Turning your leftover pizza dough into the best sandwich you’ve ever tasted...

Leftover dough. It happens. For whatever reason, you decide to not freeze it. Or maybe it is frozen, and it’s in there with the pot pies and the tots, not getting any younger. What to do? (We won’t ask why you’re not just making dozens of random pizzas as happens in this house.)

The one word solution: Panuozzo. Spellcheck doesn’t like it. You’re wondering how to pronounce it. Ready? “Panu-oˈdzːzo.” But really, let’s just call it “sandwich sorcery” and move on. This glorious sandwich bread is a simple trick that can turn you into King Earl Of Sandwich. It’s quick. It’s easy. It makes you look like a magician. You want this.

As the faithful reader of Free The Pizza knows, I’m a big fan of a) historical context and b) executional clarity with just enough c) nonsense to make you wonder what’s wrong with me. So we’re going to look at how panuozzo happened, and the simple steps you can take to make it so. And yes, nonsense will be involved.
 
I don’t make a lot of sandwiches. But I have a lot of dough around the house right now. (The “Cheap The Pizza” series of blog posts required a lot of dough—but hey, it was no-knead and easy to make!) After all those 12-inch cheese pizzas, I really had to make something besides pizza to use it all up. (No room in my freezer for that much dough. The freezer is small and I am a hoarder of freezables.)
 
I’ve done panuozzo before, but only in the oval flatbread format. This time, we’re using an alternate style that requires stretching the dough round, as if for a pizza. Then, drizzling the dough with olive oil, folding it in half in a kind of a clamshell, and baking it for about 8 minutes.

ABOVE: A panuozzo with tomato, spinach, brie and prosciutto. Notice the microblistering on the crust of the bread. That happens with cold-fermented dough and is desirable. Those little bumps are the shape of flavor.


There’s an “Oh, baby!” factor at work here. It’s kind of amazing how just tweaking the format of standard ingredients can make you sit up and say, “What have I done?!”
 
Panuozzo is hot and fresh, has an open, airy crumb and a crunchy crust. And the clamshell shape is ergonomically desirable for keeping everything inside.
 
(My wife hates sandwiches that fall apart, and in a pique of messy-sandwich ire and loathing has been known to hurl them. The clamshell format is, in part, an effort to assuage sandwich-related violence and distress at home.)

ABOVE: A very messy-looking sandwich that you might think would be a hell for someone who hates messy sandwiches. It's not. That's a Philly-style cheesesteak with homegrown green bell peppers. The bread very easily contains even this juicy mess of a sandwich to the point where my wife can enjoy it immensely without throwing it at anything or anyone. 


Where does panuozzo come from and why haven’t you heard of it before? Panuozzo was invented in 1983 in a hill town near Naples by a pizzaiolo named Giuseppe Mascolo. There’s an origin story saying that he made these sandwiches as a pizza alternative for his kids. His kids loved them so much, they encouraged him to put panuozzi on his restaurant's menu. The rest is pizza-adjacent history.

As for why we don’t hear about it, I just assume that pizzerias in the US are not all that hot to trot with an unpronounceable sandwich style that strays from the common, no-brainer sub format. It would take a marketing campaign to usurp the sub.
 
During the panuozzo frenzy happening at our house this week, the lunchtime sandwiches have included:

• Tomato, mayo and furikake*
• Philly-style cheese steak
• tomato, spinach, goat cheese and prosciutto
• prosciutto, Brie and tomato.

 
(*If you’re unfamiliar, furikake is a dry condiment from Japan. It’s often used on rice. It includes elements like seaweed, dried fish, sesame seeds, dried seaweed flakes, sugar, salt, and (yay!) MSG. If you’re on the anti-MSG bandwagon, know that it’s one of the most highly studied food additives in the world, and is clinically proven to not do any of the mythological things people claim it does to them. The Japanese eat it with abandon. It’s even on their tables with the salt and pepper shakers. They use it on their cereal. Yes, that last part I just made up. Do not quote me.)

​ABOVE: A better shot of that panuozzo with tomato, spinach brie and prosciutto. It's tomato season here in the south. Tomatoes galore.  


Why so many tomatoes on the sandwich list? It’s June here along the Gulf coast. That means Creole Tomato Season! We have plump, juicy umami fruits to burn.
 
The tomato & furikake sandwich at the top of the above list was a cold sandwich. The others all went into the oven (which was already hot from baking the bread).
 
The cheesesteak was the only sandwich that required additional cooking: the hot steak, peppers and onions went inside the bread with the cheese before going into the oven.
 
