This somewhat silly but still very tasty sandwich started with the concept of pulled pork. In the past, I have created an easy oven-roasted pulled pork that attempts to simulate Eastern NC style barbecue without a smoker, and that recipe concept works great, but I’ve never actually shared how easy pork shoulder is to cook in the slow cooker, so I decided to create a very simply flavored pork recipe that could work with any sauce or even sauceless, if you just wanted some tender pork.
While I was thinking about pulled pork and the ingredients that I could pair with it, my first thought was pepperoncinis—because we had some in the fridge for pizza night—and my brain immediately went to pepperoni next (again, because of the pizza), and then logically, with pizza on the brain, the next step is pineapple. With all these ingredients that start with P and also the pizza lingering in the back of my mind, I felt we could make one of those panuozzo-style sandwiches, but in the more Italian style, and all the ingredients started with the letter P.
Other pizza dough/panuozzo content
I’ve shared 2 panuozzo sandwiches before, but both of those have been in the “shape the dough into a flat round, fold it over, bake, and then open up and stuff ingredients into them.” For this particular sandwich, I wanted to try the more Italian panuozzo style, where the pizza dough is shaped simply, baked flat, and then sliced open like a ciabatta roll for the ingredients to get stuffed inside.
When I was devising this sandwich, I definitely could have fit way more than 7 ingredients that start with P, but I restrained myself to make a sandwich that I felt was worth eating and sharing. In the next section, I outline the sandwich I concocted. Let me know on social media or in the comments below if I missed any ingredients that start with P that you believe would help the sandwich.
What is this sandwich?
This is a sandwich made with slow-cooked, pepperoncini-flavored pulled pork1 that is seared in a pan along with some pineapple chunks2 and more sliced pepperoncinis3 to give that sweetness a balance of salt and tartness. Then the slightly crusty and warm meat, fruit, and pepper is added inside of some roughly shaped and baked bread rolls made from pizza dough4, and topped with slices of pepperoni5 and melty provolone6. The whole sandwich gets a sprinkling of chopped parsley7 as a garnish to make everything look healthy.
That’s 7 Ps.
Could I have added more ingredients that start with a P? Yes. I did actually add black pepper to one version of the sandwich, but there’s also pepper in the pulled pork, so I felt like it was a free ingredient and didn’t add it to the full count. Could I have added something like pesto? Maybe peach jam? Sure, I could have added more, but I was also trying to balance a sandwich with contrasting and complementary textures and flavors that made sense. Post up in the comments below if you have an idea of another component that starts with P that might have worked well with the rest?
7P = comet?
7P/Pons-Winnecke is a comet in our solar system that orbits the sun every 6.3 years. Sometimes called 7P and/or Comet Pons-Winnecke, it was discovered by Jean Louis Pons in June of 1819. 7P passed within 6 million kilometers of Earth in June 1927, but it should not come any closer than that in the 21st century. You can learn more about comet 7P and the potential that this comet might get a flyby from the European Space Agency’s Comet Interceptor mission in 2033 over on Wikipedia.
Now that we know what sandwich we’re making, we need to focus on the bread.
#1 Pizza dough bread rolls/panuozzo
Basically, this is bread made from pizza dough. It’s a bit chewy and isn’t supposed to be a light, fluffy roll or bun. It’s meant to have some chew that works well in this case with the softer-textured pulled pork and melty cheese.
I make my sandwiches with leftover pizza dough, or in the case of this sandwich, I doubled my pizza dough recipe so that my wife and I enjoyed a pizza night, and then I used the rest to make some bread rolls for these sandwiches.
This pizza dough recipe suggests a 12-hour cold ferment in the refrigerator, but you can (and I have) allow these dough balls to sit in the fridge for much longer than overnight. The sandwiches I made in this blog post used dough that spent close to 36 hours in the fridge before being shaped and baked.
I like to weigh my dough portions out, but you could just pull off random amounts and shape them into flat rectangles. I typically think 150 grams is right for this application, and if you use my recipe, that will get you 5 bread rolls.
Shape and roll each dough portion out until they are about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick, and about a 5 to 6 inches long and 3 inches wide oval. These will rise up, but they will not be super tall due to the ratio of flour to water in the dough. These will be chewy with a nice crust on the exterior, similar to the crust of a NY-style pizza.
