Sausage & Pepper Stromboli Is Required At Christmas

Now when we talk holiday recipes, we're usually talking about cooking for a crowd. And when that crowd arrives on that holiday, you better have something for them to munch on. And for me, it ain't Christmas without stromboli. And today we'll be showcasing some beautiful ground pork to make some homemade, easy, flavorful Italian sausage for an incredible sausage and pepper stromboli, thanks to our sponsor today, the National Pork Board. So first thing we're going to do is get our dough started. I'm going to go in with two cups of all-purpose flour. And now with a recipe like this, I might make this and prep it today or Christmas Eve. Get it on its sheet tray, get it all prepped, place it in the refrigerator, pull it out the next day, let it proof a tiny bit, and then bake it in the oven. Or you could just bake it today. It works either way. So roughly about two cups of this flour go into a bowl. Then I'm going to pour out another half cup into the cup measure. Hold this off to the side in case we need this for kneading. The weather goes from dry to humid over here in New York all the time. So the dough changes with the humidity. To that, I'm going to add two teaspoons of salt. Stir that up. Set it off to the side. And to this bowl, I'm going to add one cup of water that I've just warmed to about 105 degrees. And then a teaspoon of dry, active yeast. Then I'm going to add a tablespoon of sugar. Get that stirred around. Then I'm just going to let this sit for about 10, 15 minutes until that yeast blooms. You're going to notice a sort of a foaminess settle at the top. You're going to smell the aroma that smells kind of like a beer. And you're going to see like action in the water. These are all good signs that the yeast is activating. Now about 15 minutes later, it smells like pizza dough. It's got this foaming action that looks like it's alive and it's ready to be used. I'm just going to add that yeast and water into the flour using a wooden spatula to sort of get it all together until all of the water and yeast hydrate the flour and it becomes somewhat of a workable dough. And then once it sort of comes together into somewhat of a workable ball, I'm just going to use my knuckles and just sort of fold it onto itself, kneading it until it sort of absorbs all that flour, start to build some gluten in it. If you find it's really too sticky, then that's what that half cup of flour is for. You're going to work in a little bit of flour at a time until it's still a little tacky, but not too sticky that you can't work with it. And then you're just going to knead that dough in the bowl until the dough sucks up all the flour in that bowl and is tacky but workable. Then we can take the ball out of the bowl onto the board and we can knead it by our hand and we want to knead it fairly vigorously so that it doesn't stick to the wooden board. We're going to roll it over all that flour that's available on the board and then vigorously knead it. With a pizza dough like this, I like to knead it at alternating 45 degree angles and you want to put a little bit of oomph into it. If you do this too slow, that dough is going to start sticking to the board and it's just going to be harder to work. After about 5-10 minutes of that kneading, it should be ready to go. We can sort of pinch and seal the bottom of the dough, pull it and shape it so that the top of the dough is nice and tight and we've got a perfect little ball of dough for our stromboli. Next, we're going to put a little bit of olive oil in the bowl to help get it out of the bowl when we go to make our stromboli. Toss it around so it gets coated in that olive oil, then place the top side up and we're ready to cover it. Cover it tight with plastic wrap. Now, this needs to proof until it's about double or triples in size. That could take 2 hours, that could take 4 hours, depending on how cool or warm the place that you allow it to proof. I kind of have a little proofing situation, so let me show you what I do. I'll take the dough, place it on my chair in my office, which is surrounded by windows so it can get cold, but I do have this space heater that I'll throw on and it'll create the perfect warm environment to allow this dough to proof quickly. Now, you might have noticed that I'm using a lot of pork for my Christmas recipes this year, and for me, pork is an underutilized protein during Christmas. The truffle stuffed pork tenderloin that we made earlier this month with my brother is one of my favorite recipes for the holidays ever, and so is this stromboli. However, not everyone lives in the Italian populated northeast like me and has access to amazing Italian sausage everywhere. In fact, some places make Italian sausage pretty bad. So today we're going to be turning some simple, good quality ground pork into your own loose meat Italian sausage at home so that we can make this recipe with total control over flavor the way we like it. And make sure you visit pork.org for more pork cooking ideas and inspiration. But for now we have this beautiful ground pork. We got about 1.4 pounds for $7.80. We're mixing that with a water and flour dough, a little bit of cheese and peppers and onion. That is an affordable holiday meal if I've ever seen one. So we're going to get this into the bowl and we're going to remember that it's 1.4 pounds. Just toss it into a mixing bowl of a KitchenAid because that's what we're going to end up doing, although you could do this with your hands. Next, I'm going to get a scale out. I'm going to place this on top of it and I'm going to tear it. Now salt is an important factor in making something like an Italian sausage. Of course for flavor, but largely for texture. We're going to salt it and almost knead it so that it becomes kind of spongy and bouncy, kind of like a sausage is. And general rule of thumb is about 2% of the weight of the pork. In the recipe, I have it for one pound, but I have 1.4 pounds. So what I'll do is go to chat GPT and I'll ask it, what is 2% of 1.4 pounds? What is that in ounces? So it says 0.44 ounces. So that's what I'm going to add to the pork. That's all that we're going to need to weigh. Next up, I need one tablespoon of fennel seed toasted. So I'll measure that out. Get those into a little small little frying pan to toast up. You