Serious Eats: Recipes
Jamie Oliver's Pizza Fritta, 'Fried Pizza'
Jamie Oliver may sound English, but deep down he's really Italian—take, for example, his new chain of Jamie's Italian restaurants slowly spreading their way through England, from Oxford to Bath and beyond. In his book Jamie's Italy, he offers these crisp, petite pizzas as the Italian street food answer to papadum (very popular in the UK)—fried as the "first-ever pizzas were."
Embellished only with buffalo mozzarella, plum tomato sauce, and torn strips of basil, anointed in the fryer and thereafter with a drizzle of golden oil, it's perhaps their simple old-fashionedness that renders them so fresh and modern.
As Jamie would have it, everything in this recipe is from scratch, and probably benefits from it. But if I were doing it, and Jamie wasn't around, I would probably buy pizza dough from the best local pizzeria and use San Marzano tomato sauce—just so that this flash-fried food can be made in, well, a flash.