Is this cheesy Steak sandwich the Bomb?

Read Time: 12 minutes

How many different, distinct beef-focused sandwiches exist? The number is definitely in the hundreds. Of the more well-known steak or steak-adjacent sandwiches, the first you might think of is Philadelphia’s cheesesteak. Los Angeles is home to the French Dip, and Chicago loves their Italian beef. Buffalo, New York serves a mean beef on weck. Mexico is known for its carne asada tortas. Australia even has its own version of the steak sandwich. But unless you live in the Northeast United States, there’s at least one more that you might not even be aware of.

What is this sandwich?

At its simplest, this steak sandwich could be considered to be a close relative to the cheesesteak. This is a hot sub-style sandwich that contains thinly sliced or cubed steak that’s seared along with salami, onion, bell peppers, white mushrooms, white American or provolone cheese, and often mayonnaise spread inside a crusty long roll. This steak-focused sandwich, sometimes referred to as a grinder, is cooked very much like a Philly cheesesteak with the addition of a few extra ingredients. The sandwich I’m writing about is well known in the Northeastern United States as a Steak Bomb, but outside of that area you likely won’t find any examples.

In the Northeast, you’ll find steak bombs on the menus at pizza restaurants and dedicated sub shops in states like Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. The steak bomb is popular enough in that part of the world that restaurants will put the word steak or bomb in their name like Sax’s Steak & Pizza, Jitto’s Super Steak, Carl’s Steak Subs, and Ziggy Bombs. Even the Northeastern grocery store chain, Market Basket, is well known for their large and affordable steak bombs that they sell in their stores that are outfitted with a sandwich counter.

I painted this promotional graphic for steak bomb sandwiches. Boom.

Steak bomb history?

We know that the Philly cheesesteak was invented in 1930 by brothers Pat and Harry Olivieri, but unfortunately we just don’t seem to have any readily available recorded history like that for the steak bomb.

A blog called The Passionate Foodie attempted to find some origin story for the steak bomb in January of 2025, and the earliest mention they found was from 1970 in Montreal, Canada, of all places. I was curious and checked on Archive.org and found an advertisement from Massachusetts that predates that by three years.

The ad I found was from the University of Massachusetts’s daily paper called the Massachusetts Daily Collegian from 1967 that directly mentions a steak bomb among the grinders that the advertising pizza place serves, so we know that at least as early as the mid-1960s, steak bombs were fairly well known in the Northeast.

Ad from The Massachusetts Daily Collegian from its summer edition 1967. I’ve seen some place on the internet say that pepper steak and steak bombs are similar concepts in New England. But I can’t find any real connection between the two dishes to confirm that.

Did Louis’ Lunch invent the steak bomb?

A few online sources seem to cite that Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut might be the origin of the steak bomb. But I would like to nip that theory in the bud.

Wikipedia notes that Louis’ Lunch might have served the first steak sandwich, much like they claim to be the origin of the hamburger, but they do not have a steak bomb on their menu today. They literally just serve one burger, called “The Original Burger,” with cheese, tomato, and onion.

The burgers at Louis’ Lunch are still cooked the same way they were from the beginning. They are steamed in an ancient contraption where each patty is held vertically. Louis’s Lunch has never cooked their burgers on a flat top or griddle, so there’s no way they were the ones marrying cheese and steak, cooked on a hot surface back in the middle of the 20th Century.

This is a screenshot of a photo of the contraption used to cook burgers at Louis’ Lunch. Check it out at the bottom of their menu page.

Louis’ Lunch did not invent the
steak bomb.

Psst: someone desperately needs to inform Google’s mostly crappy AI search results
that the above sentence is a true statement. They didn’t invent it!

So, we really don’t have any idea where the steak bomb originated, but it’s difficult for me to believe its inception isn’t tied to that of the Philly cheesesteak. It seems plausible that someone in one of the Northeastern United States was making and selling cheesesteaks with onions, peppers, and mushrooms and simply added the word bomb to the name to indicate that this one was special or it included “the works,” and that simply became popular enough that other sandwich shops started copying the phrase.

