This piece originally appeared in SAVEUR’s Spring/Summer 2025 issue. See more stories from Issue 204 here.

When I first moved to the Ocean State a decade ago, I was admittedly unaware of the saucy slices’ cultural importance. It wasn’t until I fell for a woman whose family served them at every function that I became a full-hearted champion for pizza strips. Since we moved to New York, no trip back to Providence is complete without visiting Sal’s Bakery, where my partner’s family has been loyal customers for three generations.

Sometimes referred to as party pizza or bakery pizza, these sparsely topped strips are synonymous with the area’s Italian American bakeries, where the same dough used for Italian loaves is stretched into an olive oil-slicked sheet pan and covered with a thick layer of red sauce. After baking, the pie is left to cool, then cut into rectangles to be bought, sold, and eaten at room temperature, sometimes with a faint dusting of grated parm. Pizza strips typically come in flat white boxes and are doled out at casual group gatherings like birthday parties, Little League games, and family beach days as the perfect portable snack.

While the pizza strip’s origin story is a bit hazy, there are a few theories. “Part of the allure is the mystery surrounding them,” says Eric Palmieri, fourth-­generation baker and owner of D. Palmieri’s Bakery in Johnston. As he tells it, pizza strips “were something made in the home back in Italy, before the mass Italian migration to Rhode Island.” During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when thousands of Italians landed in Providence, they reimagined foods from home using affordable pantry staples—canned tomatoes and bread being central.

Reminiscent of Roman pizza al taglio or Sicilian sfincione (and similar to Italian American tomato pies from Philadelphia and Utica, New York), pizza strips are a filling snack that travels well and stays fresh for hours. They’ve always been affordable, too: Donald DePetrillo, owner of the Original Italian Bakery in Johnston, says, “In the late 1960s, a sheet of red strips cost a few dollars. That was a deal.” Nowadays, the strips are still an inexpensive snack; for about $1.50, you can find individually wrapped ones in bakeries and supermarkets as well as convenience stores and gas stations.

But why so little cheese? The answer also lies in a bit of a gray area: Palmieri points out that, without cheese, baked goods stay fresh at room temperature for a longer period of time. Early bakeries lacking refrigeration could waste less product at the end of the day. At LaSalle Bakery in Providence, owner Michael Manni says they used to add a dusting of grated parmesan to their strips some 20-odd years ago, but a gripe from the local health department turned him off of it. “It’s the same cheese that sits out all day in a shaker at a pizza parlor,” Manni grumbles, “but we did what we were told, and our customers kept coming back.”

Most important, though, is the dough. Manni’s version, like many Italian bread recipes, uses a preferment known as a biga. “It’s all about the slow fermentation,” he explains, which typically takes 12 to 16 hours. “The long rise, the resting time—it all builds flavor and gives you the chewy texture that you want.” The sauce at LaSalle is a standard tomato base, seasoned with garlic, dried oregano, basil, and parsley—a definitive Italian American flavor profile.

The strips’ humble allure may be hard to explain, but the local devotion to them is profound: You’d be hard‑pressed to find a family gathering in Rhode Island without a large white box splayed open and guests’ hands picking at squares of sauce-laden dough. A flavor-packed party staple, pizza strips owe their ongoing legacy to the few remaining bakers still working across the state. “Pizza strips give us all a sense of place,” Palmieri says, “grounding us in ways we probably don’t even fully understand.”

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