Regional Recipe
Pitta Calabrese
Calabrian ring-shaped flatbread with a hole in the middle
This is a flatbread baked in a ring — a low disc about a centimetre thick with a hole in the middle, meant to be split and filled.
Tested and written by Erika A. Cochran
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Prep
25 minutes, plus 2 hours rising
Cook
30 minutes
Serves
2 pitte
Difficulty
Moderate
Region
Catanzaro, Calabria
What you’ll need
Ingredients
Written for 2 pitte.
Showing quantities at 1× the original recipe.
- 4 cups type 0 flour
- 1¼ cups warm water
- ½ oz fresh brewer's yeast (or ¼ oz dried)
- 1⅔ tsp fine sea salt
- 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
At the stove
Instructions
Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and mix it into the flour.
Add the salt and oil and knead for 10 minutes until smooth. Cover and leave until doubled, about 1½ hours.
Turn the dough onto a board and press it out without kneading it again.
Shape discs about ⅓ inch thick and pierce a hole through the centre of each.
Set on floured trays and rest for 30 minutes.
Bake at 430°F for about 30 minutes until pale gold and firm. Cool a little, then split and fill, or serve torn alongside.
Recipe notes
The documented dough is simply type 0 flour, fresh yeast, water, olive oil and salt.
Sources give the disc form and 1-cm thickness but no standardised batch weight — two pitte is a home-kitchen quantity, not a specification.
Provenance confidence: moderate. The Comune di Catanzaro approved a production specification and De.Co. recognition in April 2026, but the full recipe specification is not public.
Context
In Catanzaro pitta is the city's emblematic bread, and the municipality describes it as accompanying the daily life of Catanzaro families for generations. Roman-Italic and Greek origin theories both circulate and neither is settled; the term is recorded in Vincenzo Dorsa's 1876 linguistic study as schiacciata di pane, flattened bread. In baking households pitta was made first to test the oven's heat before the main bread bake, and its historic centre hole was larger when the fillings — morzeddhu, suffrittu — were small.
Sources: Comune di Catanzaro — La pitta catanzarese riconosciuta prodotto De.Co.: (opens in a new tab); La Cucina Italiana — Discovering pitta calabrese: (opens in a new tab)
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