Neapolitan Tortano

Start with the dough itself, because this is where most of the failures actually come from, long before anyone cuts the salami. Flour: a plain flour with modest protein is traditional here and it's not an aesthetic choice — too much gluten strength and the dough fights you when you try to roll it thin enough to spread the filling evenly; too little and it can't hold the weight of 350g of meat and 300g of cheese rolled into it. If your plain flour feels notably weak, a small spoon of strong bread flour mixed in won't hurt. Lard is the fat of choice because it melts at body temperature and leaves the crumb tender rather than greasy the way oil would, and because this is peasant food built around what a pig-slaughtering household had lying around — not a flavour statement, an economic one. If you don't keep lard, use a flavourless solid fat — any fat with no taste of its own that's solid at room temperature; a mild white vegetable shortening does the job, butter is a poor substitute here because its water content fights the dough and its flavour fights the filling.

The yeast quantity looks enormous to a British home baker used to a sachet of 7g dried yeast for a loaf — 25g is fresh yeast, and fresh yeast is roughly a third the strength by weight of dried, so don't panic and don't substitute gram-for-gram with dried from a packet; if fresh isn't sold near you, use about a third of the weight in fast-action dried, dissolved the same way in the warm water first so you can see it's alive before it goes anywhere near the flour.

The filling is genuinely where you can please yourself, and that's worth saying plainly because people treat this dish as if it has a sacred formula. Salami Napoli brings fat and chilli-edged spice, mortadella brings softness and a faint sweetness, ham and pancetta bring saltier, leaner notes — together they give you contrast in texture as much as flavour, which matters because a filling of all one cured meat goes monotonous by the third bite. The cheese mix of caciocavallo and provolone is chosen for how it behaves in heat: both are semi-hard cheeses that soften and go slightly stringy rather than oozing out through the seams, which a very soft cheese would do. If you can't get either, a good mature cheddar or a block mozzarella that's been drained hard will behave similarly enough — just avoid anything wet.

The boiled eggs are not there for flavour so much as for the slice — cut the tortano after baking and you want coins of yolk showing through the spiral, which is why they're diced small rather than left whole or halved; a whole egg buried in dough bakes unevenly and you risk a grey, rubbery yolk by the time the crust is done. Eight minutes gives you a yolk that's set but not chalky — if you're used to British timing, that's closer to what you'd call a firm-but-not-hard boiled egg; pull them the moment the white has fully set and cool them fast under the cold tap so the yolk doesn't keep cooking from residual heat.

The pecorino scattered at the end and the raw black pepper ground straight onto the flour are doing the same job from two directions — pecorino is sharp and salty enough to cut through all that fat, and the pepper, ground into the dough itself rather than just the filling, means every bite of crust carries a little heat instead of the pepper sitting as isolated pockets in the meat layer. Don't skip grinding it into the dough and think you'll make up for it in the filling — it's a different effect entirely, more background warmth than a bite of pepper.

On the two rises: the first, in the bowl, is about building the gas structure that will give you an open, light crumb rather than something dense; the second, once it's shaped into a ring with all that cold, heavy filling weighing it down, is about letting the yeast recover from the shock of being rolled flat and stuffed. Both need to go until the dough looks genuinely swollen and feels soft and pillowy when you press it, not just "has had two hours" — in a cooler British kitchen, especially without the under-floor warmth of a Neapolitan June, that two hours might need to become three. Patience here isn't a virtue tacked on for flavour — it's structural. A tortano baked before its second prove is finished doesn't rise much further in the oven; the oven spring you're hoping for from the heat has to come from yeast activity that's already built up, not activity the oven will somehow switch on.