A recipe.  I hate cooking, but this is very rewarding tastewise and – while a little fiddly – it does not take amazing skillz.  There’s a place in town with awesome pepperoni grinders, but last time I went to get one, I was like, this is not as indulgent and wonderful as I remember it being.  Close, but not quite.  I thought to myself, I could recreate what I like about this at home.

The important thing is that the pepperoni gets hot enough to start leaking that red sauce on your bread, because when toasted up, it’s the thing that sets this apart from any ol’ sandwich.  It’s very nice.  I don’t have a pizza oven and I didn’t want to take the time to do this in my regular oven.  Also not keen for the experimentation involved in getting it right; I find skillet experiments easier to track than oven science.

I don’t often have pepperoni in the house; I’m minimizing meat preservatives in my diet, due to colon cancer history.  But my brother visited to officiate my wedding and left some behind, which is why I had occasion to do this recently.

Ingredients:

• Some bullshit-ass store pepperoni.  Gotta be the cheap non-turkey stuff for a proper amount of fat.
• Sliced bread.  I used franz “classic french” flavor; slightly less worse than the cheapest white bread.
• A wee bit of sliced black olives, enough to cover the bread lightly, shouldn’t be piled overlapping.
• A wee bit of salted butter.  I just take a stick and melt directly onto the pan what I need.
• Enough sliced provolone or mozzarella to cover your sandwiches one deep.
• A wee bit of mayo.
• Optional:  A leaf or two of lettuce.

Tools:

• Stove.
• Non-stick frying pan in very good condition.  Ones with flaking nonstick material are probably giving you cancer, chuck that shit.  I don’t know where my roommate got this new one, but it’s primo.
• Spatula:  Don’t use metal spatulas on non-stick pans.

Steps:

Lay out your bread, as many sandwiches as will fit in your skillet.  I used three bisected slices to make three half-sandwiches, which is as much as reasonably fits in my little pan.

Start the pan heating on low-medium.  Those knobs that go 1-10, I’d say 3.5-4.  Lay out your pepperoni inside the pan, about two deep and roughly in the shapes of your sandwiches.

Open your sandwiches and lay down enough olives to sparsely cover one side.  Over the top of those olives, lay down your cheese, one layer deep.  Feel free to adjust anything.  I don’t care, but sometimes a minimal amount of what you need produces a classier taste, and a less sloppy bite than a big pile of ingredients.

Once the pepperoni has released its red stuff and looks sweaty, flip it to cook the other side.  If the pieces are sticking together, great, makes flipping while maintaining your sandwich shapes easier.  If not, you can just scoop ’em on the sandwiches sloppy style later.

You’re not cooking to get the pepperoni crisp, just to release a modest amount of the fat in it.  Takes a very short time.  Then put it on the sandwiches, on top of the cheese side.

Melt a little butter in the pan, just enough to lightly soak the outer surface of a bread slice.  If it mixes with residual pepperoni fat, great, that tastes awesome.

Take the top slices of your sandwiches and invert them into the pan to get a little butter on them – they should only be in the pan close to an instant – then take them back out and put them butter-side up on the sandwiches again.  You now have sandwiches with no butter on the bottom, just on the top.

Melt a little more butter in the pan, with the same kind of aim – not to drench the bread, just oil it so it doesn’t scorch and so it tastes nice.

Put your sandwiches in the pan, non-buttered side down.  Now you have sandwiches with butter on both sides.

Cover the pan so the cheese will melt better, and put a timer on for 3-4 minutes.  Times surely vary with how big of a pan you’re using, etc.

Uncover and flip the sandwiches.  Hopefully the cheese will be melted enough to keep them from flying to pieces.

Cook uncovered another 3-4 minutes or until cheese looks reasonably melted, mindful not to burn the sandwich.

Take the nearly complete sandwiches off the pan, onto the plate you will use to serve them.  Open up the pepperoni side.  Remember our layers are olives-cheese-pepperoni.  Ideally the olive side will be hard to open because glued down with cheese; the pepperoni side will open right up.  You will see orange-red staining your bread.  Good!

Put a thin layer of mayo on that stained bread.  If you’re using lettuce, put it on the pepperoni side, and when you’re done, close it up and serve immediately.

This is very fatty food, which is why it’s good to not go gonzo with any of the ingredients.  Beware if you have gall trouble.  When you eat it warm, crisp on the outside, warm on the inside, that shit is bomb.  If you eat it quick enough that the lettuce and mayo are still cold while everything else is still hot, it’s kinda like having hot fudge on ice cream – a narrow window of time in which the food is dee-luxe.

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