Montanara Pizza Recipe: Naples' Flash-Fried Then Baked Pizza

A montanara is a pizza that is fried first and baked second. You stretch a Neapolitan dough ball, drop the bare disc into 350°F oil for roughly thirty seconds just long enough to puff and lightly color it, lift it out, top it open-faced like a Margherita, and finish it under high oven heat for sixty to ninety seconds to melt the cheese. What comes out is a pizza with the crisp-yet-airy texture of a beignet, the structural integrity of a baked Neapolitan, and a flavor that is closer to Margherita than to fried dough.

It is not pizza fritta. Pizza fritta is folded, sealed, and fully fried — a calzone-like pocket cooked entirely in oil, filled with ricotta and smoked provola before sealing. Montanara is open, briefly fried, then oven-finished. The technique reads as a fussy mash-up the first time you encounter it, but it has a long history in the Neapolitan countryside, where home cooks who didn’t have access to a 905°F wood-fired oven could approximate the result by frying first and finishing in whatever oven they had.

The dish’s American breakout is generally traced to Don Antonio by Starita at 309 West 50th Street in Manhattan, opened in 2012 as a partnership between Roberto Caporuscio and Antonio Starita — the third-generation owner of Pizzeria Starita a Materdei in Naples (founded 1901 by Alfonso Starita). Caporuscio’s daughter, Giorgia Caporuscio, worked the Don Antonio oven from the day the restaurant opened and won the Caputo Cup Classic Pizza category in Naples in 2013 with the Starita montanara at age 22 — the second woman ever and the youngest ever to win that category at the time. She formally took over ownership of Don Antonio in early 2024, by which point she had already been running the kitchen for years.

If you are coming to this from the related recipe-pizza-fritta-naples — and the two are easy to confuse — read the next section carefully. They share a dough and a fryer but produce two completely different finished pizzas.

Montanara vs Pizza Fritta vs Standard Neapolitan

The first sentence on the topic is the simplest one: montanara is briefly fried open-faced and then finished in the oven, while pizza fritta is fully fried, folded shut, and never sees the oven, and standard Neapolitan is baked from raw at 905°F and never sees oil at all. Three different dishes from the same family of dough.

The texture differences are dramatic. Montanara has a puffy, slightly oil-tinged exterior with an interior crumb that is closer to a yeasted doughnut than a baked pizza — the brief fry gelatinizes the surface and creates a sealed crust that the oven finish then crisps. Pizza fritta has the dense, deeply fried texture of a sealed pocket, with cheese filling that has been steam-cooked rather than baked. Standard Neapolitan is the lightest of the three — chewy, leoparded, with the open hole structure that an 60-90 second 905°F bake produces in 65-70% hydration dough.

The cooking time and temperature regime differs by an order of magnitude:

Why Flash-Fry Then Bake

The Neapolitan-region countryside that gave the dish its name — montanara derives from the Italian montagna, “mountain,” and is variously linked either to mountain workers (montanari) eating filled bread on field breaks, or to housewives selling fried dough topped with leftover ragu and grated cheese as a way to supplement household income. Both etymological traditions point at the same constraint: the people who first made the dish did not have access to a proper 905°F wood-fired pizza oven. They had access to a pot of oil and to whatever lower-temperature oven was at hand.

When you drop a stretched, room-temperature pizza dough into 350°F oil, three things happen in the first few seconds:

1. The surface starch gelatinizes immediately, sealing the dough and trapping moisture inside.
2. Steam pressure inside the dough builds rapidly — the dough puffs into a beignet-like pillow.
3. A thin crisp shell develops on both sides, golden but not deeply browned.

You pull the disc out before the interior cooks through. At this stage, you have a fried but not done pizza base — puffed, sealed, partially set, waiting for its real bake. Top it as you would a Margherita (thin sauce, sliced fior di latte, basil, EVOO, optional grated parmesan), then return it to a 700°F+ oven (or under a home broiler) for 60 to 90 seconds to melt the cheese and finish the interior bake.

The result has properties neither cooking method alone produces. The fry seals the surface, so the dough’s interior stays remarkably moist after the high-heat finish. The oven finish drives off the residual surface oil — a properly executed montanara isn’t greasy, despite the fry — and concentrates the topping flavors. The cheese gets the melt-and-light-brown character it needs, and the basil and oil keep their volatile aromatics intact because they are not exposed to oil heat.

Roberto Caporuscio frames the technique in interviews as a two-stage construction: the brief fry is for texture and seal, and the oven finish is for the topping integrity. Skip either step and you have a different dish.