just want to toast them to wake those flavors up in the seeds. Get those oils released, place it into a mortar and pestle, Ziploc bag, a blender, whatever you have. And we're just going to process that into a powder. And that goes into the pork as well. Next, I'm going to get a few cloves of garlic. I'm just going to pop their skins off of them and I'm going to grate them into the mixture. One thing to note about Italian sausage is that there is no kind of rule for what you flavor it with. Most that you see will probably have a predominant fennel characteristic, but there are some that don't even put fennel in it. Some put paprika, some put Italian seasoning. I find that Italian sausage that tastes too much of other things other than like pork is not always a good thing. I want to taste the pork and almost just have other things accentuate the pork. And that's what you're going to get out of this homemade Italian pork sausage. Then a tablespoon of chopped Calabrian chili. And then lastly, a half tablespoon of sugar. Then we're going to get that into the stand mixer with the paddle attachment. And what we're going to try and do is almost turn this into like a farce. We're going to massage it. We're going to sort of knead it like a dough. And the same way that a dough works with the gluten cells sort of blending with each other, the same thing will happen here with the meat fibers, changing the texture and making it more sausage-like. I forgot to add black pepper to this, which I think is an important flavor, so I'm going to go ahead and add that. And then we're just going to start on a very low speed and then slowly increase the speed until we get to about the fourth setting or whatever middle setting on the machine is. And you're going to start to see the meat sort of tear and blend with each other, become more of a homogenous mixture than simply ground pork fibers. And that's really the difference between a ground pork and then it becoming a sausage. Texture plays an important role here. That smells beautiful. Just like Italian sausage. So we're going to set this off to the side and deal with our veg. We've got two bell peppers, one onion, and then another couple garlic cloves. Slice the tops off the bell peppers and then cut them in half. Remove the seeds and the white membrane and then cut the flesh of the tops that you cut off earlier into slices like this. Then cut those peppers in half again, cut out any membrane still remaining, and then lay the pepper so the long side is perpendicular to the knife and then slice the peppers into thin strips and then get them into a bowl. Next up, slice an onion. Slice the top and the root end off and then cut the onion in half and remove the skins and any rubbery layers of the onion. Lay the onion on its flat side and then slice the onion against the grain that runs along the onion slices into thin slices of onion. Then for the garlic, cut each clove in half, remove the skins, and then cut them into thin slices. Now we can cook the pork. In a large nonstick pan on high heat, add olive oil to the pan and let it get hot. Once hot, we can add the pork sausage to the pan and just kind of flatten it into the pan to make sure as much surface area is making contact with the pan as possible. Then just let it sear undisturbed until you can start to see that you're developing color and browning the pork. Then flip it to brown the other side and with a flat bottomed wooden spoon, start to break up the pork and process it into much smaller pieces. This is a very important step. If your pieces of pork are too big, it won't roll nicely into the stromboli. So really be diligent in breaking up the pork until they are smaller pieces, but not so small that they lose all their texture. If you see any large pieces, I'll go by hand and break them up to make sure that they're all relatively uniform in size. And while you're breaking up the pork, it's also releasing its moisture. And once that moisture is all evaporated, you'll start to hear it frying and browning and that's what you want. Now it is important to remember that ground pork is recommended to be cooked at an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit to be safe to eat. But this pork is small. It's been well browned and we've been cooking it for about 10 to 15 minutes and it'll be cooking again. So we are safe here. So once the pork is now into smaller uniform crumbles and they're nicely browned, toss them into a strainer over a bowl and take some of that fat you drained, return it back into the pan and then add the onions. Season them with salt and then break up those little strips and cook those onions until they begin to fry and soften and begin to caramelize. Once you can start to see some caramelization develop, add more of that fat and the bell peppers to the pan. Season the peppers with some salt and continue cooking them until the peppers soften and begin to caramelize as well, keeping the heat on high this whole time now because you've added more ingredients. Once the peppers are in a good place, push everything off to the side and then add the garlic. Get that garlic moving around and toss that in with the bunch and once the garlic softens and becomes fragrant and slightly caramelized, kill the heat and transfer the peppers and onions to a bowl to cool. Now we just need this to cool. While it does, we can grate our cheese. Make sure you get some whole milk, low moisture mozzarella cheese. Now just run that through a box grater. We're going to probably use most of this cheese, but likely not all of it. Get that into a bowl. Now the peppers have cooled down enough to work with and I'm just going to run my knife through them and process them down into almost like a thick relish. Then I'm going to get that back into the bowl and you can add the sausage. And we're just going to mix it all together until the sausage, peppers and onions become one. And we're going to let that cool so that fat almost congeals before we put it in shamboli. And that's your sausage and pepper mix. Now for the dough, I'm going to get some wax paper out. Also going to add a little bit of oil to a sheet tray and just spread it all around for the eventual shamboli to go on. Just rub some of that oil on there too, because why not? And then we got our dough, nice and risen. Flip it right into the