While I was digging around in archive.org, I did find a whole bunch of mentions of “steak bomb” in cheap ads featured in High School yearbooks from the 1970s as well as slightly higher quality ads in daily circulars, but I didn’t actually find an entry for steak bombs in a cookbook that’s been scanned by the archive.org team until around 2010.

Just for fun, I have included some of the other ads I found that include steak bombs from the 1970s.

This ad appeared in Wilmington, Massachusetts, Wilmington Town Crier in 1975. I want to try the Hot Pastromi!

Super Sub Shops advertised cheese steaks and steak bombs in the Saugus Vs Peabody Football program from 1977. Michael’s from Wilmington, MA has all sorts of options for their Steak & sandwiches, including a Steak BOMB. This is from the Wilmington Town Crier in 1985.

Here are a couple of examples of steak bombs appearing on menus in the current day.

Portland Pie Company from Maine seems to name a lot of their menu items after locations in Maine.

Teddy G’s out of Sturbridge, Massachusetts sells a steak bomb topped pizza.

USA Subs in Derry, New Hampshire has a pretty large sandwich menu.

Bill Cahill’s Super Subs in Hudson, New Hampshire has a ham bomb as well as a steak bomb!

Jim from the Sandwich Tribunal covered the steak bomb back in 2019, and I read his take a couple of years ago when I first researched the steak bomb. I felt like I could probably write about it, but it seemed so similar to Philadelphia’s cheesesteak that I didn’t get to it until I recently saw a steak bomb video from America’s Test Kitchen.

Jitto’s Super Steak

Jitto’s Super Steak is a restaurant that opened in 1979 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Their menu seems to be a bit all over the place with pizzas, calzones, burgers, cold and hot subs, and steak bombs. The video above attempts to prepare a steak bomb recipe as they do at Jitto’s, and I’ve also found the video below, which actually goes into the kitchen to see a steak bomb getting cooked.

Most of the steak bombs that are sold out of pizza joints and sandwich shops use shaved or thinly sliced steak, much like a Philly cheesesteak. But Jitto’s Super Steak does things a bit differently with cubed up pieces of steak, and they’re proud of it. I found this video about Jitto’s Super Steak, which shows in fairly close detail the process they use to create their steak bombs.

I captured this screenshot of a steak bomb being cooked at Jitto’s Super Steak. You can see they use small cubes of steak instead of shaved steak. In the background, you can see salami cut into long strips.

Who owns the name steak bomb?

In 2007, a sub shop in Derry, New Hampshire, tried to trademark the name “steak bomb” to keep a nearby sandwich restaurant from using the phrase. USA Subs in Derry attempted to get “steak bomb” trademarked with the U.S. Patent Office and then had some attorneys send a letter to Great American Subs in nearby Londonderry. This story first appeared in Seacoastonline (archive.org link), and I did a lookup with the US Patent Office, and they still own the trademark. I also checked, and both USA Subs and Great American Subs are both still using the phrase “steak bomb,” so I don’t really know what the outcome was here. I’m guessing there were simply too many establishments using the phrase on their menus at the time of the trademark filing that it simply couldn’t be enforced.

So, technically, the owners of USA Subs in Derry, NH own the rights to the phrase “steak bomb” and everyone else is simply continuing with business as usual.

Now that we know more about the steak bomb than we probably need to know, let’s make one.

Crusty Italian-style bread rolls

If you’ve been reading along for a while, you’ve likely seen me share this bread roll recipe before. This is my Italian sub sandwich roll recipe, and it makes bread that’s crusty on the outside but soft and a slight bit chewy in the middle. This is perfect for the steak bomb sandwiches we’re making today.

