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  • Terry's Place in Austin is one of the few places...

    Nick Kindelsperger / Chicago Tribune

    Terry's Place in Austin is one of the few places in town that makes its own pizza puff.

  • Albano's Pizzeria in Cicero serves an incredibly huge version of...

    Nick Kindelsperger / Chicago Tribune

    Albano's Pizzeria in Cicero serves an incredibly huge version of the pizza puff.

  • The pizza puff at Regards to Edith boasts a remarkably...

    Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune

    The pizza puff at Regards to Edith boasts a remarkably light crust that crackles delicately when you bite. Inside is luscious burrata.

  • Pasta Fresh in Dunning doesn't serve pizza puffs, but it...

    Nick Kindelsperger / Chicago Tribune

    Pasta Fresh in Dunning doesn't serve pizza puffs, but it does serve panzerotti that have a lot in common with the homemade pizza puffs around town.

  • You can find Iltaco's Pizza Puffs at hot dog stands...

    Nick Kindelsperger / Chicago Tribune

    You can find Iltaco's Pizza Puffs at hot dog stands all around the city.

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When Regards to Edith opened a few months ago at the base of Google’s Midwest headquarters in Fulton Market, it launched with a menu containing a few quirky nods to classic Chicago foods. You know, the sort of cheap and humble offerings you used to be able to grab for lunch in the exact same area before money flooded in from tech companies. That included a version of an Italian beef made with prime rib, and a double char burger topped with aged cheddar.

None intrigued me more than a dish I never thought I’d see at a restaurant with a cocktail menu and a $42 rack of lamb entree: a pizza puff. Just as you’d guess from the name, a pizza puff features a flaky browned exterior, with cheese, tomato sauce and usually a meat (pepperoni and sausage are most common) in the middle. It’s always fried, always greasy.

Even though numerous lists claim that the pizza puff originated here, including Eater Chicago and Mental Floss, it’s something of a bit player of the Chicago food pantheon — far below Chicago-style hot dogs, deep dish pizza, Italian beef and even Maxwell Street bone-in pork chop sandwiches. Most people I talked to had either never tried one or admitted that they only indulged after drinking.

You can find Iltaco's Pizza Puffs at hot dog stands all around the city.
You can find Iltaco’s Pizza Puffs at hot dog stands all around the city.

When you order a pizza puff, unless the establishment makes its own, a real rarity, you’re undoubtedly eating one produced by Iltaco Foods on the West Side. You’ll find this packaged product sold mostly at bare-bones hot dog stands, like Downtown Dogs (804 N. Rush St.), just off the Magnificent Mile. For $3.35, you get a modest, rectangular offering. Each bite makes an immediate impact, delivering fat, salt and cheese in a compact, easy-to-eat form. It is not subtle, and grease may as well be an ingredient, but it’s easy to get the appeal of deep-fried pizza.

For a company that’s operated since 1927, there isn’t much information online about Iltaco. About all I could find was when the company started, and that Iltaco actually stands for Illinois Tamale Company. That last fact took me by surprise, considering the company is best known for pizza puffs. I tried for weeks to chat with someone from the company to help clear up some basic questions. A representative said that they needed to check with their lawyers first, and then eventually declined to comment. (I still don’t know why they needed to contact lawyers to answer a few questions about pizza puffs, but that’s not for me to know.) This left me trying to figure out the history by myself. But I had trouble finding any information from any source about when the dish was invented, who did it or what inspired the creation.

The pizza puff at Regards to Edith boasts a remarkably light crust that crackles delicately when you bite. Inside is luscious burrata.
The pizza puff at Regards to Edith boasts a remarkably light crust that crackles delicately when you bite. Inside is luscious burrata.

