Portico Pizza

[Salomon Thoj]

Locateddirectly on the Chicago riverfront, Pizzeria Portofino is a sun-drenched casual restaurant offering hand-stretched pizzas, coastal wines, an expansive patio and breezy decor that will instantly transport you to the Italian Riviera.

We're pleased to provide our guests with world-class boat docking on the Chicago River through Downtown Docks. Docking is available daily.

For more information, including dock reservations and pricing, please visit downtowndocks.com.

Use a scale to weigh your ingredients. This is especially important for weighing the flour, as the amount that ends up in a measuring cup can vary dramatically depending on how you fill the cup.

Bake one pizza or two. You can use the entire batch of dough to form one large pizza that fits on an 11-by-17-inch (28-by-43-cm) rimmed baking sheet. But I like to divide the dough in half and bake two medium-sized pizzas (I use a 10-by 14 1/2-inch / 25-by-37-cm rimmed baking sheet). This allows me to stretch the dough more to get a properly thin pizza bianca with a crispy-chewy texture. Also, I can top one pizza with tomato and have both pizza bianca and pizza rossa. Or, if I just want one pizza, I leave the half the dough in the fridge to bake a fresh pizza the next day, or I freeze it to use later. (See the RECIPE NOTES at the end of the recipe for how to freeze pizza bianca dough.)

Like most pizza and focaccia, pizza bianca is best freshly baked, or at least within a few hours of baking. If you do have leftovers, store them in a tightly lidded plastic container or a zipper-lock bag. Reheat the pizza on a baking sheet a moderately-low oven until warmed through.

Welcome to Buona Domenica, a weekly newsletter of inspired Italian home cooking and baking. I\u2019m a journalist, cooking instructor, occasional tour guide, and author of eight cookbooks on Italian cuisine. Click here to browse through the newsletter archive. If you\u2019re looking for a particular recipe, you\u2019ll find all Buona Domenica recipes\u2014143 and counting\u2014indexed here, ready to download or print\u2014a function for paid subscribers.

This week\u2019s newsletter features an extensively tested recipe for Pizza Bianca, plus a variation for Pizza Rossa. Perfecting these recipes took weeks of testing, tweaking, and photographing process shots, so they are behind the paywall. If you would like access to all recipes and archived newsletters, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Grazie.

There was a rosticceria near my aunts\u2019 apartment in Rome where we would sometimes pick up lunch. The place was small, situated right at the \u201CV\u201D where two residential streets intersected. Inside, an open rotisserie behind the counter was strung with rows of juicy chickens turning slowly on their spits. The display case, which ran the length of the shop, was filled with classic rosticceria accompaniments: patatine (French fries) and fried zucchini, suppl\u00EC di riso and potato croquettes, trays of pasta al forno, and a selection of thin, minimally adorned pizzas: pizza bianca, pizza rossa, onion pizza, and potato pizza. There was always a crush of customers in the shop, jostling for position at the counter. Elsa, my mom\u2019s older sister, would walk in and wade through them to stake out a place at the front of the counter. She was tiny\u2014maybe 5-foot-2 and probably less than 100 lbs\u2014but formidable, with a prominent nose, jet black hair, and a wiry frame. She carried a high opinion of herself (deservedly so; she was a respected teacher at one of Rome\u2019s licei classici), and rightly or not, she often got away with such roguery.

While wandering through the area with my husband a couple of years ago, we came upon that same corner. The rosticceria was no longer; it had been transformed into a modern eatery or juice bar, I can\u2019t remember exactly, something with a washed blonde wood interior. I was filled with a longing for the old place, with its patina of grease, whose perfume of fried potatoes, chicken drippings, and freshly baked pizza I could still smell as though I had just stepped out of it.

A few months ago, while reading \u2019s book Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome\u2019s Jewish Kitchen, my eye fell upon her recipe for simple pizza bianca. I wrote about Portico back in December. It\u2019s one of my favorite cookbooks from 2023. The recipes are timeless; many of them, including the pizza bianca, take me right back to the 1970s and 80s and the days I would spend in Rome with my mom and sister and aunts at the beginning and end of our summer vacations in Italy.

