Fugazzeta Recipe: Argentine Stuffed Onion Pizza (Buenos Aires)

The stuffed version is half pizza, half stuffed bread. A layer of dough goes into an oiled pan, a heavy layer of cheese goes on it, and a second layer of dough seals it in. Onions, oregano and olive oil go on top, as on a focaccia. Modernist Pizza found fugazzeta “wildly popular” all over Buenos Aires.

Fugazza, fugazzeta and fugazzeta rellena

Modernist Pizza describes fugazza as a pan-baked flatbread “with mounds of onions on top but no sauce,” and notes that its name looks like a corruption of focaccia. Fugazzeta is fugazza with cheese.

The names overlap in Buenos Aires. Pizzería Banchero calls itself the inventor of “fugazza with cheese,” which Modernist Pizza says is commonly referred to as fugazzeta. Argentine recipes such as Cocineros Argentinos’ call a stuffed, two-layer version like the one on this page fugazzeta rellena, filled fugazzeta (checked October 14, 2026). Not every pizzeria uses the names the same way, so if you order fugazzeta, ask whether the cheese is on top or inside.

Where it came from

Argentina’s pizza history runs through Genoa, not Naples. Modernist Pizza traces the first wave to Ligurian immigrants who settled in La Boca, the port neighborhood of Buenos Aires, and sold fainá, a chickpea flatbread, before pizza caught on. Pizzerias multiplied in the 1930s, and by 1942 a newspaper noted that the city’s pizzerias sold fainá and fugazza alongside Neapolitan pizza. The earliest Buenos Aires pizza was pan-baked, heavily yeasted and thick, and cheese seems to have arrived in the 1940s. Today, Modernist Pizza notes, the amount of cheese “can be astonishing.”

The Banchero family is usually credited with putting cheese on fugazza. According to the City of Buenos Aires, Agustín Banchero came from Genoa in 1893 and opened a bakery, El Riachuelo, on Olavarría street with his son Juan. On March 28, 1932, Juan and his sons Tito and Antonio opened the pizzería that still stands at the corner of Almirante Brown and Suárez in La Boca. The city’s accounts say fugazza con queso is believed to have come from Juan Banchero’s hands, and the city declared the pizzería a site of cultural interest in 2002. Nobody has a firm date: Wikipedia places the invention anywhere between 1893 and 1932, and Modernist Pizza says only that fugazzeta “was said to be invented in the early 20th century.”

You’ll find fugazzeta all over the city. When the Modernist Pizza team visited in 2019, La Mezzetta’s stuffed fugazzeta was its workhorse, at least 100 a day, and El Mazacote sold fugazza and fugazzeta by the slice.

Why it doesn’t go soggy

A sealed, cheese-stuffed pie can steam itself from the inside. Modernist Pizza found that dough baked under a wet layer stays undercooked, leaving a gummy “gel layer,” and gave the sauce-covered top crust of a Chicago stuffed pizza as a prime example. In their own double-crust recipe they put the sauce under the top crust and scored the dough. Fugazzeta has no sauce, and King Arthur’s recipe adds two more safeguards:

• It vents the top layer, poking holes in it with a fork before the onion goes on, so steam can escape.
• It dries the onion as thoroughly as possible after soaking; wet onion on top would only add steam.

The onions

Thinly sliced onion soaked in cold, salted water loses some of its raw bite. Cook’s Illustrated found that soaking leaches out some of the sulfur compounds behind the sharpness, and that it takes about 15 minutes to have any effect. King Arthur’s recipe starts the soak while the dough rises and drains the onion only after the assembled pie’s 30-minute rest, so it soaks for well over that. The recipe drains it when it looks “slightly plumped and translucent,” pats it as dry as possible, and bakes it until it’s charred in spots.

The recipe

This is King Arthur Baking’s fugazzeta, by David Turner, with the amounts as published and the method in our words. It makes one 10-inch fugazzeta in a cast-iron skillet, 8 servings by King Arthur’s count. King Arthur gives the yeast, salt and sugar by volume; the gram weights beside them are calculated from King Arthur’s ingredient weight chart, and they bring the dough to about 430 g, which matches the recipe’s two pieces of about 215 g.

Time: about 25 minutes of active work, a 25 to 30 minute bake, and about 2 hours 20 minutes from start to finish, as King Arthur gives it.

Dough

Plus olive oil for greasing the bowls and the skillet.

Filling

• 142 g (5 ounces) sliced provolone
• 226 g (2 cups) shredded mozzarella
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• A pinch of red pepper flakes

King Arthur’s list says only “shredded mozzarella.” For how the two main kinds of mozzarella behave in the oven, see low-moisture vs. fresh mozzarella.