Pizza puffs do seem to be exceptionally rare outside of Chicagoland. Jared Wentworth, the chef who helped craft the opening menu at Regards to Edith (326 N. Morgan St.), told me he’d never heard of them while growing up on the East Coast. The version he created for Regards to Edith (available for $14) takes the immediate, in-your-face pleasures of the pizza puff and smooths them out. The golden-hued offering has a remarkably light crust that crackles delicately when you bite in. Inside is luscious burrata, the creamier sibling of mozzarella. If you’re missing the gut punch of the original, Wentworth serves pepperoni oil on the side for you. “If I were just eating it, I’d have the pepperoni in the middle,” admits Wentworth. “But this way vegetarians can order, and it’s very easy to add your own.” (Days after the interview, Wentworth left the restaurant, though the pizza puff remains on the menu.)

Albano's Pizzeria in Cicero serves an incredibly huge version of the pizza puff.
Albano’s Pizzeria in Cicero serves an incredibly huge version of the pizza puff.

I did track down a few other freshly made versions. Albano’s Pizzeria (5913 W. Roosevelt Road, Cicero) serves a monster pizza puff, so unwieldy and enormous, it makes Iltaco’s pizza puffs look like Pop-Tarts. Like deep dish, this is a knife-and-fork kind of affair, thanks to the gooey glob of cheese, rivers of tomato sauce and immense piles of sausage held within. I found a similarly colossal offering at Terry’s Place (5950 W. Madison St.).

Terry's Place in Austin is one of the few places in town that makes its own pizza puff.
Terry’s Place in Austin is one of the few places in town that makes its own pizza puff.

But these visits only left me more confused, because both Albano’s and Terry’s Place served pizza puffs that seemed to have very little to do with Iltaco’s version. I seriously wondered whether they had much history in common.

Of course, the concept of putting pizza ingredients in the middle of some dough and then frying it isn’t exactly novel. Variations on this theme exist both in traditional Italian cuisine and in the freezer section of your local grocery store. Was it fair to call the pizza puff a Chicago creation at all?

Describe the pizza puff to people, and most will note that it sounds a lot like a calzone. In “1,000 Italian Recipes” by Michele Scicolone, the calzone is described as “a circle of pizza dough folded like a turnover around filling.” Anna Del Conte’s “Gastronomy of Italy” even refers to them as “a folded-over pizza.”

But look at the majority of recipes for making a calzone, and they are bound to be baked, not fried. Plus, the older the recipe, the less likely you’ll find tomato sauce inside. Luigi Carnacina’s “Great Italian Cooking,” published in 1968, features a calzone stuffed with only salami and mozzarella cheese. In fact, according to “The Regional Cooking of Italy” by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina, calzoni (the plural of calzone) didn’t have tomato sauce until about the 1940s.

A more intriguing possibility is panzerotti. “The New Food Lover’s Companion” refers to panzerotti as a “square ravioli-style pouch of dough filled with cheese, tomato sauce and various additions …” This definition squares almost perfectly with the frozen pizza puff sold by Iltaco. Though “Food Lover’s” this book also claims there is a second kind of panzerotti that’s made with “circles of pizza-like dough folded over a filling and sealed, creating a half-moon or crescent shape very much like a calzone.”

This led me down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if there was a meaningful difference between a calzone and a panzerotto. The most commonly cited difference is that calzoni are baked, while panzerotti are fried. That’s the case in “Gastronomy of Italy” and “Great Italian Cooking.” But this was contradicted by even more sources. “1,000 Italian Recipes” notes that street vendors in Naples fry calzoni “in big pots of boiling oil set over portable stoves.” “Food Lover’s” claims that while panzerotti are usually fried, they can be baked.

So, perhaps a better way of phrasing it is that calzoni are most often baked, and panzerotti mostly fried.

Pasta Fresh in Dunning doesn't serve pizza puffs, but it does serve panzerotti that have a lot in common with the homemade pizza puffs around town.
Pasta Fresh in Dunning doesn’t serve pizza puffs, but it does serve panzerotti that have a lot in common with the homemade pizza puffs around town.

