{"id":100093,"date":"2025-12-30T16:07:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T16:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/100093\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T16:07:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T16:07:13","slug":"what-is-scachatta-the-saucy-history-of-tampas-pizza-like-potluck-staple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/100093\/","title":{"rendered":"What is scachatta? The saucy history of Tampa\u2019s pizza-like potluck staple"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first thing hungry shoppers see when the doors slide open at Alessi Bakery is a table covered in boxes of scachatta \u2014 unless it\u2019s right before a major gathering of Tampanians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last couple of days, we sold out of them,\u201d said part owner and assistant manager Jason Alessi by phone in mid-December. \u201cUsually around the holidays is the busiest time, but New Year\u2019s Eve, Gasparilla<\/a>, Halloween and Thanksgiving, throughout the Super Bowl … whenever there\u2019s a big get-together, we tend to sell a lot of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s any left).<\/p>\n

Tampa natives may wonder where it came from. Anyone who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a taste of Tampa history.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Like Cuban sandwiches<\/a> and guava pastries<\/a>, this Tampa staple is prepared differently at each bakery in town.<\/p>\n

Alessi\u2019s trays are sliced into palm-sized cubes, with dough soft enough to fold up and devour in just a bite or two. Tampa\u2019sHousewife 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 \u2014 although La Segunda\u2019s bread is nearly the color of an egg yolk.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s spelled scachatta, other times scacciata. No one quite agrees on the proper spelling, or which Tampa bakery first debuted the dish.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word is from the Italian word schiacciare, which means to trample or press down,\u201d said Tampa history expert Gary Mormino<\/a>, professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. \u201cIt\u2019s basically a poor man\u2019s pizza.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to a 1992 St. Petersburg Times article, the dish was \u201clong sold cold by the piece, a convenient street food that made filling lunches and snacks for generations of Ybor workers and kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became a staple in West Tampa long before GIs returning from World War II gave America a bigger appetite for pizza,\u201d the article said. \u201cUnlike the Neapolitan pie, scachatta is made with an egg dough that produces a thicker, cakey dough. As it has evolved in Tampa, it\u2019s simple: thick, sweet tomato paste and usually some Romano cheese.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Food historian Scott Wiener, who founded Scott\u2019s Pizza Tours<\/a> in New York City, has yet to sample a square of scachatta in Tampa. But he\u2019s tried similar dishes in other parts of the country.<\/p>\n

People in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Utica, New York, might call their version \u201ctomato pie.\u201d<\/a> And Rhode Island, chows down on \u201cpizza strips\u201d<\/a> or \u201cparty pizza.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then, if you\u2019re in Sicily, there\u2019s a thing called \u2018scacciata\u2019 that does not at all resemble the thing that you have in Tampa,\u201d Wiener said. He described the dish as more of a stuffed pizza with two doughs \u2014 one on the bottom and another over the toppings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a case of the Italian language not being a codified language at all until well into the 20th century,\u201d he said. \u201cSo all over the different regions of Italy, you had things that used the same name but were very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo my knowledge, the Italians who went to Tampa came through New Orleans, and they were mostly from Western Sicily,\u201d he said. \u201cEverybody came through Palermo … and Palermo is where you\u2019re going to find sfincione.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Italian American bakeries have long repurposed excess dough and sauce from other dishes to make tomato pies, Wiener said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes sense as a thing that you would buy at a bakery when you\u2019re there to buy something else,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd 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\u2019s just extra money.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Tampa\u2019s version stands out to Wiener. Our sauce has ground beef. Our crust is egg-based.<\/p>\n

Copeland Mor\u00e9, the fourth-generation owner of La Segunda Bakery and Cafe,<\/a> said his family\u2019s scachatta base is made the same way as their Cuban media noche loaves.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you ever had a media noche sandwich, we make [the bread] with egg and a lot of sugar,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s bright yellow dough.\u201d<\/p>\n

La Segunda started in 1915 as a wholesale Cuban bread bakery, and Mor\u00e9 estimates that scachatta joined the menu sometime in the 1970s, when his family expanded their offerings to include pastries.<\/p>\n

The family sauce recipe is similar to a meat marina. It includes ground beef, \u201ca ton of spices,\u201d plus onions, peppers and garlic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll make like, 30 or 40 trays, and then we freeze that, and then we bring them out and we bake them as needed,\u201d Mor\u00e9 said. \u201cThe trick with scachatta is just making sure it\u2019s proofed right. Bake it too early and the crust is too thin. Make it too late and it just blows up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mor\u00e9 said scachatta is a top seller at La Segunda\u2019s Ybor City bakery, \u201cwhere a lot of Tampa families are used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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,\u201d he said. \u201cFor the next couple days, everyone would just eat from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But scachatta hasn\u2019t quite caught up with the newer-to-town crowds that frequent the South Tampa and St. Petersburg locations.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were like, \u2018What is this?\u2019\u201d Mor\u00e9 said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re looking at a showcase, if you\u2019re not from here and you\u2019re trying to make a decision, like, \u2018I\u2019m gonna do guava turnover or a piece of cold pizza,\u2019 you\u2019re just gonna take the guava turnover, right? Because people don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s determined to spread the scachatta gospel. La Segunda has started offering free samples at the West Kennedy Boulevard location.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not something that\u2019s very appealing to the eye, but it\u2019s one of those things that someone\u2019s like, \u2018hey, you gotta try this,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then they taste it and they typically love it and come get some more.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Alessi Bakery: 2909 W. Cypress St., Tampa.813-879-4544.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Housewife Bakery and Cafe:6821 N. Armenia Ave., Tampa. 813-935-5106.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first thing hungry shoppers see when the doors slide open at Alessi Bakery is a table covered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[52543,52546,52544,52545,135,137,136,13400],"class_list":{"0":"post-100093","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-alessi-bakery","9":"tag-italian-bakeries","10":"tag-scachatta","11":"tag-scott-wiener","12":"tag-tampa","13":"tag-tampa-headlines","14":"tag-tampa-news","15":"tag-west-tampa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}