This sandwich blog post is focused on a:
Korean-spiced cheesy Salisbury steak inside-out pizza sandwich.
Wait. You’ve never heard of one of those?
Neither had I until I mashed up a few other sandwichable concepts to concoct it.
Read along to learn how I make it and get the recipe so you can too.
What is this sandwich?
This inside-out pizza merges three components plus cheese to create a great Voltron-like handheld sandwich-adjacent experience. Those components are: a well-loved American dish with history going back to 1888, plus a fiery sauce that works its way into a beefy gravy, a whole bunch of melty cheese, and a trendy way to use pizza dough in a folded-over handheld form.
That’s a lot of words to describe the following content I can put into an HTML table, which proves useful for yet another sandwich blog post.
| Sandwich Component | |
|---|---|
| Meat | Salisbury steak patty |
| Bread | Folded pizza dough (or panuozzo) |
| Sauce | Korean-spiced beef mushroom gravy |
| Cheese | Shredded Fontina or mozzarella |
Those are the four components we must address to complete this sandwich. First, we will tackle the main protein, or meat, which is Salisbury steak.
What is Salisbury steak?
It’s not a steak.
James H. Salisbury was a physician and chemist who primarily practiced during the mid to late 1800s. Dr. Salisbury probably saved many lives during the American Civil War, but his claim to fame was a ground beef-focused dish that shares his last name.
Salisbury focused a lot of his work on the germ theory of disease, which meant that he spent time trying to prove that various infections and contagious diseases were caused by exposure to certain germs. It’s a bit gross bringing all this up during a sandwich blog, but Dr. Salisbury was convinced that a diet of coffee and steak could help prevent diarrhea that the nation’s troops were occasionally suffering from. He continued along this line to be one of the first to promote a low-carbohydrate diet for weight loss.
Salisbury’s meat-centric focus led him in 1888 to concoct something similar to what we now know of as Salisbury Steak, which is chopped or ground beef mixed with onions and seasonings and served covered by brown sauce or gravy. He might even have been one of the first people to create what would eventually be known as a fad diet, since he would often suggest that Salisbury steak could and should be enjoyed three times a day.
Salisbury steak patty
Even though it’s called a “steak,” a Salisbury steak definitely isn’t a steak like you might be thinking of. It’s a patty of ground beef, which in some cases could be ground from cuts of meat that you might recognize as steak, but it’s basically a meatloaf or a flat meatball mixed with egg, breadcrumbs, and spices, and flattened. The patty is then seared or grilled like you would a burger, and it’s added to a sauce.
Many recipes will have you cook the patties first and then move them out of the pan to rest while you use the drippings and fond left behind from searing the meat in the pan to build a sauce, but in my experience, that doesn’t contribute too much to the actual flavor of the gravy. Especially since, in this case, our sauce (which I will discuss later) is going to be overly flavored with other spices.
At this point, we just need to make a flavored beef patty that will fit in our sandwich. And that actually is a pretty important topic to write about. Since we’re stuffing these patties into a folded-over pizza dough that’s shaped like a half circle, we want to shape our Salisbury steak patties in long rectangles or half-moon shapes that are slightly smaller than the dough you’ll be working with.
But you also need to remember that ground beef patties will shrink a little bit during the cooking process. So I’ve found that attempting to mirror the size of the dough will work just fine because the beef patty will shrink slightly which makes it work perfectly with the size of the folded over dough.
If you just wanted to make a Salisbury steak sandwich, here’s the recipe I shared way back in 2021. I used part of the recipe for creating the meat patty in the sandwich recipe I’m writing about today as well. It’s much further down the page.
Salisbury Steak Sandwich
Not just a tv dinner anymore! Salisbury steak and mushroom gravy are fantastic on a sandwich. Add a slice of cheese if you want to treat yo self!
Get RecipeFolded over or inside-out pizza dough
I’ve written about this dough and the method of turning it into sandwiches. The concept is sort of similar to sandwiches made in Italy called panuozzos, which are made from the same dough that is used to make pizzas. This idea has become fairly trendy in online food content creator circles, and if you follow any of those sorts of accounts on social media, you’ve likely seen something similar over the past couple of years.
Basically, the idea is that you roll out a ball of dough as if you’re making a pizza, and then you lubricate the top with olive oil and sometimes a bit of shredded cheese, and then you fold the dough over on top of itself, creating a semi-circle, and bake it that way. This forms what will basically become a pocket that you can stuff sandwich ingredients into, and because you used olive oil, the two sides of the dough will not stick to each other, so you can easily open to add internal ingredients.
Dough for this recipe is super easy to make and to handle. You can use a stand mixer or mix it up by hand if you want. I’ve done it both ways. I currently choose to use a stand mixer because it saves me a little bit of effort, but it’s not that hard to mix and knead by hand either.