The easiest way to bake these is to put them on a sheet pan and bake them like you’d bake hamburger buns or something like cookies. But I find I get a lot better crust on the bottom and even top if I bake them on a preheated pizza stone. The recipe covers this and explains both ways of baking, just a bit to make things understandable.
Be careful, because parchment paper will burn at higher temperatures. I bake for 5 minutes or until the rolls are mostly set, and then I do that magician-with-a-tablecloth trick and reach in and carefully yank out the parchment before it has a chance to burn.
Basically, my pizza dough recipe makes 2 twelve to fourteen-inch pizzas. You could turn one of those into a pizza and save the other parts of the dough in the fridge to make 2 or 3 pizza dough rolls. Here’s the pizza dough recipe. Just below is the recipe to turn these same ingredients into sandwich rolls.
New York style pizza dough
24 hours and 34 minutesHere’s my new pizza dough bread roll recipe to use in this sandwich. You can also do this with store-bought pizza dough if you want. Just portion it into about 125 to 150 gram portions. If you do not want to bake and you’re planning on buying bread, try to get a baguette or something with some chew that will stand up to the super soft pulled pork and melty cheese.
Pizza dough sandwich rolls
Here's a simple roll recipe that I will make when I'm also making pizza dough for pizza nights. I typically get 5 rolls out of this batch, but you can make 1 twelve-to fourteen-inch pizza and also 2 or 3 sandwich rolls out of this dough recipe.
Get Recipe7P = marketing framework?
7Ps or Seven Ps is not just a newly invented sandwich; it’s also some sort of marketing jargon. The framework for the Seven Ps started out as 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion, and then someone who thinks about this stuff way more than I do invented 3 more Ps: People, Process, and Physical Evidence. I don’t know what any of this stuff means, but you can read more about the Seven Ps on Wikipedia.
#2 Pepperoncini pulled pork from the slow cooker
I’ve never shared a slow cooker pulled pork recipe before because I typically will cook them fairly slowly in the oven. But this one requires almost no hands-on time, and it is one of those 8 to 10 hours on low heat setting sort of recipes.
Basically, I add salt, ground black pepper, pepperoncinis, and a bit of the pepperoncini liquid or brine from the jar. The resulting meat isn’t super spicy or anything, but it has a slight vinegary, touch-of-spice thing going on, and like most pulled pork recipes, the resulting meat is very savory and tender.
I did not create a full recipe for just the pork, but I may in the future. The recipe is, however, mixed into the full sandwich recipe down below. But honestly, you don’t need a recipe. Just look at the photo up above, it’s literally just a 3 to 4-pound boneless pork shoulder, about 10 or 11 jarred pepperoncini, 1/4 cup of pepperoncini brine (or about half the jar), and then a teaspoon of salt and around the same amount of black pepper. Put it in the slow cooker for 8 hours on low, and you’re in business. You can throw out the pepperoncinis or chop them up and leave them in the pork. Just remember to remove the stems because they’re no fun to eat.
I also used the leftover pulled pork to make the following two sandwiches with some of the leftover ingredients in this sandwich and some store-bought Hawaiian buns.
#3 Pepperoni slices
I wrote about a riff on a Cuban sandwich during the summer of last year, where I paired slow-roasted pulled pork with spicy salami, and that combination worked so well that I figured pulled pork and pepperoni would be the star of this P-focused sandwich. The pork really isn’t that spicy from the addition of pepperoncini, and most pepperoni isn’t that spicy either, but I did buy a spicy version that added a whole lot of heat when I used those.
I added five or six pepperoni slices on top of the crisped pulled pork during the broiling process while I was melting the cheese. This heated up the slices, causing them to cup up a little and release some of their oil into the rest of the sandwich.
7P = Steam Locomotive?
In the 1940s-60s, British Rail classified their steam locomotive types using a number and a letter. The number, ranging from 0 to 9, designates the power of the locomotive, with 9 being the highest powered. The letter will either be an F or a P, standing for freight and passenger, respectively. This means that there were train engines that were designated 7P for a fairly high-powered steam locomotive that pulls passenger trains. You can read more about the classification of British Railways steam engines over at Wikipedia.
#4 Pineapple
Pineapple and pepperoni are a well-known and sometimes well-disliked combination that you might find on pizza menus, and the addition of the sweetness really gave this sandwich some depth.
