Pizza Egg Rolls

Preparation

Start by heating the olive oil in a skillet or pot on medium-high heat. Once heated, add the Italian sausage. Cook until browned, crumbling it with a spatula along the way. Once browned toss in the garlic, pepperoni and shallots and cook an additional 5 minutes or until the shallot has sweated through. Add 3/4 cup of marinara sauce, stir, and then set aside to let cool.

Once your mixture has cooled add the shredded cheese and mix to incorporate all of the ingredients.

Now is the time to heat the canola oil in a medium sized pot, on medium heat. We can turn up the heat after forming the pizza egg rolls.

When I make egg rolls, I typically use a spring roll style wrapper as I tend not to like the common egg roll wrappers that are sold in many grocery stores. But in this case I used the ones that bubble up and are traditional in Chinese-American restaurants. I was going for those Totino’s-style frozen pizza rolls that have the bubbled-up appearance and texture after frying.

Let’s make the egg rolls. Lay out one wrapper, in a diamond formation in front of you on a work surface. I like to place one on a plate with a point in front of me. Add about 3 tablespoons of the sausage mixture in the center. Fold the wrapper over the mixture, and gently pull or roll back towards you to tighten the egg roll. Once pulled back, roll it forward a turn or two, then fold over the sides, tucking them underneath the roll. Then brush a bit of the beaten egg onto about 1 inch of the top diamond area, then roll it closed and press to seal.

Your goal here is to have a tight seal as you do not want cheese to leak into the hot oil. That will not be good, trust me. See the related blog link for more step-by-step tips for rolling egg rolls.

Repeat with as many wrappers or egg rolls that you would like to make. Mine yielded about 12 pizza egg rolls.

Now go check on your oil and temperature. You want your oil to be around 375 F. Once your oil is heated, carefully add a few egg rolls into the preheated oil. You do not want to over-crowd the pan.

These will fry up in a matter of minutes so keep an eye on them. Once they are a deep golden brown, remove them from the oil with your slotted spoon or spider and place onto a wire rack, or paper lined plate to remove any excess oil.

Repeat until you have finished frying them all.

To serve, you can shower the egg rolls with finely grated Parmesan cheese and serve with a bowl of heated marinara.

The texture of the egg roll wrapper lent itself perfectly with these pizza egg rolls. I’ll be honest, I devoured two of them right away and had to back away from them as they were that great. My wife who seemed a bit skeptical fell in love with them. And so did my son and daughter.

The great thing about these pizza egg rolls is that I knew every ingredient that was going into them. And they were actually better than Totino’s pizza rolls. Not only that but you can get as creative as you want with the stuffing. These are hands-down the best. I hope you enjoy them as much as we did!