Ingredients
Instructions
- Pull the dough out of the fridge about an hour before you start. This cannot be fridge-cold or it won't be workable. Cold dough tears, snaps back when you try to stretch it, and generally behaves like you've wronged it. Give it an hour on the counter and it'll relax.
- Toss a handful of flour on your work surface. Whatever that surface is. I like a stainless steel sheet; you use whatever you've got. The flour is non-negotiable — naked counter plus pizza dough is how you end up scraping dough off your counter with a bench scraper and a bad attitude.
- Pound and stretch the dough into a rectangle. Roughly 12-14 inches on the long side, 8-10 inches on the short side, about 1/4 inch thick, give or take. The long side matters — it's the roll axis in step 8. More length on that side = more spiral layers = a better stromboli. If you make a square, you get a stubby log with fewer layers. Rectangle. Long way one way.
- Spread a thin layer of marinara on the dough. Thin. Too much sauce and the dough never crisps up and the whole thing goes soggy. Leave a 1-inch border around the edges — sauce on the border means the seal has nothing to grip, and the seal is what keeps the inside inside. My dictation didn't include the border, which is why we're all here learning together.
- Add the cheese. Mozzarella and provolone, both. See the ingredients note — mixing cheeses is allowed and good.
- Add the meat. Pepperoni and ham, layered flat. If you're tempted to use sausage: it's a great add, but cook it first and drain the fat. Raw sausage will not cook through inside a rolled-up stromboli, and it'll release grease that soaks the dough from the inside out. Pepperoni also releases its own grease — some people blot it on paper towels first. I did not, and we're not pretending I did.
- Add the veggies. I only had garlic this time, so I added garlic. Would've added green peppers if I'd had any. Note: fresh tomatoes, raw peppers, mushrooms, raw onions — those should be cooked down or at least patted bone-dry first. Wet veggies release water into the roll and you end up with soggy pizza-adjacent sadness. Garlic alone is a safe pick for a first attempt, which is what we're doing here.
- Flour your hands, then ROLL the dough. From a long edge, roll it tightly away from you into a log, jelly-roll style. Pinch the seam closed along the long side, place the log seam-side down, and tuck the ends under. See the "Fold Is Not The Right Verb" callout below — my original instructions said "fold in half," and we are correcting that in real time. Floured hands are the difference between a clean roll and a dough-covered swearing session.
- Transfer to a baking sheet. Light cooking spray, or parchment paper. Parchment is cleaner, no spray needed, nothing to scrub later. Keep it seam-side down.
- Brush with the egg wash. Whisk 1 egg, 1 teaspoon of water, and a pinch of garlic powder. Brush very lightly over the top. Very lightly — we are not topping this with scrambled eggs. The point of an egg wash is color and sheen. A puddle of raw egg is a puddle of raw egg that bakes into a yellow omelette hat.
- Cut 3-4 diagonal slits across the top. This is the steam exit. Melting cheese and cooking dough produce a surprising amount of pressure; without a release, the stromboli will — and I quote myself again — explode. Which is dramatic but basically accurate. See the callout. Make the slits now; you cannot slit later.
- Bake at 400°F for 25-30 minutes. Rotate the pan halfway through so it browns evenly. You're looking for a deep golden brown on top — not pale, not cautious. Lift one end and peek underneath; the bottom should be browned and sound hollow when you tap it. If the top is browning before the bottom catches up, that's normal; it'll finish.
- Rest 10 minutes before slicing. I did not include this in the dictation but it is in fact the difference between a clean slice and a molten cheese avalanche onto your cutting board. 10 minutes lets the inside set up enough to slice. Slice crosswise into roughly 1.5-2 inch rounds.
- Serve with extra marinara on the side for dipping. If you don't have extra homemade, a jarred sauce warmed up for 60 seconds is completely fine — the whole point is more sauce than you put inside. Nobody has ever wanted less dipping sauce.
We're Winging This One
Lead-off disclosure, in case you skimmed the intro and are now committed: I have never made stromboli before. I have made plenty of pizzas, I have assembled plenty of sandwiches, and at some point in my life I combined those two mental models and decided a stromboli was a tractable Saturday project. The dough's not mine. The sauce isn't mine. The decision to roll it, bake it, and put it on the internet IS mine, and that's the part under test. If this works, we take credit. If it doesn't, we blame the dough. Confidence and prior experience are different things, and this recipe is operating almost entirely on the first one.
The Sauce and the Dough Are Not Mine
Credit where it's due: the marinara is Casey's, my wife's recipe, which has fed this family and most of our friends for years and will get its own page on this site eventually. The pizza dough is my son-in-law's — also home-made, also getting its own page eventually. Both of them did the hard parts. All I did was roll it up and put it in the oven. In the author's own words: home made, just not by me.
Fold Is Not The Right Verb — You Roll It
My original dictation said "fold the dough in half." My original dictation was wrong, and we are coaching past-me here because he was figuring this out on the fly. Folding in half gives you a calzone — which is a different, legitimate thing, and if you want a calzone go make a calzone. A classic stromboli is a tight roll from the long edge, jelly-roll style, seam pinched closed on the bottom, ends tucked under. You get a spiral of layers through the whole log, which means every slice has a clean cross-section of dough / sauce / cheese / meat / dough / sauce / cheese / meat — the thing you're actually eating a stromboli for. Fold = two half-moon layers. Roll = spiral. Roll wins. Default to the roll, correct the dictation, move on.
Not Scrambled Eggs on Top
The whole point of an egg wash is color and sheen. A thin, barely-there layer that bakes into a glossy golden crust. The point is NOT a layer of protein on top of your stromboli. Very lightly. We are not topping this with scrambled eggs. If a bead of egg wash is pooling anywhere on the dough, you have used too much. Dip, dab, brush, done.
Slit the Top or It Explodes
Not metaphorically. Inside a sealed, rolled stromboli you've got melting cheese releasing water, dough releasing steam, and — depending on your meat choices — grease that is also, let's say, participating. All of that produces pressure. Pressure wants out. If you give it a controlled exit via 3-4 slits across the top, the stromboli stays shaped like a stromboli. If you don't, the pressure finds its own exit — usually at the weakest seam, which is almost always one of the tucked ends — and you get a geyser blowout of cheese and sauce all over your sheet pan. Slit the top. Three or four. Diagonal. Takes five seconds. Saves the entire bake.
Rest Before You Slice
Ten minutes. On a rack if you have one, on the pan if you don't. I know it smells incredible. I know the whole point of making a stromboli is cutting it open and seeing the spiral. If you cut it the second it comes out of the oven, the cheese and sauce are still molten, they will avalanche out of the first slice, and that slice will be a flat disappointing puddle on your cutting board. Ten minutes of rest lets the inside set up just enough to hold its shape when sliced. Then cut crosswise into 1.5-2 inch rounds. The spiral will be gorgeous. The slices will stand up on a plate. Patience, briefly, as a technique.
Actually, A Fun Note on the Name
The subtitle calls stromboli "the Italian word for pizza sandwich." In spirit, correct — it IS a pizza sandwich. In etymology, less so. Stromboli is actually an American invention, probably from Philadelphia in the 1950s, and most food historians think it's named after the 1950 Ingrid Bergman film Stromboli, which in turn is named after the Italian volcanic island. So: the dish is American, the name is a movie reference, the movie is named after a volcano. None of which is Italian for "pizza sandwich." My instinct about what it IS was right. My instinct about what the word MEANS was ambitious. Both can be true.