I bought a whole pineapple, but you don’t really need to do that because you will have a lot of leftover sliced fruit. You can buy pre-cut pineapple in the produce section of most grocery stores. I would personally go ahead and spend the little extra money and do that instead of prepping a whole pineapple and storing it in my fridge.
For this particular sandwich recipe, you just need some small bite-sized pieces of pineapple that we add to the pork as we’re crisping it up in a skillet. That means the sweet pineapple has a bit of time to lightly caramelize while the pork is warming.
I’m not an expert on breaking down a pineapple, but here’s what I do if you’re not sure what to do. First, cut off the top and bottom. Then cut the pineapple from top to bottom, right through the center core. Then I will usually cut the core out with a triangular cut from top to bottom to remove the core. Then you can slice off the rough outside, and then you’re left with just good pineapple pieces that you can cut into whatever shapes you desire.
#5 Provolone cheese
I did something weird with the provolone cheese. The original plan was to just buy pre-packaged sliced provolone, but the small grocery I visited didn’t actually have any—there was a space for it, but they were out. So instead, I went to the deli with the thought that I would have them cut me off a block of provolone, and then I could grate it since I was planning to broil/melt the cheese onto the sandwich. At the last second, I decided I wanted slices of cheese instead of grated cheese, so I ended up slicing it into thinish, short slices of provolone that I shingled on the bread.
7p = short arm of a chromosome?
7p (small p) could mean the 7th chromosome out of 23 pairs that exist in humans. The p designator would refer to the small arm of the chromosome, while q is the longer arm of each chromosome. So, 7p is the short arm of each of the pair of chromosomes that make up between 5 and 5.5 percent of a cell’s DNA.
#6 Pepperoncinis
I use pepperoncinis in two spots with this recipe. If you’ve been reading along, you know that I already put them directly into the slow cooker with the pork shoulder, but I also cut 1 or 2 pepperoncinis into very small pieces and add them into the skillet while the pulled pork and pineapple are cooking.
I personally do not think that pepperoncinis are super spicy. But they do add just a bit of spice and vinegar to the slow-cooked pork. The additional sliced peppers added to the skillet right before sandwich assembly add some tart, pickle-y elements along with a little additional texture to the sandwich.
#7 Parsley
I’m old enough to remember going to a restaurant and ordering a burger or steak, and the plate would often have some of that weird curly parsley on the side. That’s because those restaurateurs knew that people eat with their eyes even before they smell or taste the food. It’s important to make our food look appetizing.
The parsley that most of us buy these days to use in pesto or chopped up as a garnish is either called flat leaf parsley or Italian parsley, and it’s not quite the same as its cousin that was placed beside your baked potato at the Golden Corral.
Basically, this starts-with-P ingredient adds very little flavor to the 7P sandwich, but it does add something to the way the finished sandwich looks. We all evaluate the food before we eat it, and a piece of the enjoyment of what we’re eating is how the food looks.
You can skip the addition of parsley and enjoy a 6P sandwich if you’d like, but I think the visuals matter. Because of that, when I’m making or creating sandwiches, I will typically try to add some sort of green component if possible.
Sandwich assembly and cooking process
To build the sandwich, I sear a sandwich-sized portion of pulled pork in a medium pan over medium heat with small pieces of pineapple and chopped up pepperoncinis. Then I move the meat, fruit, and peppers to the bottom slice of pizza dough roll and top that with slices of pepperoni. Layer provolone cheese on the top piece of bread and broil both the top and bottom open-faced until the meat is crispy and the cheese is melty. Then add chopped parsley and close up the sandwich.
7P = Doctor Who?
The production code for the final serial of the original run of Doctor Who was known as 7P. This story was titled Survival, and it was the final story of the 26-year run, ending with actor Sylvester McCoy portraying the Seventh Doctor in December 1989. Doctor Who, as a television show, resumed as Series 1 sixteen years later in 2005, with actor Christopher Eccleston taking on the role of the Ninth Doctor, since there had been a made-for-TV movie featuring the Eighth Doctor in the 90s between the two series.
Recipe and photos of the 7P sandwich
Here are a few photos of this 7P sandwich, and the full recipe is just below. How many other ingredients that start with P would you have added?
