How to eat a maritozzo

By Fernando Rodriguez Villegas

The first thing to understand is that the question of the title is not a trivial one, especially if you have a beard.

So what is a maritozzo? It’s a Roman pastry consisting of round piece of sweet bread with a big gash in the middle completely filled with whipped cream. The New York Times calls them unnapealingly “Sweet Cream Buns”, which doesn’t even begin to do them justice. It seems that maritozzi have become quite a thing in the US from what I can gather online.

I first tried a maritozzo at Pagna, the wonderful bakery/pastry-shop/caffe in Trieste that opened not that long ago. They are just amazing.

So how to eat one? The trouble is not getting any part of the monster blob of incredible sweet white cream to end up on the table, your lap or your face. So here is what I discovered. Take a spoon (I always have an espresso with the maritozzo as in the picture) make a cut on the cream along the middle following that of the bread. It doesn’t have to be deep. Then pull apart the two halves of the maritozzo and you are ready to dive in. Use the spoon to distribute the cream evenly on the bread as you eat.