Hoagie Rolls

When you’re building a hoagie sandwich, it’s easy to focus on the medley of savory deli meats, cheeses, and condiments, but for a truly great hoagie the namesake roll is just as important as what’s inside. A hoagie roll supports a hefty amount of meats, cheeses, condiments, and toppings and to do so it needs to retain its overall structure while the interior remains soft and slightly chewy for a pleasant eating experience. If it’s too squishy or lacks structure,the roll will either start to fall apart, or worse yet, when you sink your teeth into it all the fillings will just slide out the back. A well-made hoagie roll should have a tight interior crumb that’s enclosed by a paper-thin crust that’s easy to bite through. A perfect hoagie roll’s exterior should be so light and crisp that it flakes onto your plate while you’re enjoying it—if there’s no messy crumb trail of your hoagie left behind, then it probably wasn’t a great hoagie roll. Sure, you could pick up a bag of rolls at your local grocery store, but for a truly sublime hoagie experience, you need freshly baked rolls. 

Sandwiches built on fresh, perfect hoagie rolls were a staple of my weekend routine while I was growing up in Philadelphia. After my Saturday morning swim lessons one of my parents and I would often swing by our local corner store, Tilden Market, to pick the ingredients for lunchtime deli sandwiches for our family of five. Like many corner stores in Philly, Tilden Market made great hoagies to order, but my frugal parents always bought all the fixings—bread, deli meats, sliced provolone, a tomato, a head of lettuce, and, of course, Herr’s potato chips—to assemble our sandwich plates at home. While my mom or dad would wait at the deli counter for the sliced meat and cheese, I’d head over to the bread bins and pick out the rolls. These hoagie rolls were freshly baked from a local bakery and a far cry from their packaged supermarket counterparts.

Now that I live outside the mid Atlantic area, I don’t have a local hoagie shop to pick up freshly baked hoagie rolls. Sure, supermarket sub or long rolls will do in a pinch, but they’re a pale shade of the freshly baked rolls that I grew up enjoying. The supermarket versions are often dull in flavor with a cottony, dry, and squishy interior that lacks enough structure to fully support a sandwich and is enclosed in a soft crust that doesn’t flake at all.

Through rounds of testing and tasting dozens and dozens of rolls I've developed what I believe to be the ultimate hoagie roll recipe—and it requires just a handful of ingredients and a mere 30 minutes of active prep time. Here’s a breakdown of the ingredients, mixing method, and shaping technique I use to make bakery-worthy hoagie rolls at home. Biting into one brings me right back to Tilden Market, and I can practically hear my siblings bickering over who gets the last slice of roast beef.

The Key Ingredients for the Best Hoagie Rolls

In the world of breads, there are two basic categories: lean and enriched. Lean breads such as French bread and hard rolls have a chewier texture with more bite and a hard crust, while enriched ones such as brioche and challah, are, well, richer. But this hoagie roll recipe actually tiptoes that line and has characteristics of both a lean and an enriched bread. At first taste and glance, these hoagie rolls have the signature white color, tight crumb, and mild flavor of a lean bread, somewhat similar to many other sandwich breads. But the hoagie roll’s balance of a tender yet sturdy texture with a hint of developed rich flavor is achieved by enriching the dough slightly. Here’s a breakdown of what each ingredient contributes to the bread, starting with the flour.

Bread Flour: Since I add fat for tenderness and elasticity, I need to balance that with a higher protein flour because this is a bread that needs some heft. It’s a balancing act to get a tender dough with a slight chew and a uniform and tight interior crumb, and the higher protein ratio in bread flour (12 to 14%) compared to all-purpose flour (9 to 11% percentage) ensures that the dough is strong enough to stretch without tearing as air bubbles form and develop inside the dough during proofing. When I made the dough with all-purpose flour during my tests, the dough was noticeably more slack and was unable to get the proper gluten development needed to support the structure in the tightly shaped individual long rolls.

Fat: A small amount of fat—vegetable oil in this case—tenderizes the dough. The fat coats the gluten strands and makes both the crumb and the crust more tender; it also makes the crumb more finely grained for an even and smooth surface to smear your preferred condiment across. Where the high gluten bread flour helps to develop structure, the fat balances that so the interior is sturdy but still soft. 

Another perk to enriching the dough is that breads that are made with fat usually don't dry out as quickly as unenriched breads.

While fat is used for texture in these rolls, it shouldn’t impart an assertive flavor. Hoagie rolls should not have a discernible buttery or oily richness or flavor. So I prefer to stick to a neutral oil, such as the vegetable oil in this recipe, and limit the recipe to a small enough quantity of oil that it provides all of the listed benefits without tipping the dough into noticeably enriched territory.

Egg: One egg goes a long way in this dough. The egg makes the bread lighter and fluffier, without it tasting overtly “eggy” or enriched like brioche or challah, both of which use many eggs. The fat in the yolk inhibits gluten formation just as the oil does; the effect is subtle, loosening the dough only slightly to expand and puff up more. The egg white on the other hand acts as a coagulant and sets the crumb, making it pleasantly bouncier. The result is a hoagie roll that has just the right amount of chew and strength while remaining tender enough to enjoy bite after bite.