Leah\u2019s recipe became the template for the recipe I\u2019m sharing here. I\u2019ve made some changes in ingredients and method, using a mix of flours to get the desired amount of \u201Cchew\u201D in the crust; mixing the ingredients by hand; and reducing the amount of yeast significantly so I could give the dough a slow, cold rise in the fridge. (If you\u2019re looking for a quick recipe to mix and bake in a matter of a few hours, check out Leah\u2019s recipe in Portico.)

Pizza bianca is similar to focaccia, but they are not the same. Focaccia is made from oil-enriched dough and it tends to be tender and fluffy, whether it is thin Ligurian-style focaccia, thick potato focaccia from Puglia, or the tall, bubbly sourdough focaccia that became so popular among home bakers during lockdown. Pizza bianca is thin, with crunchy edges, a crispy top and a chewy crumb. There is no oil in the dough, though olive oil is lightly brushed on top of the dough right before it\u2019s baked and then, once more, when it comes out of the oven.

Pizza rossa is pizza bianca dressed with a thin layer of lightly seasoned tomato pur\u00E9e\u2014no cheese. When I posted the above photo on my Instagram feed a few days ago, one person commented, \u201CI used to think pizza rossa was missing something, but then I took my first bite and realized it was everything.\u201D She is exactly right. For the last couple of months, as I\u2019ve been working on these recipes, I\u2019ve been baking pizza bianca and pizza rossa a couple of times a week. They remind me so much of the pizza bianca and pizza rossa from that old rosticceria; when one is in the oven, it perfumes the kitchen with the aroma of toasting flour and baking dough. It fills me with nostalgia, it makes me want to go back in time, it makes me happy. I\u2019m pretty sure it will make you happy, too.

This is a wet, sticky dough. Normally, I would just coat it, and my hands, with oil when shaping it, but because the pizza bianca is not oil-rich, I use flour to help mitigate the stickiness. I flour my hands, and I flour the parchment that I use to line the baking sheet so the dough doesn\u2019t stick to it. Don\u2019t let this issue worry you too much, though. Follow the instructions in the recipe and you\u2019ll see that the more you work with this dough, the easier it gets.

Use a pizza stone or baking steel. If you have one of these tools, use it to give your pizza a crispy bottom. Although you can bake the pizza directly on the stone or steel, I prefer to bake it in a parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet that I set on my baking stone. This is easier than trying to successfully place the soft, sticky dough neatly onto the super-hot surface of the stone; plus, it doesn\u2019t get flour all over the oven, and it still yields a crispy, lightly browned bottom crust.

The best part of all. Although pizza bianca is thin, it\u2019s not so thin that you can\u2019t slice it open and fill it with silky slices of mortadella to make the most delicious sandwich of all: pizza e mortazza (pictured above).

Alliance for Middle East Peace, which is a coalition of 170 organizations, both Israeli and Palestinian, that work to foster coexistence and cooperation to build long-term stability and peace in the region.

Roman Jewish history is long and storied, but the most defining period was definitely the 300+ years (from the 1550s-1870s) that the city's Jews were forced by papal decree to live in a cramped, gated slum called a ghetto. Their livelihoods were severely restricted during those centuries, which means the community was desperately poor. And they faced discrimination and threats of violence from their non-Jewish neighbors on a daily basis. But out of those years of strife, the Jewish community became deeply connected and resilient. And meanwhile a Jewish culture and cuisine formed, which is unlike any other in the Jewish diaspora.

For eating, I love Casalino Osteria. There are lots of restaurants in the Roman Jewish Ghetto serving the community's traditional dishes, but I think they are the best. Renato al Ghetto is also great, and doing traditional food with a modern twist. And no trip to the neighborhood is complete without a visit to Pasticceria il Boccione, a 200-year-old kosher bakery that sells traditional Roman Jewish cookies, crostata, and cakes. Just beyond the Ghetto neighborhood in Trastevere, I love C' Pasta...e Pasta, which is a humble-looking spot that serves excellent fresh pastas and a variety of traditional Roman Jewish dishes.

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