I gotta say, as homemade cheesesteaks go, it was excellent—and all thanks to the bread. The legendary Amarrosso roll of Philly cheesesteak fame is hard to find outside of the Philly area—but I would argue that the panuozzo cheesesteak is a thrilling alternative. Your tastebuds will salute. Your eyes will roll back in your head. Your meat-eating friends will build an altar in your name. In the process, they will violate several religious commandments as well as various rules decreed by the HOA. (Answering to their deity and/or the board is on them. We’re just making bread here.)
 
These sandwiches are so good, you might even make pizza dough just for making the sandwiches. 

ABOVE: A panuozzo fresh from the oven. This is the one that went on to become the messy-looking cheesesteak in an earlier photo.


How do you make panuozzo?
 
There are various was to do this. I’m suggesting the version I enjoy the most: The Clamshell Crunch Bomb. (Yeah, I just named that. Might need to work on it.) These steps are for a standard home oven, not a high-heat specialty pizza oven.
 
[NOTE FOR THE NEWBIE: Generally speaking, beyond dough and sauce, Free The Pizza does not do codified recipes. That’s because pizza is not about recipes, but about patience and practice. You have good judgment. You can exercise that in making sandwiches. And remember one of the key directives in pizza: less is more. That also applies to the sandwiches, both here and elsewhere. Given a choice, I would much rather have a fresh, crusty French baguette, buttered with good, grass-fed butter, and filled with a slice of good ham, a slice of good cheese, and a leaf of good lettuce. It’s a mind-bending flavor bomb. A NY deli sandwich the size of your head has its place. We’re just going for finesse and flavor rather than bulk. But I digress.]
 
Presumably, you’ve got the pizza dough handy. (If you don’t have dough yet, here’s an easy recipe that requires little more than water, flour, salt, yeast and patience.)
 
Before you pole-vault into this, decide what kind of sandwich you want to make. Sometimes, I plan ahead. Other times, it works like this:
 
OPENING FRIDGE DOOR
“Let’s see, I have leftover ribeye and some Oaxaca cheese. If I fry up some onions and garlic, I have a cheesesteak.”
 
Or…
 
OPENING FRIDGE DOOR
“Hmm. That prosciutto needs a purpose. There’s that Brie we forgot to put out for guests last weekend. Organic spinach. Fresh tomatoes. That has to be a sandwich.”
 
However you do it, make sure you have all your sandwich fixings ready to go. That hot bread is going to come out of the oven and you’re going to want to pounce upon it.
 
The size of the dough ball is up to you.
 
I’ve been using 10-ounce/285-gram dough balls that easily stretches to 10 inches or so. The resulting sandwich easily feeds two. Possibly four if they’re not a) gluttonous or b) teenagers. The bigger your doughball, the wider the diameter of the panuozzo, of course. (There’s also nothing to stop you from cutting the fresh-baked bread in half and making two different sandwiches--which is going to happen shortly.)

ABOVE: If that looks like a pizza in process, that's because it could easily be. You just stretch the dough as if for a pizza. This is a 285-gram dough ball stretched to about 11 inches. 


INSTRUCTIONS
 
Making the bread
STAGE ONE: Stretch, oil, fold, bake.
 
Follow all the normal steps for making pizza: temper the dough on the kitchen counter for a couple of hours before baking. Have flour for dusting the work surface and semolina for dusting the peel.

[SIDEBAR: If you're new here and require easy instructions for making a pizza, there are basic steps and simple recipes right here. Of course, you can always buy the Free The Pizza book, linked here and at the bottom of the page.]
 
45 minutes before baking, make sure your steel or stone is in the top third of the oven.
 
Set the oven to bake at 475 degrees and preheat it for 45 minutes, or until the oven has reached temp and the baking surface has had time to heat up as well.
 
(Timing here is all relative. Steel heats faster than stone. If you’re using an upside-down cast-iron pan, that heats faster than steel.)

ABOVE: A stretched dough drizzled with olive oil. One way to control the flow of olive oil in a situation like this is by using a small plastic squeeze bottle. Pouring straight from the liter-sized olive-oil bottle is an exercise fraught with flooding and profanity.
​

When the oven is ready for baking, dust the work surface with flour and stretch your dough. Drizzle olive oil around the top. Fold the dough in half. Place it on the peel and slide it into the oven.

ABOVE: The oiled dough folded in half. After this, it's placed on a peel and launched just as a pizza dough.


I set my timer for 8 minutes. After 5-6 minutes, I turn on the broiler to get a little more color and crunch on the top of the bread. Monitor your baking. No two ovens behave identically.
 
Before removing the baked bread from the oven, I like to check the internal temp with a meat thermometer. It’s so much easier than guessing. Done temp for bread is around 205-210F.
 
Put the hot bread on a cooling rack. Give it a couple of minutes to calm down.
 
On a clean work surface, open your bread like a clamshell. You’ll see all kinds of bubbly, olive-oily goodness inside there. Time to assemble your sandwich.

