Piadina (Italian Flatbread Sandwich)

One of the highlights of my time living in Italy years ago was enjoying countless piadine. The sandwich, which originates from the Emilia-Romagna region, is a popular street food in Italy. The large circular griddled flatbread folded over a heaping handful of fresh greens with a modest amount of thinly sliced cured meats and/or cheese is also found in Italian gas stations and cafes. While it’s meant to be portable and eaten on the go, I like to take my time and savor this half-moon-shaped sandwich. It’s just too good to scarf down.

Admittedly, to describe a piadina as a “sandwich”—at least as we typically define a sandwich in the United States—is a bit misleading. Sure, both American sandwiches and Italian piadine (the plural of piadina) are portable meals in which savory contents are sandwiched between layers of bread, but beyond that their identities are very different. 

The main difference is that the bread itself is the star of the show when it comes to piadine. While you can generally specify the kind of bread—rye, wheat, sourdough, etc.— for your sandwich in an American deli, the focus tends to be on fillings such as thick layers of deli meats and sliced cheese, and maybe a leaf or two of lettuce. On the other hand, a piadina is defined by its thin, pliable, and tender freshly griddled flatbread, rather than the filling. The name piadina refers to not just the sandwich, but to the bread itself.

Since my time in Italy I have found great freshly-made piadine stateside. Not long ago, I took a little urban adventure to find the best piadina in New York City. Research and advice from a trusted friend who’s an Italian food professional led me to a corner shop in Brooklyn called Lella Alimentari. Walking through the door of the shop, I encountered wafts of espresso and fast-paced Italian banter. The menu, pinned to the wall by a feathered dart, listed 10 piadina options. I knew immediately my friend did not lead me astray; this was no run of the mill sandwich shop.

The piadine at Lella Alimentari were on par with those I’d enjoyed in Italy—remarkably thin and crisp yet pliable and tender. It’s not bready, like a pita, nor is it chewy, like a flour tortilla. The piadina I had long been making at home had both pita and tortilla vibes, and I wanted to learn how to improve this, so I loitered near the pass to watch the Lella Alimentari cooks as they assembled piadine during the lunch rush. I noticed how paper thin each dough round was and how quickly it cooked on the griddle. I took mental notes, then I set about to recreate Lella Alimentari’s perfect piadina at home.

The Flatbread

The foundation of this sandwich is its namesake flatbread. No store bought bread will suffice as an easy swap in this recipe. It must be freshly made. The dough should have a bit of chew to it, but it still should be tender and pliable enough to fold over and sink your teeth into easily. It comes together relatively easily and cooks within minutes on the stovetop. Here is guidance on how to make the ideal piadine for sandwiches.

Key Ingredients in the Dough

Piadina dough is unyeasted but it often includes a small amount of chemical leavener in the form of baking soda or baking powder to lighten the dough a small amount. I’ve opted for baking soda in my version. Baking powder, even in very small amounts, made the dough too fluffy and pillowy, closer to a pita texture, which I wanted to avoid. But a small amount of baking soda added to the dough tenderized the dough and lightened the texture just the right amount. 

The other ingredients are simple: white flour, salt, water or milk, and a little fat. Lard is the traditional fat used in piadine. It adds savory flavor to the bread and the saturated fat keeps the crumb tender and short. I tried using olive oil in place of lard and the result was heavier with a slightly chewy texture. However, if you’d like to keep this bread vegetarian, you can swap vegetable shortening for the lard. 

I also landed on using milk rather than water because when I tested a dough made with water next to one made with milk, I found that the milk contributed a nice flavor to the bread and gave it a slightly snappier exterior than the soft crust created by the water dough (most likely due to the sugars and protein found in milk that enhances the Maillard reaction).

