Stracciatella on pizza — the topping
Stracciatella is the soft, stringy, cream-soaked heart of a burrata, sold on its own: fresh mozzarella torn into fine shreds and loosened in cream until it barely holds a shape. The name means “little shreds” — and shares it, confusingly, with a chocolate-flecked gelato and a Roman egg-drop soup, neither of which goes anywhere near a pizza.
It rides one pizza here — the pinsa — as a cold finish, spooned over the crust after the oven. This page is what it is, what to buy, and how to handle it, with the dose read from the same registry the recipe page scales.
What to buy
Buy it fresh, in a tub swimming in its own cream, from a good cheese counter or Italian grocer — like burrata, it's made for the day and measures its life in days, not weeks. Look for loose, glossy, milky strands; drain off the excess liquid before it goes on, but don't squeeze it dry, because the cream is the whole point.
Can't find it? Make it from its parent: tear open a ball of burrata and use the soft inside, which is stracciatella by definition. Or pull very fresh fior di latte into fine shreds and loosen them with a spoonful of cream — not the same pedigree, but the same idea on the pizza.
Working with it
Stracciatella never bakes. The recipe note is the whole method — “cold from the fridge, spooned over the hot crust” — because heat is its undoing: a hot oven splits the cream into a greasy puddle and boils away the fresh-milk delicacy that's the reason to buy it. So the crust comes out first, and the stracciatella goes on after, in cool, loose spoonfuls.
Treat it gently. Drain the worst of the liquid, spoon it in soft mounds rather than spreading it flat, and finish with a thread of olive oil, a little salt and black pepper. On the pinsa it's the cool layer under the draped mortadella — laid down first, so the meat and a scatter of pistachio crown it.
On the pizzas
The classics that use it, with the amount each takes at its default size — the same numbers their recipe pages scale to your dough:
| Pizza | Per pizza | When |
|---|---|---|
| Pinsa mortadella e stracciatella | 70 g | after the bake |
Questions from the counter
What's the difference between stracciatella and burrata?
Burrata is a pouch of fresh mozzarella filled with stracciatella; stracciatella is that filling on its own — “burrata without the bag.” They taste the same because they are the same cream-and-curd interior. Reach for stracciatella when you want that creaminess spread across the whole pizza without a mozzarella shell to cut open and distribute.
Does stracciatella go on before or after the bake?
After, always, and cold — it's a finish, not a baking cheese. Spooned over the crust the moment it leaves the oven, it stays loose and milky; sent through the bake, the cream breaks into grease and the freshness cooks out. The residual heat of the pizza softens it just enough. It's the same rule that keeps the mortadella beside it out of the oven.
Where do I buy stracciatella, and what if I can't?
Good cheese counters and Italian delis carry it fresh in tubs; it's perishable, so buy it close to when you'll use it. No luck? Tear open a burrata and scoop out the inside — that is stracciatella — or shred very fresh mozzarella and stir in a spoonful of cream. Skip anything labelled stracciatella that turns out to be gelato or soup; they only share the name.
Put it on a pizza
The dough is the calculator’s job and the doses are scaled on the recipe pages — this one is ready for the classic below.
The clock is a suggestion. The dough is the boss. In bocca al lupo!
Impasto is a free pizza dough calculator for Neapolitan, New York, Roman, Sicilian, Detroit, thin crust and focaccia doughs — flour, water, salt and yeast weighed in baker's percentages, with the fermentation schedule written for you.