This application makes dough for 4 or 5 folded-over sandwiches. You’ll start with a big batch of dough and let it proof for about an hour or until it’s doubled in size, just like you’re making a batch of buns or a loaf. And then you divide it into equal-sized pieces, shape each one into a taut ball, and directly stash them in the refrigerator for overnight or even up to 5 or 6 days.
I prefer to make five dough balls, which end up weighing around 150 or 155 grams. I typically turn one into a baked pizza dough each day, which ends up with me using this dough, stashed in the fridge, for five days in a row. And it works perfectly fine for at least 6 days like this. I’ve yet to have it last longer than that, but it probably would be ok for a few more days if needed.
As I said above, the concept here is that we roll out a 7-inch dough circle like you were making a pizza or a thick tortilla, and then add and spread a drizzle of olive oil all across the top. Add cheese to one side of the circle and fold it over on top of itself. The dough bakes folded over, and the oil and cheese help the middle part to keep from sticking to itself because the sandwich is made by opening the baked dough up and adding ingredients into the middle of the fold.
Maybe it’s just easier to show you what I mean.
Don’t forget the olive oil lubrication. I did once, and the dough ends up baking together and sticking, so it’s harder to open up.
Warning: adding too much cheese might lead to a bit of overflow. The tastiest kind of overflow. Just be careful of the lava-like heat.
My recipe for these inside-out pizza sandwiches requires a baking process and then a broiling process. You can skip the broiling if you don’t care how crispy the exterior of the dough looks or how brown it looks. But I think it’s fairly important. If you don’t have a broiler, you can simply keep the oven on bake and move the baking dough to the top rack closer to the top of the oven, where it will get a bit more color.
Warning: Reynolds, the company that makes a lot of baking products like parchment paper, wax paper, or aluminum foil in the United States, says that parchment paper is rated to 425 degrees F. We’re baking these inside-out pizza sandwiches at 450. This means, in theory, we’re breaking some rules. I’ve found in my cooking experiments that parchment paper is just fine at 450, but what you really should be aware of is that broiling in most ovens takes place above 450.
My toaster oven classifies broiling at 500, which is well above Reynolds’ suggested temperature cut-off. You can look above at a piece of parchment that has been baked and then broiled. You can see it’s starting to brown a little bit. I try to remove the parchment before the broiling process if possible. The pizza dough should be set at this point, and it should be easy to slip the paper out if you’re careful.
Here’s my dough recipe. The full ingredient list and directions are in the sandwich recipe at the bottom of this blog post, but just in case you want to bookmark it or save it for later, this is how you can make the dough.
New York style pizza dough
This is less of a recipe for pizza and more of a recipe for the dough that I use and how it should be cooked. It's up to you to figure out what you want to top it with, but I think you probably already have an idea.
Get RecipeMushroom gravy + Korean-style fire paste
This part of the sandwich recipe is a blend of two different things. None of this is traditional to any culture or recipe. It’s just a mashup of two different recipes that I have made and shared before into one thing that turned out really good and tasty. First, we have to talk about the base for the sauce or gravy.
Beefy mushroom gravy
This sauce starts as the gravy you’ll traditionally find smothering a Salisbury steak patty.
I have not made Salisbury steak since March of 2021, when I wrote about and created a very simple Salisbury steak sandwich recipe. Technically, I didn’t make Salisbury steak gravy for this sandwich either, because while I started with the base of a Salisbury steak gravy, it eventually merged into something different with the addition of the Korean-style fire paste. Because of all of this, I don’t actually have any photos from this attempt that weren’t changed and altered by the fire paste. So all of these photos are pictures I took in 2021 that I never shared in that original blog post.
This gravy starts with a base of sautéed mushrooms and onion, thickened with a little flour and beef broth, and seasoned to create a savory sauce.
Once you have the gravy all thickened up and reduced a little bit, it’s nice to tuck the cooked Salisbury steak patties into the sauce to make sure that everything is all warmed up to the same temperature and ready to serve.
If you’re serving Salisbury steak as a main dish without the spicy fire paste (that I’m writing about next), I would suggest serving it on top of a bed of creamy mashed potatoes or rice.
Korean fire paste
The non-traditional addition I added to this Salisbury steak gravy recipe is a spiced-up paste that is loaded with Korean spices. This combination of two Korean spiced products you can get at your local Asian market (or online), and they, plus a few other things like ginger, garlic and honey, corn syrup, or rice syrup, all are the base for a buldak chicken marinade.
I’ve written about chicken buldak or Korean Fire chicken with cheese before and even turned it into a sandwich. During that process, I learned how easy and well this particular marinade or paste can work in different situations, like in my Fire cheesesteak that turned out to be a real banger of a sandwich.