Shaping the Dough

I realized the major difference between my subpar piadina dough-making at home and Lella Alimentari’s came down to a difference in shaping the dough. The piadine I had been making at home were noticeably smaller in circumference and thicker than the ones served at Lella Alimentari’s. At home I have been rolling my piadine rounds out to nine inches, while at Lella Alimentari, the sandwich rounds were closer to 10 inches. A one inch difference might seem minor, but it made a substantial impact in the final size of the cooked flatbread and provided more surface area for fillings to be scattered across before folding over to eat.

The other key shaping insight I learned at Lella Alimentari was that the thickness of the rolled-out dough needs to be just right for the flatbread to have the best texture: Rolled too thick and the dough turns fluffy and pita-like, rolled too thin and the dough cooks up too crisp. Rolling the dough to a scant ¼-inch thick created a piadina that remained pliable with a slight chew when cooked. I scaled the dough amount accordingly so that each piadina was 10-inches in diameter and around ¼ inch thin.

How to Cook the Piadina

To properly cook the piadine, you need a thoroughly preheated, but not smoking hot, skillet. Much like when you’re making pancakes, you need an evenly heated cooking surface, and it takes a few minutes for the empty skillet to heat through evenly. Add the piadine to the skillet while it’s still too cold or unevenly heated and you run the risk of the dough sticking to the skillet or cooking through unevenly and too slowly, which would dry the piadina out to a cracker-like consistency. The skillet should be hot enough that the first side of the dough lightly browns on the bottom and small bubbles spread across the top within 30 seconds of hitting the heat. This leads to the ideal texture after the dough is flipped and cooked for another short 30 seconds.

Piadina Fillings and Variations

When I started developing this recipe and playing around with different filling combinations, I was lucky enough to be in Queens and within walking distance of an old-school Italian-American butcher shop, Metro Meat. I loaded up on provisions from their deli case, like breaded eggplant and chicken cutlets, prosciutto, mortadella, provolone cheese, and jars of imported pestos. I experimented with piling different combinations of the delicious bounty I had procured on warm, freshly cooked piadine and brought out an overflowing platter to taste with my sister. She bit into an eggplant and provolone iteration that I had slathered with sundried tomato pesto and immediately jumped up for a napkin. The oily filling dripped out of the sandwich from every side. Unlike with thicker, spongier breads like focaccia, the oily spread doesn’t soak into thin piadina dough, instead it slides right off. It just didn't work.

After this oily encounter, I understood why good piadina makers in Italy and elsewhere skip the oily or liquidy spreads and fillings. While Lella Alimentari doesn't include any piadine with spreads on their menu, they do have one with one of my favorite soft fresh Italian cheeses: stracchino. Stracchino is a creamy cow’s milk cheese from Northern Italy that provides a buttery flavor and texture without being runny. In my opinion, it is the perfect filling for piadine—it clings to the bread well and adds a rich flavor without creating a mess. I grab stracchino to fill my piadine at home whenever I can find it, but unfortunately, it’s not the easiest cheese to find here in the States. If you can find it, by all means use it in this sandwich, but if you can’t, not to worry!

It turns out stracciatella Pugliese—the deluxe combination of mozzarella shreds and cream found inside balls of burrata—is a pretty darn good substitute for my beloved stracchino. 

At home, I tore open a ball of burrata from my local grocery store and scattered the cheese across my piadina, letting any excess cream ooze over the bread as well, then piled lightly dressed arugula on top. The fresh greens provide a spicy, nutty, pleasant bitter counter to the creamy, milky cheese Though it wasn’t an exact replica of the sandwich from Lella Alimentari, it was a delicious combination that worked well and proved to be my preferred piadina filling when making the sandwich at home.

While I’ve opted to keep my recipe here focused on just the fresh cheese and greens, you can fill piadine with any classic Italian cured meats, such as prosciutto or mortadella, as wall as many types of cheese, and fresh greens. Or try adding thinly sliced figs, artichoke hearts, or roasted red peppers. You could even swap sweet for savory and slather a thin layer of nutella with mascarpone on your piadina or combine fresh ricotta with a little honey as a filling option. Just remember to keep it portable and not to overload it—simple is best.