It’s time for one final course with Stanley Tucci, as Tucci in Italy episode 5, “Lazio,” serves as the finale for the inaugural season of his new travel/food show on National Geographic. And just as the other episodes this season, Tucci in Italy Lazio featured plenty of incredible dishes that I could almost taste through the screen.
After picking some of my favorite dishes featured in the episodes on Tuscany, Lombardy, Trentino-Alto Adige and Abruzzo, I’ve picked three more (and an honorable mention or two) from Lazio, the region that includes Rome and its surrounding and varied countryside.
While I would have loved being able to sample these dishes myself in Italy, from sight alone (and Tucci’s reactions), these are the dishes from Tucci in Italy Lazio that I’d love to try.
Stanley’s favorite sandwich
Right off the bat Tucci teases us with “one of the most delicious sandwiches I’ve ever had in my life” that he found when he was shooting a movie in Rome (possibly Fountain of Youth). The sandwich comes from Circoletto, where brothers Niccolò and Manuel Trecastelli have crafted something that Tucci says redefined his concept of a sandwich.
So what’s inside? Smoked tongue (from what animal is not shared), Roman lettuce, gherkins (tiny pickles if you weren’t sure) and a homemade mustard mayonnaise. Everything in the sandwich was sourced from their local market, meaning, as the brothers put it, “everything Lazio has to offer is inside” the sandwich. Tucci simply called it “perfect.”
There’s one another sandwich I want to quickly mention though — the porchetta sandwich he has in Ariccia. Simple, but with an incredible looking cut of pork and, as the Italians claim, some of the best bread in the world, it looked amazing.
Roman pizza
It’s a neck-and-neck race for which food is more associated with Italian culture — pasta or pizza — but as we’re told in this episode, the first people to cook pizza were likely the Egyptians. Their influence is present in the Roman pizza featured in this episode, which is thinner and crispier than its cousin, the Neopolitan pizza.
Chef Sami, who comes from an Egyptian family, makes Tucci a margherita pizza with red sauce, buffalo mozzarella, which is then topped with olive oil and basil leaves, which looked absolutely delicious.
If you’re more of a fan of a pizza with plenty of toppings and you think margherita pizza is a bit boring, consider this point from Chef Sami: a simple pizza like margherita lets you really recognize the key ingredients of the pizza, while additional toppings can hide that base of flavor.
Sbroscia
While Tucci visited many high-class restaurants this season, I was constantly more interested and desiring the dishes that have survived centuries from Italy’s working class. That is evident again with two different versions of sbroscia, a kind of fish stew, that we see in this episode.
The reimagined dish that blends the stew with a gorgeous looking pasta with pesto sauce from Michelen-star rated restaurant, La Parolina, looks great, but I’ll take the stew made with fresh eels, pike and tench that came fifty yards away from the lake and cooked with actual lake water (the local fisherman drink it straight all the time) every day.
The fisherman Tucci meets with says that fishermen who ate sbroscia every day for lunch would live a long time. Whether it’s that or the gorgeous surroundings that helped prolong their life, I’d give either a try.
You can stream all episodes of Tucci in Italy on-demand on Hulu or Disney Plus.
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