I hoped a visit to Pasta Fresh (3418 N. Harlem Ave.) in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Belmont Heights would help clear things up. Though I’d heard the classic Italian deli served panzerotti, I couldn’t immediately spot one on the menu. When I asked the waitress for one, she assured me that they could do it. The result was a golden-browned half-moon of fried dough, which was stuffed with a judicious amount of cheese and sauce. Problem solved.

But when I went to the register to pay, another customer was picking up his order of fried calzoni, which looked identical to the panzerotti I had just consumed. (Calzoni are easy to find on the menu.) Confused, I asked the cashier if there was a difference between the fried calzoni and the panzerotti, and he assured me that they were exactly the same.

Despite the confusion over the name, it’s easy to see the Italian connection with the house-made pizza puffs at Albano’s and Terry’s Place. Each is just a folded over pizza that’s fried. Sure, they have been inflated to Chicago-esque proportions, but squint and they are the same. Whether you want to call it a calzone or panzerotto is up to you, but we are squarely in Italian hands.

But neither the calzone nor panzerotto seemed to explain Iltaco’s pizza puff. This meant I needed to leave the comfortable hold of Italian cuisine and set out into uncharted American territory. Since you can find Iltaco’s pizza puff in the freezer section of most Chicagoland grocery stores, I looked for other pizzalike objects hanging out nearby. That’s when I found Hot Pockets and Totino’s Pizza Rolls. It became pretty clear that Hot Pockets were a dead end, because they weren’t created until the early 1980s. Plus, they were developed, thanks to a pioneering crisping sleeve, with the microwave in mind, not the fryer. (The history, however, of how Jewish brothers from Iran created such a quintessentially American snack is utterly fascinating.)

Totino’s pizza rolls don’t look much like the pizza puff. Instead, the little squares of dough with tomato sauce, cheese and meat more resemble petite ravioli. But the history of these bite-size snacks turns out to be both far more intriguing than I originally imagined, and pertinent to understanding the pizza puff.

As Mike Siemienas, General Mills’ brand public relations manager, explained to me over the phone, Jeno Paulucci created the pizza roll in the late 1960s, under the original name of Jeno’s pizza rolls. (The name wasn’t changed to Totino’s Pizza Rolls until after Pillsbury purchased the brand in 1985 for $135 million. To make things even more confusing, General Mills acquired Pillsbury in 2001.)

This wasn’t Paulucci’s first food product. He started in the food business back in 1944 with Chun King, a canned Chinese food company. While it makes more sense for the son of an Italian immigrant to create the pizza roll than canned chow mein manufactured in northern Wisconsin, his previous experience turned out to be serendipitous (especially, if you’re a fan of the pizza roll).

According to a New York Times obituary of Paulucci from Nov. 25, 2011, the pizza roll isn’t made with a traditional pizza dough, but with a wrapper similar to the one used for Chinese egg rolls. (I couldn’t confirm this directly with General Mills, mostly because the brand had been purchased so many times they didn’t have the full story.)

Which brings us back to the Chicago pizza puff. Though I could never get the owners of Iltaco to chat, I do know one thing. Iltaco’s pizza puff isn’t wrapped in pizza dough or anything like it. It’s wrapped in a flour tortilla, the same kind you’d use for a burrito. How do I know? It says so right on the wrapper. The first ingredient listed on the back is a flour tortilla. Iltaco’s website is also not shy about this fact. Here’s what the site has to say about the original pork pizza puff: “Pork Sausage and Mozzarella Cheese with our Home-Style Pizza Sauce Wrapped [in] a Soft Flour Tortilla.” Unwrap one of the still frozen pizza puffs from Iltaco, and you can clearly see the tortilla.

This means that the pizza puff most Chicagoans know and love has as much in common with a chimichanga (a deep fried burrito) as a calzone or panzerotto. This shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise considering Iltaco’s name, but this is still an odd ending for this little-considered Chicago specialty.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @nickdk