middle. Then I'm just going to take a rolling pin and start forming a rectangle. Roll it out that way first, roll it out to the side, to the other side. Now I want you to keep in mind, I want the side furthest away from me, which is the side that's going to close the shamboli to be thickest, because that's going to be the exterior of the roll. The roll is going to start towards your bottom. So that can be a little bit thinner because that's going to be all the way in the inside of the shamboli. So you just want to roll it until it kind of takes up most of the length of the sheet tray. But again, you don't want to roll it too thin or you're going to have a blowout. I've made a ton of these over the years and the thickness you roll the dough is vitally important. Next, we can take our cooled sausage and pepper mixture and just sprinkle that over the top on the surface of that dough. Now I'm just going to go onto that dough with that sausage and pepper mixture first, and I want to get a very thin coating all the way around the shamboli, but not too thick. And this is why the texture and the size of the sausage matters. If you didn't break it down enough when you were browning it, it's not going to sit right in the shamboli. It's going to stick out. There's going to be like grooves and bumps when it's rolled out because they're just too big to fit into the shamboli. So now all those pieces are cut nice and thin and it's all going to fit inside and roll a lot easier. And you don't have to add all the sausage. You don't want too much. You just want the right amount. And I'm going to leave a little bit on the edge for the dough to close. And on top of that, the cheese. Again, just a thin layer totally covering the sausage, but you don't need to add it all. You just want there to be almost a one-to-one ratio of cheese to meat. Once your cheese is on top, then I'm just going to take my hands and just sort of compact it all in. Make sure it all stays together while we roll. And then we can start the roll. And starting at the edge closest to you, you can take that parchment, just kind of curl it over. Get that parchment to release and then just try and get it folded over. And once you've got that first tuck rolled in, you can use the parchment paper, holding it nice and taut, to roll the rest of the stromboli. Once you get to the edge, you're going to take that seam and you're going to start to pull the dough over the top of the stromboli to close it. You're going to pinch the sides of it so it's completely encased in the dough. Then use the parchment paper to transfer it to a sheet tray, trying to get that seam at the bottom of the pan. Then use your hands to straighten it out. You may have to angle it on the sheet tray if it's a little big. And see, I kind of made a mistake here. That seam is kind of creeping up the side, which makes me nervous of a blowout, but we're going to try and make it work. Then I'm going to crack an egg and beat it for the egg wash. Now, like I said earlier, you could cover this with plastic, get it in the refrigerator, let it sit overnight in the morning or on Christmas before people get there. Pull it out, let it come to room temperature and even maybe proof a little bit. And then you can take over from here, which is basically just scoring the top. And the way that I score the top is basically scoring them in the sizes I'm going to eventually cut them. That's going to have air escape from it, it's going to create a nice pattern, and it's also going to tell me where I need to cut when it's done. Then we're just going to egg wash the entire stromboli. Make sure you get the sides all around, not in a heavy doting, just a very light coating of that egg wash. While I do this, you should note that I have the oven preheating at 400 degrees, ready to take this bad boy. Then finally, on top, just a little Italian oregano or Italian seasoning, whatever you have, just for a little color of green, a little decorative, a little sprinkle on top. Into the oven it goes. We're going to set a timer for 20 minutes and then check it and assess the situation. And halfway through the cooking process, around 10 minutes, you're going to want to give the stromboli a rotation. Time's up, that's been 20 minutes, but I can tell by the color, it needs a little bit more time. So I'm going to set a timer for five more minutes and then I'll give it another check. You see all the fat kind of dripping out of the stromboli? Basically, that's what makes a stromboli so delicious. See, I got lucky here. See that crease? That's where we folded over the final side of the dough. Usually you want that on the bottom so it seals onto itself. I was worried that might open up while it baked, but luckily enough it's sealed. So you just want to make sure you try and get that seam on the bottom of the stromboli. But it worked and it looks beautiful. So we're just going to let this cool. We're going to let this settle. It's way too hot to work with right now, it's like a volcano and it's going to stay hot for a while. So this can be out of the oven like 30 minutes before people come and then you can slice into it. It's going to be nice and perfect. I'm just going to use a spatula to release it from the sheet tray, get it onto the board and now we're ready to cut into this thing. And I mean, get out of town. Are you kidding me with that? That's a perfect stromboli. Maybe the best stromboli I've ever made. We're going to cut it. We're going to give it some slices and then your guests will admire one of the most glorious strombolis they've ever had. If you've ever had a stromboli before, then you know how good this is going to be. See how nothing's falling out? Everything's still in the bread. It's still a thin piece. This is stromboli perfection. Layers. And that sausage we made, even after cooking it twice, is still moist and perfect. Incredible Italian sausage made at home. This and all my holiday recipes are in my holiday plan of attack. It's a little ebook I have just to hold all my family recipes. You can find the National Pork Board's complete recipe collection at the Yummly link down in the description. And don't forget to visit pork.org for all your pork cooking ideas and inspiration. That's all that I have today. I'll see you next time. Until then, take care of yourself and go feed yourself.