A glorious mound of Italian goodness, not to be made by the faint of heart
For my birthday this year, I was inspired by my birthday twin and fellow food aficionado Stanley Tucci to make a timpano--a time-intensive, show-stopping, work-of-art Italian dish that could probably feed a small army. In his recent memoir, Taste (which you should read if you haven't already), Stanley talks about how his family makes this dish as a holiday tradition and it takes them the whole day to do it each year. I took a little shortcut to reduce that to half a day, but it's still no small feat to make this thing. The rolling out of the dough enclosure alone is an energy intensive commitment, but it's all oh so worth it. I used the NYT Cooking recipe adapted from Tucci's cookbook, but made some process adjustments to it that I documented below, because I found the existing recipe didn't quite fit in my 6 quart dutch oven.
So first off, make sure you have a 6 quart dutch oven. And like 6 hours of free time. And a very big appetite or a lot of hungry helpers.
Timpano
Makes 16 servings (at least)
Ingredients:
For the Dough
4 cups all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon kosher salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
Olive oil and butter for greasing
For the Filling
2 pounds ziti, cooked about 6 minutes or half the package recommended time, and tossed lightly in olive oil to prevent sticking when cooled
4 cups Genoa salami, cut into chunks between ¼-½ inch wide.
4 cups provolone, diced into ¼-½ chunks (see note below)
12 hardboiled eggs, peeled and cut into halves or quarters
1 bag (about 26 oz) of frozen small meatballs, heated according to package instructions
1 cup finely grated pecorino Romano
7 cups of tomato pasta sauce (see note below)
2 tablespoons olive oil
6 large uncooked eggs, beaten
Directions:
In a large mixing bowl, mix together flour eggs, salt, and olive oil until combined into a crumbly dough. Add 4 tablespoons of water, and knead for a few more minutes until well combined. Add in additional water as needed, 1 tablespoon at a time, kneading to fully incorporate, until the dough is smooth and holds into a ball. Let rest for about 10 minutes.
While dough is resting, grease the inside of a 6 quart dutch oven generously with butter and olive oil. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and set out all the filling ingredients in bowls in preparation for assembly.
Flatten dough into a circle onto a lightly floured work surface. Lightly flour the top as well, then roll out with a rolling pin until the dough is about 1/16 of an inch thick and almost 3 times larger than the base of the dutch oven (it will need to cover the bottom, sides, and also wrap over the top of the dutch oven form).
Once rolled out, fold the dough in half twice to form a triangle, then place into the dutch oven and unfold to have it centered in the form, with equal excess draping over all of the sides. Gently press the dough down into the bowl form and make sure there isn’t a bunch of air trapped under the dough.
Mix 2 cups of tomato sauce into the 2 pounds of cooked baked ziti.
Place 4 cups of the ziti into the base of the dough-lined dutch oven, to begin the filling layers. Next, add in about ⅓ of the salami, and ⅓ of the provolone on top of that. Then add a layer of 1/3 of the eggs, and then about ⅓ of the meatballs. Sprinkle about ⅓ of the pecorino romano on top.
Spread about 1.5 cups of tomato sauce on top of everything, then repeat the layers starting with pasta again, ending with another 1.5 cups of sauce. After two full layer assemblies, begin a third layer cycle–at this point you’ll should be close to reaching the top of the dutch oven, so you may find you have some excess pasta or other toppings that won’t fit. Stop layering once you’re within a half inch of the top of the dutch oven, and spread the remaining 2 cups of tomato sauce over everything.
Take the 6 beaten eggs and slowly pour/spread over everything.
Seal the timpano by carefully folding the dough over the filling into the center. You should be able to crease together folds of dough to seal, trimming off folds of extra dough with scissors. If you need to, you can reroll out extra dough to patch any holes/openings that remain uncovered. Use a dab of water to moisten dough seams and press them together firmly so that it remains well sealed for baking.
Bake for 1 hour uncovered in preheated oven. Then take out and cover the top with foil, and return to the oven for another 30 minutes of baking.
Remove from oven, and let sit for 30 minutes at room temperature before handling. Then, grab the dutch oven by the handles and twist/wiggle it around to see if the timpano spins loose–if well greased, it should not stick to the dutch oven and will shift around in the pot.
Invert the timpano out of the dutch oven by putting a cutting board, baking sheet, or large serving platter on top of the dutch oven and timpano, and flipping the whole thing over, then lifting the dutch oven off of the timpano.
Cool for another 30 minutes, then slice to serve!
Leftovers can be refrigerated and reheated.
Notes:
In Tucci's recipe, it calls for homemade ragu, using another recipe from his cookbook. While I'm sure his ragu recipe is phenomenal (and is on my list of Italian recipes to try in the near future), it adds a few more hours to the process. So if you're not committed to also making a meat-based tomato sauce from scratch in preparation for this dish, I'd recommend getting a good, hearty tomato sauce from the store. I found the closest thing I could to a ragu from a local fresh pasta shop, which was their arrabiata sauce with ground beef and pork in it. Alternatively, a combo of a sausage-based sauce and an arrabiata from the grocery store would be a good option as well.
Also in his recipe, it calls for sharp provolone, which I had a hard time finding the day I went shopping, so I substituted in 3 packs of sliced provolone. And for the Genoa salami, if you can't find an uncut log to start from, pre-sliced is fine. Just make sure you still cut it up into small pieces, so that the sauce/flavors can distribute through the layers instead of getting trapped by a big slice of salami.
While this is a pretty traditional timpano dish, you could technically swap out the fillings inside with other things, like a different kind of sauce, or vegetables instead of meat, etc. But unless you have a dietary restriction that requires substitution, I do think this combo warrants trying at least once as-is before taking creative too much creative liberty--it's just so good.
If you have excess dough cut off and don't want to discard it, it's technically pasta dough, so you could run it through a pasta machine and cook up a little dish of fresh pasta for yourself!
Here are some photos of the whole process!
