The first thing hungry shoppers see when the doors slide open at Alessi Bakery is a table covered in boxes of scachatta — unless it’s right before a major gathering of Tampanians.
“The last couple of days, we sold out of them,” said part owner and assistant manager Jason Alessi by phone in mid-December. “Usually around the holidays is the busiest time, but New Year’s Eve, Gasparilla, Halloween and Thanksgiving, throughout the Super Bowl … whenever there’s a big get-together, we tend to sell a lot of them.”
You can buy scachatta by the slice at Cuban and Italian bakeries around Hillsborough County, but most people encounter the pizza-like bread at potlucks, birthdays or showers. The doughy delight is baked in sheets and sliced into rectangles, perfect for grazing on during a party or eating cold for breakfast the next day (if there’s any left).
Tampa natives may wonder where it came from. Anyone who’s new to town or must drive over a bridge to get to Ybor may see it on a buffet table and wonder what the heck it is.
Here’s a taste of Tampa history.
Like Cuban sandwiches and guava pastries, this Tampa staple is prepared differently at each bakery in town.
Alessi’s trays are sliced into palm-sized cubes, with dough soft enough to fold up and devour in just a bite or two. Tampa’sHousewife Bakery & Cafe sells two whopping hunks with a pastry and a soda for $7.60, featuring dough thick and springy as a kitchen sponge. All have meaty sauce slathered on top of a slightly sweet crust — although La Segunda’s bread is nearly the color of an egg yolk.
Sometimes it’s spelled scachatta, other times scacciata. No one quite agrees on the proper spelling, or which Tampa bakery first debuted the dish.
“The word is from the Italian word schiacciare, which means to trample or press down,” said Tampa history expert Gary Mormino, professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. “It’s basically a poor man’s pizza.”
Like other Ybor treats, scachatta is a hybrid of Cuban and Sicilian cuisines, inspired by immigrants of the late 1800s who came to work in local cigar factories.
According to a 1992 St. Petersburg Times article, the dish was “long sold cold by the piece, a convenient street food that made filling lunches and snacks for generations of Ybor workers and kids.”
“It became a staple in West Tampa long before GIs returning from World War II gave America a bigger appetite for pizza,” the article said. “Unlike the Neapolitan pie, scachatta is made with an egg dough that produces a thicker, cakey dough. As it has evolved in Tampa, it’s simple: thick, sweet tomato paste and usually some Romano cheese.”
Food historian Scott Wiener, who founded Scott’s Pizza Tours in New York City, has yet to sample a square of scachatta in Tampa. But he’s tried similar dishes in other parts of the country.
People in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Utica, New York, might call their version “tomato pie.” And Rhode Island, chows down on “pizza strips” or “party pizza.”
“And then, if you’re in Sicily, there’s a thing called ‘scacciata’ that does not at all resemble the thing that you have in Tampa,” Wiener said. He described the dish as more of a stuffed pizza with two doughs — one on the bottom and another over the toppings.
“This is a case of the Italian language not being a codified language at all until well into the 20th century,” he said. “So all over the different regions of Italy, you had things that used the same name but were very different.”
To Wiener, Tampa scachatta resembles focaccia more than pizza. It shares similarities with sfincione, a Sicilian street food that features spongy crust, onions, anchovy and bread crumbs.
“To my knowledge, the Italians who went to Tampa came through New Orleans, and they were mostly from Western Sicily,” he said. “Everybody came through Palermo … and Palermo is where you’re going to find sfincione.”
Italian American bakeries have long repurposed excess dough and sauce from other dishes to make tomato pies, Wiener said.
“It makes sense as a thing that you would buy at a bakery when you’re there to buy something else,” he said. “And it makes sense for the bakery, because you bake them off in square pans when the oven is not doing anything else, and then they sit on the counter and you sell them. It’s just extra money.”
But Tampa’s version stands out to Wiener. Our sauce has ground beef. Our crust is egg-based.
Copeland Moré, the fourth-generation owner of La Segunda Bakery and Cafe, said his family’s scachatta base is made the same way as their Cuban media noche loaves.
“If you ever had a media noche sandwich, we make [the bread] with egg and a lot of sugar,” he said. “It’s bright yellow dough.”
La Segunda started in 1915 as a wholesale Cuban bread bakery, and Moré estimates that scachatta joined the menu sometime in the 1970s, when his family expanded their offerings to include pastries.
The family sauce recipe is similar to a meat marina. It includes ground beef, “a ton of spices,” plus onions, peppers and garlic.
“We’ll make like, 30 or 40 trays, and then we freeze that, and then we bring them out and we bake them as needed,” Moré said. “The trick with scachatta is just making sure it’s proofed right. Bake it too early and the crust is too thin. Make it too late and it just blows up.”
Moré said scachatta is a top seller at La Segunda’s Ybor City bakery, “where a lot of Tampa families are used to it.”
“When we were little, if we went to the beach, it was like automatically we would buy a big thing of scachatta and just put it on the counter,” he said. “For the next couple days, everyone would just eat from it.”
But scachatta hasn’t quite caught up with the newer-to-town crowds that frequent the South Tampa and St. Petersburg locations.
“People were like, ‘What is this?’” Moré said. “When you’re looking at a showcase, if you’re not from here and you’re trying to make a decision, like, ‘I’m gonna do guava turnover or a piece of cold pizza,’ you’re just gonna take the guava turnover, right? Because people don’t know.”
But he’s determined to spread the scachatta gospel. La Segunda has started offering free samples at the West Kennedy Boulevard location.
“It’s not something that’s very appealing to the eye, but it’s one of those things that someone’s like, ‘hey, you gotta try this,’” he said. “And then they taste it and they typically love it and come get some more.”
Here are three places where we sampled the iconic local dish. Do you prefer another spot that makes a mean scachatta? Let us know in the comments.
Alessi Bakery: 2909 W. Cypress St., Tampa.813-879-4544.
La Segunda Bakery and Cafe: Visit the Ybor City location for slices of scachatta. Call ahead to order a tray to their South Tampa or St. Petersburg bakeries. 2512 N. 15th St., Tampa. 813-248-1531.
Housewife Bakery and Cafe:6821 N. Armenia Ave., Tampa. 813-935-5106.