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Celebrate Soup Month in the Most Dangerous Way Imaginable

Paffuto's soup panzerotti puts the warm essence of soup inside deep-fried hot pockets in a way that seems kinda reckless. And we're here for it.


Soup panzerotti from Paffuto / Photography by Mike Prince

As all of you undoubtedly are aware, January is Soup Month — a time for battling back against the cold and gray of the weather with big sweaters, roaring fires, warm beverages, and big, steaming bowls of hearty soup.

Most people celebrate Soup Month in the traditional fashion with bowls of chowder, tureens of cream of broccoli, crocks of French onion, pots of chicken noodle, wedges of grilled cheese sandwich with vessels of warm tomato soup to dunk them in, and mugs of hot chocolate, which, let’s be honest here, is basically just cream of chocolate soup. But for some people, that’s just not enough. Some people need to live on the edge. Walk on the wild side. Push the envelope of their Soup Month celebrations to the ultimate limit.

Daniel Griffiths, Jake Loeffler, and Sam Kalkut — the chef/partners at Paffuto in Bella Vista — are three such young daredevils. For them, a simple bowl of soup frankly would not do. Not here. Not now. Not in Phila-goddamn-delphia in this cursed Year of our Lord, Two Thousand and Twenty-Five.

No, these hot liquid anarchists wanted to do something special and unique. So after hours, in the kitchen of their restaurant, which specializes in Italian panzerotti (which are basically mini-calzones that you eat with your hands), these Hot Pocket sorcerers, these wizards of the hand pie, set about pushing the limits of what a Soup Month celebration could be. They thought to themselves: What is the single most dangerous, ridiculous, foolhardy soup-delivery vehicle on earth?

The answer, obviously, is the soup dumpling — delicious, yes, but fraught with peril, both physical and sartorial.

But soup dumplings already existed. So Griffiths, Loeffler, and Kalkut looked around and thought maybe making them bigger was the answer. And also deep-fried. And also hand-held. Which, in a kitchen dedicated to the voluminous production of deep-fried dough pockets filled with all manner of things, led unerringly to the idea that this Soup Month would be celebrated at Paffuto with soup panzerotti. Deep-fried hand pies filled with soup! Genius!

A soup panzerotti in the making.

“We are NOT taking a bowl of hot soup and pouring it into a panzerotti,” Loeffler told me when I got him on the phone to congratulate him on his (and his partners’) devious brilliance. “That would be insane.”

Well, sure, but…

“So, like with the French onion we’re doing this week, we’re taking the flavors of French onion soup — the caramelized onion, herbs, beef stock, brandy — and putting them into a panzerotti.”

This means caramelizing onions in the pan, adding the herbed beef stock, letting it cook down, then deglazing the pan with brandy and letting it cook down some more — infusing those flavors into a tangle of deeply-scented onions and then shoveling them (along with some mozzarella) into the dough.

It took the three partners a while to come up with ways to make soup panzerotti that wouldn’t simply explode like bombs, Loeffler explained to me. They experimented with all kinds of techniques and all different ways to get the flavors of classic soups into the dough shells. “We had to clean out the fryer a lot,” he explained. “But really, once we’d done an egg [breakfast] one, it was all downhill from there.”

In addition to soup-filled panzerotti, Paffuto will sell empty shells, perfect for dunking into soup.

Paffuto got kind of a late start on the whole Soup Month thing, so their soup panzerotti only hit the menu this past Wednesday, on January 15th. The plan is to do a different one every week, beginning with the previously described French onion, then moving on to a comforting broccoli cheddar (which is fairly straightforward), an Italian wedding soup panzerotti (which, Loeffler admits, is a little more complicated and still being worked on), and culminating with the grand finale, a grilled cheese and tomato soup panzerotti with the thick Cooper Sharp American, gruyere, and vodka sauce-inspired tomato soup all on the inside. That’s the one Loeffler, Kalkut, and Griffiths are most excited about. As far as they know, no one has ever tried anything like it before.

Each of the special Soup Month panzerotti will run you $15. The deal will run through the week of February 5th. They’re also serving empty, toasted panzerotti shells and bowls of soup to those looking for a more traditional (if far less awesome) bread/soup interaction. Those are $12. Hours, schedules, information on Pafutto’s new(ish) dinner menu, and anything else you might need can be found right here if you’re interested.