Huge Stromboli

Stromboli. STROMBOLI! The greatest rolled, stuffed, baked Italian thing of dough ever to grace a baking sheet, and I've had stromboli — probably more stromboli than anyone in recorded history, that's just a fact, you can ask people, people will tell you, 'Bigly has had a lot of stromboli,' and they're right.

Now many people — and many people don't know this — they confuse stromboli with calzone. They think they're the same. They are NOT the same. They are completely different. A calzone is folded. A stromboli is ROLLED. Rolled. Like a beautiful Italian flag wrapped around meat and cheese. That chef on TV — you know the one — gets this wrong constantly, calls them interchangeable, an insult to both. If your chef tells you otherwise, find a new chef. Embarrassingly wrong. Sad.

The stromboli, real stromboli — and this is where it gets interesting, very interesting, the history part — was invented in PHILADELPHIA. PHILADELPHIA, not Italy. People don't know that. They assume Italy, because of the name, but no, Philadelphia, 1950, a guy named Romano, look it up, I had people look it up. Tremendous American invention. We don't celebrate it enough. We celebrate the pizza, the lasagna, the meatball — all great, all tremendous, all welcome at my table — but the stromboli gets NOTHING. No parade. No holiday. A travesty. We're fixing that today. Hand on heart.

Slice it into rounds. Beautiful pinwheel rounds. Each slice a tiny work of art, a meaty marble of dough and cheese, layered colors — the red of the pepperoni, the pink of the ham, the white of the cheese, the green of the herbs, like a flag, an Italian-American flag of FOOD. Put them on a platter. Put marinara in the middle. Watch them disappear. They will disappear. Faster than you think. The stromboli always disappears fastest. That's the recipe.