Mayhem Again: a love letter to mortadella, in five layers
LP mortadella, Vannella's ricotta, pistachio gremolata, hot honey. Five layers, each one in conversation with the others. The Italian deli sandwich we wish more delis made.
There's an Italian deli on every other block in Sydney that will sell you a mortadella sandwich. Mortadella, bread, maybe a tomato slice. $8 if you're lucky. It's a perfectly good lunch.
This is not that sandwich.
The Mayhem Again is what happens when you ask: what does mortadella deserve, if we take it seriously? Not "what's the cheapest way to put it on bread", but "what does this remarkable Italian cured meat deserve to be paired with so its best qualities come through?"
The answer turned out to be five layers, in conversation.
Layer one: the mortadella
Mortadella is from Bologna. It's a finely emulsified cured pork sausage flecked with cubes of pure white pork fat, seasoned with pepper, sometimes pistachio, sometimes myrtle. The good stuff is sliced so thin it's almost translucent — light hits it and turns pink.
We get ours from LP — a small Italian smallgoods producer who has been refining their mortadella for two decades. They source their pork carefully, season it in a way that tilts traditional (more black pepper than most modern producers use, a touch of mace), and slice it to order on a hand-cranked slicer.
The slice matters as much as the meat. Thick-cut mortadella feels like deli meat. Wafer-thin mortadella feels like silk. We use wafer-thin.
Three slices, folded in waves so they have air between them. Air is texture. Air is the difference between eating mortadella and experiencing it.
Layer two: Vannella's ricotta
Vannella is a Sydney family that has been making ricotta in Marrickville since 1984. Their fresh ricotta is the gold standard in this city — milky, slightly sweet, with a texture between cream and cottage cheese that holds shape on a knife but melts on the tongue.
We use the full-fat fresh ricotta, not the firmer aged stuff. Spread thick across the bottom half of the focaccia.
Why ricotta and not mozzarella, or stracciatella, or burrata? Because mortadella has its own creamy fat (the white cubes). Adding stretchy cheese on top of that is over-creaming the sandwich. Ricotta is fresher, sharper, brighter. It contrasts the mortadella instead of doubling down on it.
Layer three: pistachio gremolata
Gremolata is a traditional Italian condiment — parsley, garlic, lemon zest, chopped fine, used to brighten heavy braised dishes like osso buco. We took the principle and ran it sideways.
Our pistachio gremolata: roasted Sicilian pistachios (we roast them ourselves, briefly, to wake the oils), parsley, lemon zest, a touch of garlic, a small amount of olive oil to bind. Chopped — chopped, not blitzed — so you get individual pistachio pieces and discrete parsley leaves and the occasional pop of lemon.
Why pistachio? Two reasons.
First, mortadella from Sicily traditionally contains pistachio in the meat itself. Adding pistachio on top reinforces a flavour that's already there, in a more concentrated form. It's not gimmick — it's tradition turned up.
Second, pistachio adds the only crunch in the sandwich. Without it, everything is soft on soft on soft, and the sandwich loses its rhythm. The crunch is the comma between layers.
Layer four: hot honey
We finish the build with a drizzle of hot honey across the pistachio gremolata.
Hot honey — honey infused with chilli — is one of those condiments that became fashionable in the last decade and then almost immediately became gimmicky. Most hot honey is honey with a few drops of hot sauce. Useless.
Ours is honey we get from a beekeeper in the Blue Mountains, infused for two weeks with fresh red chilli from Sydney market gardens. The chilli pulls its heat and floral character into the honey slowly. The result is honey that tastes like honey first and then warms up at the back of your throat about three seconds after you swallow.
Sweetness + heat + cream + cure. That's the four-way conversation at the heart of this sandwich.
Layer five: rocket and Parmigiano
The top of the sandwich, before the bread lid goes on:
A loose handful of rocket. The pepper-bitter scrubs the cream of the ricotta.
A small handful of shaved 24-month aged Parmigiano Reggiano. The salt crystals in the cheese punctuate the sweet of the honey.
This isn't decoration. Both of these ingredients have a job. Pull the rocket out and the sandwich is too rich. Pull the Parmigiano out and the sandwich is too one-note.
The whole sandwich
Five layers, all in conversation:
- Bread (our focaccia) → ricotta
- Ricotta → mortadella
- Mortadella → pistachio gremolata
- Pistachio gremolata → hot honey
- Hot honey → rocket + parmigiano → bread (lid)
You take a bite and your tongue maps a path through cream, salt, fat, crunch, sweet, bitter, sharp, and bread. In that order. Every time.
Sandwich design isn't a thing most people think about. But every sandwich we put on the menu has been thought about this hard. The Mayhem Again is the one where the thinking is most visible.
What it costs and where to eat it
$22 at both Pyrmont and Marrickville.
It is the second-most expensive sandwich on our menu, after the Daniele Drama. The reason is the LP mortadella, the Vannella ricotta, the Sicilian pistachio, the Blue Mountains honey. All four of those ingredients are sourced from producers who do one thing exceptionally well and charge accordingly. We charge accordingly to pay them properly.
If you've never had a mortadella sandwich, this is not the place to start — it's not the simple version. Start with a deli mortadella roll first. Then come back. The contrast is the whole education.
Why we keep building this
Because mortadella is one of the world's great cured meats, and most people experience it as a $4 slice on Vienna bread.
The Mayhem Again is our small protest against that. Take a beloved, common Italian ingredient. Pair it with the best small-producer cheese in Sydney. Add a condiment that nods to where the mortadella came from (Sicilian pistachio). Add a sweet-heat element that elevates it without burying it. Finish with crunch and pepper.
Five layers. One sandwich. A whole afternoon's worth of thinking, served in twelve minutes.
That's the Ozzo we always want to make: respect the ingredient enough to give it a stage worthy of it. Not "elevated comfort food" — just comfort food, taken seriously. There's a difference. You can taste it.
Once. Then again. Hence the name.
The stage worthy of all this is the Ozzo bread. Read the bread story →
Order at Pyrmont or Marrickville →
