Meet Garbage Bread: The Easy Game-Day Snack That Starts with Pizza Dough

Game-day foods, sometimes called tailgating foods, are an important part of watching a sporting event. It takes a lot of energy to cheer on your favorite team or yell at the referees through the TV screen—these foods give you strength for such important activities. 

There are game-day standards, such as slow cooker chili, nachos, subs, and all things Buffalo (wings, dip, and cauliflower), but sometimes you want to add something new to the spread. 

The latest recipe from Brunch with Babs might be just what you’re looking for. When the self-described “internet mom/grandma you didn’t know you needed” posted a recipe for cheeseburger garbage bread, it caught our attention immediately.

One of her followers said, “Looks like a Super Bowl snack the boys will love.” We slightly disagree with that commenter. It looks like a game-day snack everyone will love.

What Is Garbage Bread?

Garbage bread is essentially stuffed pizza dough. It falls into the stromboli, calzone, or panzarotti category because it uses pizza dough and similar toppings to pizza (which can be anything, right?), but the toppings become fillings when the dough is wrapped around them. It’s most similar to stromboli because it’s rolled up like a pinwheel.

Anything that goes on a pizza can go into garbage bread, but some of the most common fillings are bacon, seasoned ground beef, onions, and cheese. Those are the fillings Babs uses in her own recipe for garbage bread. She describes her version as “a giant bacon cheeseburger stuffed in bread."

How to Make Garbage Bread

Making garbage bread is pretty similar to making stromboli. Cook the fillings of your choosing in a pan. Drain most of the grease and mix in some shredded cheese to melt. Roll out the pizza dough to fill a baking sheet and spread the fillings on the dough. Sprinkle with more cheese, roll it up lengthwise into a pinwheel, seal off the ends, and brush with egg wash. Bake until golden brown and cut into slices after it slightly cools.

Babs serves her cheeseburger garbage bread with a “special sauce” of mayo, mustard, ketchup, onion relish, and seasonings (she has the recipe for that, too). If you’d like to switch up the sauce, you can try our secret burger sauce or have the blue cheese dressing you serve with your wings do double duty as a dip for the garbage bread. Or, offer a choice of sauces and let the sports fans choose their own.

Her followers had plenty of suggestions for switching up the fillings for this recipe that one commenter said was a ”new family favorite.”

Another commenter said they would add mushrooms instead of the onions and use Swiss cheese. Another suggested adding banana peppers. Someone else switched it up totally and stuffed spicy sausage, mozzarella, and Italian seasonings into the garbage bread. And when someone asked Babs if they could substitute crescent rolls from a tube for the pizza dough, she replied, “Yes!” 

Garbage bread seems infinitely customizable and sure to be a hit on any game-day food table, particularly during NFL playoff games and the Super Bowl.