Don Antonio, Starita, and the New York Story

The dish’s American breakout happened at Don Antonio by Starita at 309 West 50th Street in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, opened in 2012 as a partnership between Roberto Caporuscio and Antonio Starita.

Antonio Starita — known professionally as “Don Antonio” — is the third-generation owner of Pizzeria Starita a Materdei in Naples. The original pizzeria was opened in 1901 at Via Materdei 27/28 by his ancestor Alfonso Starita, initially as a wine cellar that gradually evolved into a friggitoria (fry shop) and then a full pizzeria. In 1954 the shop was used as a filming location for Vittorio De Sica’s L’Oro di Napoli, the anthology film that contains the most famous cinematic record of Naples-era fried pizza tradition (Sophia Loren’s “Sofia” character runs the pizza shop in the Pizze a credito episode, although in the film she sells pizza fritta on credit, not montanara). Antonio Starita has been a founding member of the Associazione delle Pizzerie Centenarie and was actively involved in the long lobbying effort that secured EU Traditional Speciality Guaranteed status for Pizza Napoletana in 2010 — the framework now codified in the AVPN standard.

Roberto Caporuscio apprenticed under Antonio Starita in Naples, then immigrated to the United States in 1999 and built his New York reputation through Kestè in Greenwich Village before partnering with Starita on Don Antonio. Giorgia Caporuscio worked the Don Antonio oven from opening day. In 2013, at age 22, she traveled with her father to the Caputo Cup competition in Naples and entered the Classic Pizza category with the Starita montanara. She won, becoming the second woman ever to take first place in that category and — by the public record at the time — the youngest. She has since accumulated additional honors (50 Top Pizza USA’s Pizza Maker of the Year in 2024 among them) and formally assumed ownership of Don Antonio NYC in early 2024.

The Don Antonio menu now lists more than sixty pizza options, but the montanara has been the restaurant’s defining dish from day one and is what new servers consistently recommend to first-time customers. The signature topping is the Starita-tradition smoked buffalo mozzarella, finished with grated Parmigiano and basil.

In Naples itself, Pizzeria Starita a Materdei — still at the original Via Materdei 27/28 address in the Materdei working-class district — remains the canonical reference for the Starita montanara. Other contemporary Naples pizzaiolos including Enzo Coccia at La Notizia (Via Michelangelo da Caravaggio, opened 1994) and Salvatore Salvo have their own approaches to fried pizza, but the Starita montanara is the version that travels best internationally because of the Caporuscio NYC pipeline.

For a different Neapolitan baseline — same dough family, oven-only — see recipe-neapolitan-margherita and neapolitan-pizza-at-home. For the sealed-and-fried sister dish, see recipe-pizza-fritta-naples.

The Recipe

This recipe makes four 8-inch montanara. The dough is a 65% hydration Neapolitan formula with a long cold ferment. Total active time after dough is mixed: about 15 minutes per pie.

Dough (makes four ~290g balls)

Method:

1. Whisk flour and yeast in a large bowl.
2. Add the cool water and mix by hand until no dry flour remains. Let rest 20 minutes (autolyse).
3. Add the salt and mix until incorporated. The dough should feel cohesive but slightly tacky.
4. Cover and rest 30 minutes. Wet your hands and perform three sets of stretch-and-folds, 20 minutes apart.
5. Cover tightly and refrigerate 18-24 hours.
6. Tip out, divide into four 290g balls, and ball tightly. Cover and rest 60-120 minutes at room temperature until pliable. Cold dough fries badly — let them warm.

Topping (per pie)

• 60-70g San Marzano DOP tomatoes, hand-crushed, lightly salted (no cooking)
• 70-80g sliced fior di latte — or smoked buffalo mozzarella for the Starita signature
• 3-4 fresh basil leaves
• 1 tsp grated Parmigiano Reggiano (optional)
• Drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil
• Pinch of flaky sea salt

Oil Setup and Oven

• 3 inches (7.5 cm) of neutral high-smoke-point oil — peanut, refined sunflower, or canola — in a wide, deep pot. A 5-quart Dutch oven works.
• Frying thermometer (essential — the oil temperature window is narrow).
• A spider strainer or slotted skimmer for lifting the pizza out.
• A plate lined with paper towels for transitional drainage.

Oven setup: Preheat to 550°F (or your oven’s max) with a baking steel on the upper-middle rack at least 45 minutes ahead. If your oven has a working broiler, plan to use it for the finish — preheat under broiler for the last 5 minutes before launching the pizza, then switch back to bake-mode (or leave broiler on if you’re attentive). The closer you get to 700-800°F at the steel surface, the more authentic the bake. See the home oven broiler protocol in our neapolitan-pizza-at-home guide.