This recipe makes five 6-inch long rolls that are the perfect size (for me) for a cheesesteak. You’ll likely get a larger sandwich at some of the Northeastern-located steak bomb restaurants, but when I make a sandwich at home, I think this size is just fine.

This recipe makes 5 rolls that are, in my opinion, the perfect size for a single steak bomb.

The recipe calls for an egg wash if you want shiny rolls, but I left it off to have a more crusty-looking appearance.

The rolls are crusty on the outside and soft inside.

I did not use the egg wash on the exterior of these rolls, which didn’t create a shiny surface.

A steak bomb needs a roll that will stand up to a lot of cheesy and slightly greasy fillings.

Three rolls waiting in line to get bombed.

What kind of steak goes into a steak bomb?

Most menus I’ve seen say the steak in a steak bomb is “shaved steak.” But as I covered above, Jitto’s in New Hampshire does things a bit differently with flap steak cut into smaller pieces. Because of this and because of America’s Test Kitchen’s video, I decided to try both.

The Jitto’s recipe calls for flap steak, which I couldn’t find at my local store, so I bought some petite sirloin to use instead. ATK’s video suggests that Lawry’s seasoned salt is the seasoning that they use at Jitto’s, but I used it for that version and the shaved steak version because it really seems like something that most of the steak bomb restaurants would be using. If you wanted to make your own seasoning blend for your steak bombs, I would recommend something like my Cajun seasoning blend that I created to mimic Bojangles’ seasoning for their chicken and French fries.

Shaved steak at my local Mariano’s was $7.99 for 14 ounces.

The steak I bought to turn into cubes and a Jitto’s-style steak bomb was just a slight bit cheaper than shaved steak.

America’s Test Kitchen thinks that Lawry’s seasoned salt is used in a Jitto’s steak bomb so I used that too.

I made steak bombs with two different cuts or types of steak for this sandwich. I tried the Jitto’s version with smaller pieces of steak, and then I also tried the shaved steak version. I liked both, but they really were entirely different sandwich experiences because of the texture that each brought to the sandwich.

Here’s some salami and shaved steak ready for the flat top.

I also cut up some petit sirloin into 3/4 inch cubes to make a Jitto’s-style steak bomb.

Some restaurants leave the salami whole, but to me it works better if it’s cut into smaller pieces.

Jitto’s slices their salami into strips. But I’ve seen some recipes call for quartering the salami, and I’ve also seen recipes that simply sear the salami in whole pieces and lay them into the bread to form a bottom base for the steak and cheese. I think the most important thing is just to make sure that the salami has a bit of time to sear and crisp up because it really does bring a textural saltiness to the finished sandwich.

The veggies

The vegetables in this sandwich are sliced onion, sliced mushrooms, and sliced (not diced) bell peppers. I am a big green bell pepper hater, but I do enjoy the other colors, so I only used the red variety in my sandwiches.

Onion

The onion is sliced and cooked first because it will take the longest for it to cook down and soften into a good texture. I cooked my onion pieces for about 4 minutes, but you could go as long as 6 or 8 minutes if you don’t like the texture of onion.

Basically, the pan or griddle has oil added to it, and then the onion goes in first, and it cooks first to make sure things are soft and at the proper texture. Once the onions have lightly browned, you can easily tell if they’ve cooked enough to move to the next vegetable.

Thinly slice the onion and give it a bit more cook time than the other vegetables to let them soften just a bit.

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are added after the onions have gotten a start on their cook time. For the mushrooms, I slice them about a quarter inch thick and then, after they’re all cooked, I do go back through and give them a really loose chop to make sure there aren’t any really large mushroom pieces in the finished sandwich.

The mushroom pieces will soak up the liquid and/or oil that’s on the griddle or pan, so things might start looking a little dry, but you can add oil or just cook through it, and then the mushrooms should start to extrude their own liquid once they get cooking.

Each sub got about 1 and a half mushrooms, sliced and roughly chopped.

Bell peppers