Topping

• 454 g (2 cups) cold water and 1 teaspoon table salt, for soaking
• 1 large onion (150 g, about 5 ounces), halved and very thinly sliced
• ¼ teaspoon dried oregano
• 19 g (3 tablespoons) grated Parmesan
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Method

1. Mix. Put all the dough ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook. Mix on low speed for about 30 seconds, scrape the bowl, then mix on medium speed for 5 to 7 minutes, until the dough is smooth and clears the sides of the bowl.
2. Divide and rise. Divide the dough in half, about 215 g each, shape the pieces into balls and put them in separate lightly greased bowls. Cover and let them rise for 60 to 75 minutes, until puffy but not necessarily doubled.
3. Start the onion. While the dough rises, stir the salt into the cold water until it dissolves, add the sliced onion and push it under. Leave it uncovered at room temperature.
4. Bottom layer. Grease the bottom and sides of a 10-inch cast-iron skillet with oil. On a clean, unfloured counter, stretch one piece of dough with your fingertips or a rolling pin into a 10-inch round, an even ¼ inch thick all over. Press it into the skillet so it covers the bottom completely.
5. Cheese. Shingle the provolone over the dough, leaving a border of about ½ inch. Mix the mozzarella, oregano and pepper flakes and scatter them evenly over the provolone, keeping off the border.
6. Top layer. Stretch the second piece into a round 10½ to 11 inches across, again an even ¼ inch thick.
7. Seal and rest. Drape it over the filling, line its edges up with the bottom layer and pinch them together to seal the filling in. Cover and let it rise at room temperature for 30 minutes.
8. Preheat. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 450°F (232°C) with a rack in the upper third.
9. Dry the onion. Drain the onion, which should now look slightly plumped and translucent, and pat it as dry as you can between paper towels, in a couple of rounds if needed, or in a lint-free kitchen towel. Toss it with the ¼ teaspoon oregano.
10. Vent and top. By now the fugazzeta should look just slightly puffed around the edges. Poke holes across the top with a fork so steam can escape. Scatter the onion over it right to the edges of the pan, sprinkle with the Parmesan and drizzle with the olive oil.
11. Bake. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the edges are dark golden brown, the onion is charred in spots and the Parmesan is golden brown.
12. Rest. Let it rest for 15 minutes before slicing, and serve it warm.

For a 12-inch pan (calculated)

King Arthur’s recipe is written for a 10-inch skillet. A 12-inch pan has 1.44 times the area of a 10-inch one (about 113 square inches against 79; area grows with the square of the diameter, and (12 ÷ 10)² = 1.44), so keeping each layer the same ¼ inch thick means multiplying every amount by 1.44:

Stretch the bottom layer to 12 inches and the top layer to about 12½ to 13 inches, the same ½ to 1 inch of overlap King Arthur allows. This is arithmetic, not a tested recipe. King Arthur’s 25 to 30 minutes is for its 10-inch fugazzeta, and nobody has published a time for the scaled version, so bake it to the recipe’s cues instead: dark golden-brown edges, onion charred in spots and golden Parmesan.

If something goes wrong

• Pale, soft underside. King Arthur’s recipe uses a cast-iron skillet and a fully heated 450°F oven. The soggy-bottom guide covers other causes.
• Cheese leaking at the seam. Keep the cheese off the ½-inch border, as the recipe says, and pinch the seal firmly. If the top layer keeps shrinking back as you stretch it, cover it and let it rest for a few minutes before trying again.
• Sharp, raw-tasting onions. Slice thinner, soak for at least 15 minutes, and dry them well.

Sources

• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1, pages 40–42 (pizza in Buenos Aires, fugazza and fugazzeta), 144, 200 and 203–207 (Buenos Aires pizzerias, Banchero, La Mezzetta, El Mazacote) and 370–371 (the gel layer and their double-crust fix).
• City of Buenos Aires, Sitios de Interés Cultural: Pizzería Banchero (declared 2002), and “Historias de mi comuna: Pizzería Banchero” (January 22, 2013).
• Wikipedia, “Fugazza” (accessed October 2026): the 1893–1932 window.
• David Turner, “Fugazzeta,” King Arthur Baking (updated January 9, 2025; checked October 14, 2026): the complete recipe on this page, including the 10-inch skillet, dough, filling and onion weights, the onion soak, venting, the 450°F bake, the rest and storage.
• King Arthur Baking, “Ingredient Weight Chart” (checked October 14, 2026): gram weights for the yeast, salt and sugar.
• Cocineros Argentinos, “Tremenda fugazzeta rellena” (checked October 14, 2026): the name fugazzeta rellena for a stuffed two-layer version.
• Cook’s Illustrated, “Toning Down Raw Onion’s Bite”: soaking needs about 15 minutes.
• Pan areas and the 12-inch quantities are calculated.