What's not to like about a lightly browned pocket of pizza dough, stuffed with cheese, roasted red pepper and Italian sausage? Or cheese, peppers and mushrooms -- hold the sausage? Call it a calzone or call it a luna. DiLauro's Bakery and Pizza, at 502 E. Division St., on the North Side of Syracuse, calls their version a DiLuna.
Call it DiLicious! If you like Italian food and you've called Central New York home for a while, you know by now what a calzone is: an inside-out pizza, shaped like a half-moon, filled with ricotta and mozzarella cheese, meat and/or vegetables, and served with tomato sauce on the side. Your favorite neighborhood pizza parlor serves them, as do restaurants like Angotti's, a family-owned and family friendly restaurant on Burnet Avenue, which serves some of the biggest calzones I've ever seen. They're HUGE! Calzone rates an entry in my go-to food reference book, "Food Lover's Companion,'' but lunas do not. They are not as widely known and may (or may not) be an Upstate New York food thing, like tomato pie (Utica) and spiedies (Binghamton).
They show up up here and there on menus. Casa di Copani, on Burnet Avenue, offers individual calzones and lunas designed to serve a crowd through its pizza parlor, Via Copani. Pastabilities, in Armory Square, has a single-serving luna on its popular lunch menu. The menu describes it as a double-crusted pizza, and the fillings change daily. Friday featured a veggie-lover's luna: onions, peppers, zucchini and mushrooms, all held together with mozzarella cheese. Pasta's house tomato sauce is served on the side.
But back to DiLauro's and its DiLuna(s). Paul A. Waverchak, president of DiLauro's, describes the DiLuna as "a smaller version of the calzone, with some minor differences. Usually a calzone is made with ricotta cheese and other side items and is larger. Our 'DiLunas' are smaller, made with sauce, mozzarella cheese and other side items."
They cost about $3 and they're one of our favorite grab-and-go/take-home treats.
As for DiLauro's itself: It's a small bakery with the deepest of roots on the North Side. Waverchak proudly notes it has been in business 102 years at the same location. The place caters to all your carb needs, with crusty Italian bread, rolls, slices to go, individual tomato-basil pizzas, whole pizzas and more. They even sell bread crumbs.
For something different, try DiLauro's cinnamon raisin bread. It makes excellent toast and French toast.
Unless you'd rather have a DiLuna for breakfast. It has been known to happen.
The best food and bread there is! Just brought home 10 pounds of dough...to NC...and making my own DiLunas. ;)
Posted by: Harriet | 05/18/2015 at 07:43 PM