If you own an Ooni or Roccbox, this is a great use case — they hit 800-950°F easily and finish a topped montanara in 45-60 seconds.

Method

1. Bring oil to 350°F (175°C). Confirm with thermometer. The window is 350-365°F. Below 340°F you get greasy soggy dough; above 370°F you brown too fast and the interior doesn’t puff properly.
2. Stretch one dough ball. On a lightly floured surface, press out from the center to a roughly 8-inch round. Try to keep it relatively even; a thicker rim will puff harder during the fry.
3. Slide carefully into the oil. Lower it in by hand or with a slotted spatula — never drop it from above (oil splash is a burn hazard). The dough will sink, then rapidly rise as it puffs.
4. Fry approximately 30 seconds total. Use the spider to gently flip after 15 seconds or once the underside is lightly golden. The dough should be lightly golden and visibly puffed, not deeply browned. Pull it before it darkens. (Recipe references vary — America’s Test Kitchen recommends 1.5-2 minutes per side at 350°F for a thicker, more set fry; Saveur cites 1-2 minutes total; the Starita-tradition technique at 8-inch diameter is closer to 30 seconds total.)
5. Drain briefly on paper towels (5 seconds) and transfer to a peel dusted with semolina.
6. Top open-faced. Spoon the hand-crushed tomato in a thin layer, leaving a small border. Add the sliced fior di latte. Tear a few basil leaves over. Light dust of Parmigiano if using. Drizzle with EVOO.
7. Launch into the hot oven. Slide the topped pizza onto the preheated steel. If broiling, the heat source should be 4-6 inches above the pizza.
8. Bake 60-90 seconds at maximum temperature with broiler assist. The cheese should melt and just start spotting; the rim should crisp further. Pull when cheese is fully melted and the rim has a few darker spots. Do not overbake — overbaked montanara loses the puff and ends up tough.
9. Finish with a final drizzle of EVOO, a pinch of flaky salt, and fresh basil if you held some back.

Practical Notes

Oil temperature is the entire game. Below 340°F: greasy, heavy, won’t puff properly. Above 370°F: browns too fast, interior stays raw. Use a thermometer. Re-check between pizzas — the dough drops the oil temp by 10-15°F each time, and you need to wait for it to recover before the next disc.

The home oven adaptation is the broiler. A 550°F home oven without broiler is too slow to finish a montanara properly — the dough’s interior will dry out before the cheese melts. Run the broiler for the last 5 minutes of preheat to superheat the steel, then bake under the broiler for the entire 60-90 seconds. Watch closely. Modern Neapolitan-style countertop ovens (Ooni Karu, Roccbox, Gozney Dome) all hit higher temperatures and finish in 45-60 seconds.

Don’t skip the oven finish. Eating a flash-fried disc topped with melted cheese after only the fry is technically possible but the texture is wrong — the dough doesn’t fully cook through, and the cheese melts unevenly because there’s no top heat. The oven step is what makes it pizza, not fritto misto.

Use fior di latte, not fresh buffalo mozzarella with high water content. The brief 60-90 second oven bake doesn’t give buffalo mozzarella’s water enough time to evaporate, which can leave a watery topping. Drain buffalo mozzarella aggressively (60+ minutes on paper towels) if you’re using it, or substitute fior di latte (lower-moisture cow milk) for cleaner melt. Smoked buffalo mozzarella, the Starita standard, splits the difference — the smoking process drives off some moisture.

The Roman-Naples variant uses red tomato sauce only (no cheese) on the fried disc, finished with grated pecorino after the oven step. Some white-pizza variations skip the tomato entirely, building on cream and lardo. Both are legitimate; the Margherita-style version above is the canonical Starita-tradition build.

What Goes Wrong

The most common failure is greasy dough. The fix is oil temperature. Use a thermometer. Don’t lower the temp by frying too many at once; do one at a time and let the oil recover between pies.

The second-most-common failure is dough that doesn’t puff. This is almost always under-fermentation. An 18-24 hour cold ferment is the minimum; the gluten needs time to relax so it can stretch easily during the puff. If your dough fights you when you stretch it, it isn’t fermented enough.

The third is overcooked tops. Watch the broiler. The whole point of the oven finish is short — 60 to 90 seconds. If you walk away from the oven, you’ll come back to a black topping. Stay at the oven door.

For a deeper Naples-fried-pizza counterpart that goes into the oil and never comes out for an oven finish, see our recipe-pizza-fritta-naples — the sealed-pocket sister dish that emerged from the same post-WWII Naples context. For the broader folded fried-pizza family, our calzone-vs-stromboli breakdown covers the cousins.

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