Well, it turns out this marinade also works great as an addition to a mushroom gravy. It does turn the gravy into a fairly spicy version, but it’s not so spicy that it will send you running for a glass of milk. It might be too spicy for your grandmother, though.
Cheesey
I didn’t think too hard about the cheese portion of this sandwich. I wanted something that was shredded and creamy, so I went with Fontina. Nothing about this sandwich is traditional, but if I wanted to be a bit more true to the roots of one of the sandwich concept components, I could have gone with low-moisture mozzarella because that is what is typically used in Korean fire chicken with cheese (aka cheese buldak).
But Fontina more than met the expectations of adding a bit of cheese to the experience, and I would suggest it if you try this in your kitchen. Mozzarella, Swiss, or provolone would be good alternatives. Just try to shred it yourself.
Speaking of cheese
I also turned all these ingredients into some personal, lunch-sized pizzas that I baked in my toaster oven from start to finish in about 20 minutes. This time includes preheating the toaster for about 10 minutes and then baking the pizza on a pizza stone for about 5 minutes at 450 F, and then switching over to the Broil function to brown the top for an additional 4 minutes or so.
While the toaster is preheating, I stretch out the dough, fresh from the fridge, and top it with all the ingredients. Granted, this 20-minute period requires you to already have some sauce prepared, which in this case was the spicy Salisbury steak mushroom gravy. I placed small, raw balls of ground beef on top, which cooked thoroughly during the baking process.
On top of the meat, I added at least an ounce of shredded mozzarella, and after the pizza was finished baking, I topped everything with a little chopped cilantro for color.
Baking pizza on a pizza stone in a toaster oven will not give you the perfect bottom crust; mine was rather pale, but the top gets nice and crunchy, and because it’s had an overnight rise, the crust is plenty flavorful and nice to eat on its own.
The inside-out pizza sandwich
Here’s a bunch of photos of this sandwich. I did not create a “sandwich assembly” area here like I normally do for my sandwiches because this one is almost too easy to build.
First, you open the dough and then you add a layer of sauce and top it with the seared Salisbury steak patty that’s topped with a bunch of melty cheese. Then you just need to make sure you don’t waste any sauce and get the patty fully covered in spicy mushroom gravy.
Scroll through the photos and get the full recipe below. Beware, this one is a bit complicated, but I did my best to make the whole process as easy as I could.
I would suggest making the dough and the spicy mushroom gravy in advance, as much as a couple of days before sandwiching. Then, when the oven is preheating or baking the pizza dough, you can sear off the Salisbury steak patty.
And then melt the cheese on top of the patty and heat up the spicy mushroom gravy in the same pan while the pizza dough finishes cooking.
Spicy, cheesy Salisbury steak inside-out pizza sandwich
This cheesy and beefy sandwich is spicy, savory, and folded over and wrapped by a piece of chewy pizza dough that contrasts well with the sandwich ingredients. Note: this recipe is a little complicated, please read the associated sandwich blog post before tackling the recipe.
Ingredients:
Pizza dough- 450 grams bread flour (3 3/4 cups or all-purpose flour)
- 12 grams sugar (1 tablespoon)
- 11 grams salt (2 teaspoons)
- 3 grams instant yeast (1 teaspoon)
- 284 grams water (1 1/4 cups)
- 12 grams vegetable oil (1 tablespoon)
- 1⁄4 cup gochugaru, coarse flakes
- 1 1⁄2 tablespoons gochujang
- 2 1⁄2 tablespoons corn syrup, rice syrup, or honey
- 1 1⁄2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 1⁄2 teaspoons soy sauce
- 3 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 teaspoon ginger, minced
- 1 pound ground beef (80/20 or 85/15 - either is fine)
- 2 tablespoons ketchup
- 1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
- 1 whole egg, beaten
- 1⁄2 cup bread crumbs
- 3 tablespoons salted butter
- 8 ounces sliced button mushrooms (about 10 or 12 mushrooms)
- 1 cup diced onion
- 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 3 cups beef broth
- 1 tablespoon ketchup
- 2 to 3 tablespoons fire paste (from above)
- 1 teaspoon cornstarch
- 1 tablespoon water
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 seven-inch dough round, per sandwich (from above)
- 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 cup spicy mushroom gravy, per sandwich (from above)
- 1 half-pound salisbury steak patty (from above)
- 2 to 3 ounces shredded cheese (I used fontina, but mozzarella works great)
- cilantro (for garnish)
Directions:
Make the 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. You can do this by hand as well, just stir to combine everything and knead on a surface for about 8 minutes until you have a smooth dough.
Shape the dough into a ball and place it in a lightly oiled sealed container in your fridge for 1 hour. After an hour, divide the dough into 4 or 5 equal-sized pieces. If you shape it into 4 pieces, the sandwiches will be considerably larger. Shape all your dough pieces into balls and place them in a sealed container in the fridge until ready to use. The dough will work after being in the fridge for up to 5 days.
