800 Degrees To-Go | Tasting Table Los Angeles
We've got a new sandwich crush.
The panuozzo belongs to the same family as the patty melt and the Cronut: Take one awesome thing and combine it with another awesome thing to create something utterly brilliant.
Said to have originated among food vendors located along highways outside Naples, the panuozzo is the love child of a panino and a calzone: a flatbread sandwich stuffed into a swath of puffy baked-to-order dough cleaved in two and crisped on a sandwich press.
You can get one of these handheld hybrids at Anthony Carron's new 800 Degrees To-Go, a small kitchen alcove hidden around the corner from the much larger 800 Degrees Neapolitan Pizzeria.
Carron explains, "We wanted to create a sandwich at the take-out location, but the commercial breads we tried seemed boring, so we switched to pizza dough."
Made using a custom-built Stefan Ferraro oven, these two-fisted panuozzos range from the Autostrada ($10), a pseudo-Cubano pressed with paper-thin cold cuts, melted caciocavallo cheese and spicy pepper relish, to the Salsiccia e Friarielli ($8), a gooey strata of sausage and fontina accented with broccoli rabe and oil-cured Calabrian chilies.
Not every panuozzo adheres to tradition: Let Thanksgiving come early with the Fra'mani Turkey ($9), dressed with sweet cranberry relish and buttery Taleggio cheese, or travel further down the Mediterranean with the Spicy Braised Lamb ($12) with crumbled feta and wild arugula.
Welcome to the final frontier of flatbread.