Aunt Alice's Stromboli

Author Notes

This recipe is a family favorite—it originates with my Aunt Alice who makes this for every family event. She taught it to me in my teens and I have been making it ever since. I'm not sure if it has evolved over time but the basic trick is to use frozen bread dough for the Stromboli. Some grocery stores carry a basic white bread dough - usually 3 or 5 loaves (Like this http://www.bridgford.com/bread/). Normally you would let this rise to make bread but here you roll it out and use it as Stromboli crust before it rises - the result is a very thin, malleable dough that encases the goodness inside. Depending on how many loaves of bread you get - you may need to adjust the amounts of filling—I am giving you my estimate for 5 loaves.

Now, the insides: I never stray from this combination of fillings—there is some alchemy here that occurs with the sweetness of the ham, salty meats and cheeses and the hint of green pepper. Even if you don't want the green pepper, bake it with the pepper and remove later. Trust me. I go straight to the deli counter and get everything sliced there. Don't bother with small pieces of pepperoni or salami, you want the sandwich size for this recipe.

Serve with your favorite marinara. I like Rao's or you could use Hazan's tomato, onion, butter deliciousness here. These freeze beautifully. As you can see from my picture, I do a little assembly line. Just wrap them up before the dough rises and bake straight from frozen and add about 10-15 minutes. —meganvt01

Test Kitchen Notes

I did 1/4 recipe since I really only needed 1 stromboli. All of the frozen bread options at the store were par-baked (Ace Bread is really big here). The only thing suitable was the pizza dough from the deli. I used 400g of dough and that worked nicely.

I free formed the filling and just layered to make it so every slice would have a bit of everything in it. I don't think you need to overthink it. I don't really like green pepper, but I do get what she means about pick it out after so you still have the flavour (as a child my favorite pizza was Hawaiian but with the pineapple picked off. I refused pizza with just ham because it didn't have the lingering taste of pineapple.). My suggestion if you don't want the green pepper would be to sub a different pepper since it still tastes like green pepper. I didn't magically like the flavour of it here.

I was lazy and for sauce just used passata with a pinch of salt and pepper. That worked nicely. —Stephanie Bourgeois