West Virginia’s Pepperoni Roll

Pepperoni, at least according to the general consensus, was invented in America. It is an example of salami–which is of course a blanket term for a specific class of Italian salume or “salted meats.” Salume includes whole-muscle meats like prosciutto and capocollo, but salami refers to ground meats, sausages that are cured and fermented and usually air-dried for a period of time. Many articles online echo a claim from the Wikipedia page for pepperoni that it was invented by Italian-American immigrants in New York in 1919–but the same Wikipedia article also quotes a newspaper advertisement from an Anchorage, Alaska newspaper published in October of 1916 that lists pepperoni among other sausages.

The source Wikipedia cites for the 1919 claim is an illustrated children’s book called Marvellous Maps: Our changing world in 40 amazing maps. Among the other claims made by this book is this: “The world is a cat playing with Australia”

The specific claim made about pepperoni is this: “The pepperoni sausage we top our pizza with was created in New York around 1919 and only became widely used in the 1950s when gas ovens became popular.”

“Around 1919” is not a very precise claim. The New York origin makes sense, as the late 19th and early 20th Centuries saw large numbers of Italians immigrating to New York. But if pepperoni had spread across the country far enough by 1916 to be mentioned in an Alaskan newspaper, it must have already existed for some time by then.

Another article on the website America Domani cites an earlier publication yet, a 1908 issue of a defunct Michigan-based magazine called The Gateway that featured an article about the purity of sausages and mentioned pepperoni. I have been unable to locate a copy of the magazine and confirm this for myself. The article goes further and speculates that the heavy use of paprika in pepperoni may indicate an Eastern European influence in its creation. The heavy influx of Italians to New York City around the turn of the century coincided with similar spikes in immigration of Germans and Eastern European Jews, so it does seem likely that this combination could have produced a sausage like pepperoni, which combines finely ground beef and pork, heavily spiced with paprika and red pepper flakes, fermented and air-dried into a sausage that is so shelf-stable it is commonly sold pre-sliced in bags hanging at room temperature near the tomato sauce in grocery stores.

If pepperoni had made its way from New York all the way to Alaska by 1916, it’s no surprise that by 1927 it was a common snack for Italian-Americans in West Virginia. In that year or sometime thereafter, a Calabrian immigrant named Giuseppe Argiro invented the Pepperoni roll at Country Club Bakery in Fairmont, WV. Giuseppe had worked in the coal mines before opening the bakery and noticed that many of the miners would bring along a loaf of bread and a stick of pepperoni to eat while working the mines. He combined the two into a single portable package, baking bread rolls with pepperoni inside, mingling the red rendered pepperoni fat with the soft crumb of the bread in an appealing way. Though the snacks may have originated in home kitchens as suggested by Candace Nelson, the author of The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll, a book collecting observations about the treat from many West Virginians and telling the stories of the many bakeries across the state that now sell the roll.

Earlier versions of the rolls used Italian-style doughs resulting in crustier rolls, but over the intervening years many of the bakeries that churn out the rolls to the tune of many hundreds per day have converted to softer, American-style breads. Some use sliced pepperoni, while many use long thin sticks of pepperoni instead. Cheese has become a popular addition to the pepperoni rolls as well; mozzarella usually, though some bakeries offer pepperjack versions as well.

When I went looking for a recipe for these rolls–they are available for mail-order from a few vendors as well, but I thought it best to try making them myself–I was surprised to see that many home cooks simply make theirs using frozen packages of bread dough or dinner rolls. So I developed my own recipe that I intended to share here. I don’t think I will though, for multiple reasons but largely this: I’m just some schmuck from Illinois. What do I know about pepperoni rolls?

From what I can gather though, each roll is made with about 50 grams worth of slightly sticky dough, rolled out or flattened with fingers to about a 6″ round. These are topped with pepperoni and possibly cheese, then the sides folded over on top, the ends pinched to seal and folded in as well.

I brushed some of these with an egg wash hoping to get a nice brown color but I don’t imagine that to be a necessary or even recommended step. The ones without the egg wash did not look substantially different from the ones with it.

The dough I made was a pizza-style dough with 66% hydration made with King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose flour, with nothing but water, yeast, salt, and a bit of sourdough discard added to it, fermented in the fridge overnight before being split into balls of 45-50 grams each and rolled out into circles for the rolls. I made several pepperoni roll variants with it–using sliced deli pepperoni and pepperoni snack sticks cut into bats about 3″ and 1/4″ thick. I made them without cheese, with mozzarella cheese, and with pepperjack.

The cross-sections show how the fat rendered from the pepperoni found its way into the roll’s crumb, tinting the bread orange–more so with the sliced pepperoni than with the snack sticks, which were leaner than a typical pepperoni. The pepperoni slices I used were not the typical 1″ diameter cup-and-char slices you’d find on a pizza–this was a sandwich-sized pepperoni I ordered from my local Italian deli. The bread itself was fine, chewy like a good pizza crust, with the flavor that comes from a slower fermentation and a bit of sourdough character. The rolls with mozzarella in them were my favorite–the mozzarella seemed to carry the pepperoni flavor better than just bread alone, while the pepperjack cheese overwhelmed the pepperoni flavor to some extent. Overall though I was very pleased with my version of the pepperoni rolls, authentic or no.

But the main reason I don’t want to share my recipe with you is because after making that, I managed to acquire a regular sized 1″ thick link of pepperoni, and thawed some frozen store-bought bread dough, and rolled it out to make pepperoni rolls.

This is what I was shooting for all along. Soft bread, spicy sausage, the orange pepperoni fat soaking into the crumb and oozing out along with the melted cheese. Using pre-made store-bought frozen dough may seem like a cop-out–but for me it delivered the best result.