If you're cooking immediately, leave a dough ball on the counter while you get the chorizo and onions ready.
Korean-style fire paste: add the gochugaru, gochujang, corn syrup, vegetable oil, soy sauce, minced garlic, and minced ginger to a small bowl and mix well. This is your fire paste that is added to the spicy mushroom gravy. It will not all be used in the gravy, but you can use this paste in any application where you'd want to marinate meat or add extra spice to a dish. Store in the fridge for up to a month.
Salisbury steak patties: mix ground beef, ketchup, hoisin sauce, beaten egg, and bread crumbs in a large bowl. Works best when you use your hands. Try not to overmix. When all ingredients seem incorporated, form your patties. I find this easiest to do with a parchment-lined sheet pan.
Shape the meat mixture into four patties in shapes that are either a long rectangle (about 7 inches long and 2.5 inches wide). Or a half circle with a diameter of around 7 inches.
Place beef patties covered with plastic wrap into the fridge while you make your sauce.
Spicy mushroom gravy: add butter to a pan on medium heat. When butter has melted, add your diced onion and sliced mushrooms. Cook the mushrooms and onion for around 10 minutes until the mushrooms start to get soft.
Add the two tablespoons of flour and stir in with the mushrooms and onion. When you can no longer see white flour (2 to 3 minutes) you can add the ketchup, Korean-style fire paste (that you made above), and beef broth.
Raise the heat on the pan to high until the sauce starts to simmer. Add 1 teaspoon of cornstarch to a small bowl with 1 tablespoon of water. Mix to combine well. This is a cornstarch slurry. Once it's fully combined, add it to the pot and simmer for 10 minutes until the sauce has thickened.
Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper if you think it needs some. If you are not immediately making a sandwich, you can store the sauce in the fridge for up to a week. If you are making a sandwich now, just move the warm sauce to the side. It will be used and warmed back up during sandwich assembly.
Sandwich time: when it's sandwich time, preheat your oven to 450 F (232 C). If you own a pizza steel or pizza stone, add it to the middle rack while the oven is preheating. If not, you can just add a sheet pan to the oven and let it preheat.
Salisbury steak: at this point, if your sauce is still in a pan, you can go ahead and start cooking the beef. If you do not have another pan, pour your sauce into a bowl and put it aside until the beef is done.
Add 1 beef patty to a pan over medium-high heat (if cooking more patties, just double, triple, or quadruple the amounts in the Sandwich assembly area. Cook each patty for 3 minutes per side. Once your patty is cooked, fully remove the pan from the heat and allow the patty to rest while the dough is baked. You will heat the patty again with sauce and cheese once the dough is ready.
Dough baking: shape one dough ball on the counter with your hands into a circle around 7 inches in diameter. If you choose to make 4 dough balls instead of 5, you should shoot for 9 to 10 inches in diameter.
Once you have a circle, add 2 teaspoons of olive oil to the dough and spread it all around evenly across the top of the dough. Add half of the shredded cheese on top of the oil on one side of the circle. Fold the dough over the cheese into a semicircle and place it on a piece of parchment paper. The oil helps keep the folded-over part from sticking to itself. This allows you to open it up when fully cooked.
Carefully with a spatula or your hands, transfer the dough onto parchment paper into the oven on top of the pizza stone/steel or hot sheet pan.
Cook for 4 to 5 minutes or until the top of the dough is getting puffy and the folded-over part is starting to separate. At this point the dough should be finished baking, but I suggest turning off the oven and turning on the broiler for 2 to 3 minutes to brown the top. Just be careful and don't walk away because it will burn quickly under the broiler. Pull it out when it looks dark enough for your tastes.
Remove the cooked dough to a rack or plate to cool and get ready to sandwich.
Sandwich assembly: place the pan with the Salisbury steak back on the stove over medium heat. Warm the patty up for a minute or two, and then flip. Immediately top the steak patty with the rest of the shredded cheese.
Add a couple of big spoonfuls of spicy mushroom gravy to the pan. Warm everything for an additional minute or two before spooning the sauce from the pan on top of the meat and cheese.
Open the folded pizza dough very carefully because the inside will be hot. Add a few spoons of sauce from the hot pan, and then slide in the Salisbury steak, topped with cheese and the rest of the sauce.
Garnish with chopped or torn cilantro and serve.
Notes:
This recipe is a little bit complicated. If you have questions or want to read more about all the parts of this recipe, please check out and read the associated sandwich blog post that hopefully will add context to all the components of the sandwich.
Check back next week
Next week we’re travelling to the world of Bob’s Burgers, but we’re not making a burger. Get ready.
