It’s luscious, deeply satisfying and, at $17, crazy good value.
The secret to a great sandwich? Just about any chef will tell you it’s the freshness of the bread.
And as far as Tim Glasson is concerned, it doesn’t get much fresher than pizza dough freshly baked from the oven.
“We stretch and bake the dough to order, so it literally can’t be more fresh,” Glasson says. “That’s a big part of the appeal of what we do.”
But what does this have to do with sandwiches? Let us tell you.
Ever heard of panuozzo?
Glasson is talking about panuozzo, a “pizza sandwich” that emerged in Naples in the 1980s. It takes pizza dough, bakes it and shapes it into a sandwich stuffed with fillings.
The traditional way (although we’re talking the ’80s here, so “tradition” is perhaps a relative term) to make panuozzo is to shape a typical Neapolitan pizza dough into an elongated roll, par-bake it, and then slice it open like a pita and stuff it full of ingredients, before giving it a second bake.
The other way is more of a pizza wrap, where the cook stretches the dough, fills with hot ingredients, folds it for baking, and then reopens to add any cold ingredients before serving to the diner. This is what we’re talking about here, in East Brisbane, at Olli Italiano.
Olli Italiano’s very Instagrammable lunch menu
Olli Italiano is the product of Glasson and his partner, Anna Brobjer, who opened this cute as a button Italian restaurant in January. It sits on the corner of Lytton Road and Latrobe Street, an eye-catching bolthole presented in a smart white and scarlet paint job.
Olli’s usual fare is keenly priced, homey pasta and pizza fronted by a menu of smaller plates such as meatballs, deep-fried lasagne and burrata. But Glasson and Brobjer wanted a way to make lunch more approachable for locals, hence the February-March (Glasson can’t remember exactly when) launch of a short menu of panuozzo.
“We wanted something that people could come down and grab regularly, either in the restaurant or takeaway,” Glasson says. “And then we came across the idea off panuozzo and thought, ‘This is just perfect’.”
Olli Italiano’s mortadella panuozzo
There are six panuozzo on the menu. Glasson says the Diavola Dreams (tomato, fior di latte, rocket, nduja, hot salami, basil) and the Meatballs My Dear (pomodoro sauce, rocket, meatballs, shaved Parmesan, basil) are the bestsellers, but for us they play second (and third) fiddle to the first sanger on the list: the Mortadella Mi Bella.
Like so many great sandwiches, its beauty is in its simplicity. There’s mortadella supplied by Selecta Food Group that’s made by an Italian family in Melbourne, a fistful of springy rocket, gooey stracciatella from Byron Bay Mozzarella, and then a liberal sprinkle of pistachio, as much for texture as it is flavour.
Simple, except it’s wrapped inside an almighty pizza base made with Italian 00 flour, filled with fior di latte and cooked fast at 350 degrees in the drop-door pizza oven out back, to produce a bubbly, crispy Neapolitan-ish crust. It’s then finished with a generous sprinkle of pecorino for a bit of seasoning. And that’s it.
It makes for a luscious, deeply satisfying sandwich that’s as big as your face, yet easy to eat with one hand (after the chefs cut it in two, at least). I test this by demolishing it in the car on the way back to the office, rushing to address a deadline, conducting an interview on the way.
There was hardly anything left for my coworkers upon my arrival. Sorry, gang.
Where to get it
The Mortadella Mi Bella is $17, making it crazy good value. You can get one daily 11.30am-3pm from Olli Italiano at 2/53 Lytton Road, East Brisbane.
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
