

Use Spice home ovens to bake and enjoy your favorite pizza

Pizza is a dish that, in order to be really good, requires very high and very fast cooking. For this reason, sometimes in the home oven it is not perfect, while in the pizzeria they do it easy with professional ovens or wood-burning pizza ovens. But even at home we can prepare a good pizza with perfect cooking thanks to the use of electric pizza ovens. To give you a more precise idea, we are talking about the Spice Caliente oven, for example, but the Diavola ovens are also excellent products: Diavola Pro and Diavola 16 "gas. Spice ovens are excellent allies in the kitchen, because they can quickly reach time high temperatures, bake a dough in an excellent way in just 5 minutes and bake a pizza that not even the most old-fashioned amateurs will be able to distinguish from a pizza cooked by a pizza maker.