ABOVE: Panuozzo about halfway through the bake. 


Assembling your sandwich
STAGE TWO: Open, fill, heat (if necessary), and serve

ABOVE: The baked panuozzo opened up and ready for filling action. 

ABOVE: The tomato, spinach, goat cheese and prosciutto sandwich assembled and ready for warming in the oven. (The bread was cut in half for this sandwich. The other half was used for a different sandwich.)

ABOVE: The tomato, spinach, goat cheese and prosciutto sandwich in the oven for a couple of minutes of warming.

ABOVE: A closeup of the finished tomato, spinach, goat cheese and prosciutto sandwich.
​

If you’re making a cold sandwich, like the tomatoes, mayo and furikake, just spread the mayo, sprinkle the furikake and place the tomato slices. Close the clamshell, cut and serve.
 
If it’s a warm sandwich, like the tomato, spinach, goat cheese and prosciutto, assemble the sandwich. Then, place it on a baking pan (I line mine with foil to facilitate cleanup), and slide it into the oven for a couple of minutes.
 
Remember, we’re talking a warm sandwich here, not hot. Gently warming all these ingredients helps them soften and meld into a synergistic flavor bomb like you’ve never had while maintaining a civilized, foody veneer that hides the fact inside you is a hungry wolverine with an evolved palate, waiting to devour that panuozzo as if it were…well, whatever wolverines eat on a fresh, hot bun.)

ABOVE: The cheesesteak filling inside the panuozzo before going into the oven. Note: be sure to distribute your ingredients evenly. Notice from this photo that whoever gets the right-hand side of the sandwich will want to know why he has so damn many peppers, and whoever gets the left-hand side of the sandwich is going to want to know where the hell all his peppers are.


If it’s a hot sandwich, like the cheesesteak, I would already have the sandwich filling hot. My cheesesteak with peppers and onions was hot and fresh from the skillet, cheese partially melted. I put the assembled sandwich in the oven and monitored its progress. Once the Oaxaca cheese was bubbling and liquid (as Oaxaca cheese gets), I pulled it out and allowed it to set for a minute or so be fore slicing and serving to the wolverines.
 
If you’re wondering why I’m using a non-traditional cheese like Oaxaca for a cheesesteak, that’s easy: it’s what I had handy. It’s an excellent melting cheese, with a flavor not unlike mozzarella. I find it a viable and tasty alternative to the traditional Philly cheesesteak options of provolone or Cheez Whiz. Use what gets you jazzed, whether it’s traditional or otherwise. This is your program, baby!

[If you need a cheesesteak recipe, this is an approximation of how I made the one in the photos.]
 
Cold, warm or hot, the common denominator here is simple: hot, fresh bread made by you mere moments before serving the sandwich. The Fabulous Honey Parker is from Philly, and I’ve eaten cheesesteaks all over that town. The one I made here from leftover steak and the “wrong” cheese is one of the best I’ve ever had. The reason is the bread. 

In fact, Honey and I had a lengthy discussion about this sandwich as compared to a traditional Philly cheesesteak. She doesn't think it's a fair comparison, because the meat "wasn't quite right." I sliced it slightly thicker than a traditional Philly cheesesteak because it was going into the oven and I didn't want it to dry out. As a Philly cheesesteak, she gives it a B to a B-plus. But as a sandwich generally, she ranks it an A-minus. The minus is because it needed some acid, and she believes hot cherry peppers or hoagie spread would have made it an A-plus. 

And none of the above critical judgment would have been possible without the bread, which was excellent. 

[SIDEBAR: Shameless spousal promotion moment. Aside from her many talents and her excellent palate, The Fabulous Honey Parker is a novelist. Her hilarious Careful-ish trilogy reads kind of like Friends for the 2020s. It also features one character who makes a lot of pizza at home, and another who creates pizza art photography. Honey has also written a nutty vampire van-life novel that features no pizza whatsoever, as vampires can't eat pizza. But they can still enjoy Jewish guilt and sleeping all day in Walmart parking lots. Who knew? Guaranteed, there is no pizza, but there will be blood. And, if you have Kindle Unlimited, they're all FREE!]
 
At the end of the day, panuozzo is a really simple, enormously satisfying alternative for using leftover pizza dough. It’s fast, it's not fancy, and it makes people happy. (Much like pizza.) It’s also a rapid and sharp learning curve. Even if you were not a pizzamaker and you wanted to try this as a way to raise your sandwich game, I would call it a viable alternative to other sandwich solutions.

​Making bread happen. It’s what’s for dinner. Or lunch.
​
------
 
A lot of big-time professional artisan pizza makers once made their first pizza in a home oven just like yours. You can do it, too. My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. The book is about how to get from zero to pizza using the oven you already have. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than the print editions and has links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here. ​​