The roll’s crust is also greatly affected by the egg. The proteins and fat in the egg promote the Maillard reaction in the outer crust and help it turn crispier. Adding an egg to the dough also adds a hint of richness from the yolk's fat.

Yeast: Yeast is another critical component of the dough, responsible for producing the gas that will raise and aerate the rolls. But just as I had to shift from all-purpose flour to bread flour to maintain the necessary gluten level given the presence of fat in this dough, I also have to adjust yeast quantities. This is because yeast is impacted by the presence of fat as well, fermenting more slowly. While we can always proof for longer to give the yeast extra time, we can also simply increase the amount of yeast (in baker's percentages, I've bumped the yeast up to 1.8% from the more typical 1.5% of most white sandwich bread recipes). 

Salt: Salt not only builds great flavor in bread, it also strengthens the gluten structure. Gluten proteins naturally repel one another, but the chloride ions in salt help them overcome that repulsion and stick together. The activity of the salt tightens the gluten network so the dough is firmer and easier to shape and hold its shape during baking.

Sugar: The small amount of sugar in this recipe boosts the yeast and kickstarts the fermentation/proofing process. At just .5%, the baker's percentage of sugar in this recipe is low—anything above 5% generally slows down the fermentation process, but at a lower percentage, the sugar feeds the yeast. The sugar also adds a very subtle sweetness to the final bread. 

Water: While using bread flour and a proper mixing method are key in attaining the hoagie roll’s signature tight crumb, how much water is mixed into the dough also plays a major role. Hydration has a huge impact on crumb structure, with wetter doughs allowing air bubbles to balloon more, leading to a more irregular crumb with some very large bubbles. A lower hydration dough does the opposite: it's taut enough to constrict the air bubbles' expansion, leading to a crumb with a much smaller, tighter bubble distribution. The result is a bread that is denser and has a more robust structure—one that can contain wet and fatty fillings and condiments without them just dripping out and soaking through an overly open crumb. The hydration percentage—amount of water in the dough—used here is 58%. This is less than what you would find in more rustic loaves with an open, uneven crumb, such as our baguette recipe (in that one, the recipe developer, Andrew Janjigian, uses a 73% hydration level for the dough). Limiting the water amount to under 60% keeps the dough taut so that as it proofs and carbon dioxide builds up the dough is strong enough to more effectively trap the gas, producing smaller, tighter, even bubbles.

The Method

To get hoagie rolls with a soft, tight crumb structure and texture, you need to develop a stretchy, gluten-rich dough that is slightly sticky so it can hold all of the air bubbles the yeast will make. The flour type and ingredient ratios both play major roles in achieving this, but it’s also essential to mix, proof, and shape your dough properly to ensure good gluten development.

It's Okay to Overmix the Dough

The gluten development at the mixing stage is crucial for the ease of folding, rolling, and shaping the individual rolls after proofing. The mixing method is fairly straightforward, but there are a couple of details to keep in mind.

First, save yourself the arm strength and use a stand mixer with this recipe. It’s faster and more efficient than trying to knead the dough by hand, which would take over 20 minutes of vigorous kneading to achieve gluten structure, and still isn’t as strong as what the stand mixer will produce.

Another crucial thing to keep in mind is that once you've incorporated the ingredients in the mixer bowl at a lower speed, it's essential to turn up the speed to develop the gluten. Let the dough slap around in the bowl until it’s smooth, and don’t cut the listed eight minutes of kneading time short even if the dough appears smooth before your timer goes off. You can’t overmix the dough at this stage, but you can under-mix it and not build enough gluten strength.

Punching the Dough After Proofing Is Key

Proofing the dough until it doubles in size and punching it down afterwards forces larger air bubbles to form, then deflates and redistributes them more evenly in the dough—it's the exact opposite strategy of a no-knead dough, which is famous for the more uneven crumb structure that is produced when bubbles are allowed to form and grow freely. Here we want the gas bubbles to form in a controlled setting. The dough’s structure is created by the tight gluten network encasing and holding in the gas that’s redistributed by pressing down after the initial proof and later with multiple folds while shaping.

Fold Then Roll When Shaping

Shaping the rolls with a series of envelope folds before rolling into logs further distributes the small interior gas bubbles evenly within the rolls. The result is rolls that have a consistent tight and even crumb structure. The folding and rolling technique transforms the dough from a short rectangle into 8-inch long tubes, with each step in the sequence elongating the dough gradually and evenly for uniform logs.

Keep the Oven Heat Moderate and Add Some Steam While Baking

These individually sized rolls bake best at a steady temperature of 350℉. The egg and sugar in the dough make the bread more prone to burning, so the rolls should not be baked at very high temperatures as the crust may go too dark too soon. Additionally, steam is key to giving this bread its signature light, airy, and crackly-on-the-outside shell. To create steam in your home oven, you simply need a spray bottle of water to spritz the inside of the oven when placing the loaves inside to bake. Wait for the rolls to cool fully before slicing open and loading with your favorite sandwich fixings.