Stromboli

Growing up my mom would make Stromboli as a special treat. I've modified it to meet our needs and my family loves it. I've found that depending on what are of the country you're from you may have never heard of it. Stromboli is sort of like a pizza pocket.

Ingredients:
1 loaf of frozen bread dough thawed
1 jar of pizza sauce
1-2 cups of diced honey ham lunch meat
1-2 cups of diced cotto salami
1 1/2 cups of shredded mozzarella cheese
pepperoni
beaten egg white and Parmesan cheese (optional)

Roll out the bread dough into a roughly a 12x14 rectangle. Towards the "bottom" spoon 1/2 the jar of pizza sauce.

Add meats, cheese, and pepperoni on top of the pizza sauce. It will look something like this:

The easiest way to wrap it together is to fold the sides in first,

The roll up from the bottom - the filling will push towards the top but should not go the whole way or it won't form a tight seal.

You want to try and form a seal with the dough - but sometimes (as you'll see in the last picture) it still leaks. Some people leave the pizza sauce out and use it as a dipping sauce and that fixes the problem but my family likes it with the sauce and then the other half of the jar can be used for dipping. We like to brush ours with beaten egg white and Parmesan cheese.

Place the Stomboli on a greased cookie sheet.

Bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes. You want it to be browned well so that the dough is cooked the whole way through.

Note: Over the years I've discovered that cheap ham tastes nasty and have found that honey ham tastes the best (and I even use the off brand and it still tastes good). Do not use hard salami (unless you like the taste) - cotto tastes the best combined with the other flavors.

Also - my mom used to do individual ones and would pull the dough from the top and bottom, rolling it together and fastening it with toothpicks. Then the sides would be rolled and toothpicked to the top. This will also work on the non-individual strombolis and tend not to run out as much. The only reason I stopped doing it this way is because it takes longer and I could never remember how many toothpicks I used.

Enjoy!