The 7P sandwich
Have you ever had a sandwich that included more than 7 components that all started with the letter P? This one features chewy pizza dough bread rolls, tender, savory pepperoncini pulled pork, sweet, lightly caramelized pineapple, crispy pepperoni, melty provolone, and a light garnish of parsley to make things healthy.
Ingredients:
Pizza dough bread rolls- 450 grams bread flour (3 3/4 cups)
- 12 grams sugar (1 tablespoon)
- 11 grams salt (2 teaspoons)
- 3 grams instant yeast (1 teaspoon)
- 12 grams vegetable oil (1 tablespoon)
- 284 grams water (1 1/4 cups)
- 3 to 4 pound pork shoulder, boneless
- 8 to 10 pickled pepperoncini from a jar
- 1⁄4 cup pepperoncini liquid or brine
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1⁄2 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1 pizza dough bread rolls, sliced (from above)
- pepperoncini pulled pork (from above)
- 1⁄4 cup pineapple, in bite sized pieces
- 1 to 2 pepperoncinis, from a jar, stemmed and diced
- 1 to 2 slices of provolone
- 5 to 7 pepperoni slices
- parsley, chopped for garnish
Directions:
Make the pizza dough: combine all ingredients in your stand mixer and, using the dough hook, knead for 6 to 8 minutes or until a smooth dough forms. If you do not have a stand mixer, combine the ingredients in a large bowl, stir until everything comes together, and then knead the dough with your hands for about 10 minutes.
Shape the dough into a ball and place it in a lightly oiled sealed container in your fridge for 24 hours or overnight.
30 minutes before time to bake: remove the dough from the refrigerator and preheat your oven to 450 F (230 C). If you have a pizza stone or pizza steel, add it to the oven on one of the middle racks to preheat.
Weigh and portion the dough into 5 or 6 equal-sized portions. On a lightly floured counter or surface, roll each dough portion into a tight ball and let them all rest on the counter for 10 minutes under a clean kitchen towel.
Shape and bake: After ten minutes, carefully shape each dough ball into a fairly flat oval about 5 or 6 inches long and 3 inches wide. If you are using a pizza stone or steel, add your shaped dough portions to a piece of parchment on top of your pizza peel or on top of an upside-down sheet pan. Depending on the size of your pizza stone/steel, you will likely have to bake these in batches of 2 or 3 dough portions at a time. You're going to carefully transfer the dough by sliding it on top of the parchment to the stone or steel in the hot oven. If you are not using a pizza stone or steel, place each piece of shaped dough onto a sheet pan that's lined with parchment paper.
Bake the rolls for 15 to 20 minutes or until the exterior appears nice and golden brown. Note: parchment paper might burn at 450 F, so it's probably a good idea to check it at about the 5-minute mark. If it's turning dark colors, you can carefully yank it out since the rolls should be mostly set at this time.
Pepperoncini pulled pork: add the pork shoulder, pepperoncinis, pepperoncini brine, salt, and black pepper to a slow cooker and cook on low for 8 to 10 hours. When the time is up, turn off the heat and allow the pork to cool for 30 minutes or so. Shred the pork with tongs or a couple of forks, remove and discard all the pepperoncini stems. Store in a sealed container in the refrigerator until time to sandwich.
Warm the pork: when it's time to sandwich, add a sandwich-sized amount of pulled pork to a medium skillet over medium heat. Add in some bite-sized pieces of pineapple and chop up a new pepperoncini, and add both to the pulled pork in the skillet. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes or until the pork is lightly browned and the pineapple has also taken on some brown color and is starting to look crispy at the edges.
Build the sandwich: add the warmed pork, pineapple, and pepperoncini to the bottom of a sliced pizza dough roll. Top with slices of pepperoni. Add slices of cheese to the inside of the top of the roll and place both the bottom roll and top roll on a sheet pan under your oven broiler until the cheese is melty and the pepperoni is crispy. If you do not have a broiler, you can place the sandwich in a 350 F (175 C) oven for about 5 minutes until the cheese has melted.
Remove the sandwich from the oven, sprinkle some chopped parsley on top of the pork and pepperoni, and then close the sandwich and serve.
Check back next week
Next week we’re making another sub. But I think I’m going to change up the bread slightly, and we’re turning what’s typically a cold sub into a hot sub and we might be angering the entire Italian-American community. Check back to see what I mean.
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