• Meal Ticket video maven (and Unbreaded foodie crush) Felicia D. visits Supper to take a look at Mitch Prensky’s DIY bacon wrapped hot dog kit, the perfect Super Bowl snack. [Meal Ticket]

• Favorite under $10 food blog Midtown Lunch has opened up shop in Philadelphia and bites into the po’ boys at Beck’s Cajun Cafe in the Reading Terminal Market. [Midtown Lunch - Philadelphia]

• We took a sneak peak at Noah Bernamoff’s Montreal-style Mile End deli in Brooklyn a few months ago, now GutterGourmet takes a look at the recently opened shop. A sandwich dubbed the “Ruth Wilensky” has been added to the menu, which features pastrami pressed on an onion roll. [Always Hungry]

• Bread Gloves, ’nuff said. If any of our readers are bakers, we expect you to hook us up with a pair of these! [Daily Fork]

The po’ boy is the quintessential New Orleans sandwich. The crusty French bread, and toppings varying from breaded shrimp, and soft-shell crab, to roast beef au jus, help to tell a story of the sandwich makers behind the counter. In ten days, The New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival will bring together 40 restaurants to share their sandwiches and stories with attendees. Scheduled events range from storytelling of New Orleans history, the art of streetcar maintenance, and even “Ultimate French Bread Fighting”, a mysterious showdown that pits Jared Fogle of Subway fame against a representative from John Gendusa Bakery.

To countdown to the event, John T. Edge journeyed in and out of some of N’awlins most famous po’ boy shops. He finds that many are keeping it real, building sandwiches the same way they were 80 years ago. Others are struggling to survive, using lower quality ingredients, resulting in lower quality sandwiches, that appeal only to tourists buying into the hype, not the tradition. Still, shop owners are adamant about standing up against the impeding chains, as Subways and Quizno’s are slowly creeping into the area. We must fight to keep these iconic shops alive, or the history and culture of the land will die with the sandwiches that represent them.

Saving New Orleans Culture, One Sandwich at a Time [The New York Times]

A rundown of America’s greatest sandwiches reminds us that we read Playboy for the articles, of course.  Their A-List identifies some of this country’s most iconic sandwiches, including the lobster roll, the pastrami sandwich, the cheesesteak, the Cuban, the banh mi and the Italian beef.  And while the debate can begin as to which shop actually makes the best version of these legendary sandwiches, we at Unbreaded just appreciate the discourse.

For some serious sandwich porn, check out the complete list at Playboy.com.

This year everybody is a little gun shy about taking that big summer vacation.  Mooching at the shore is at an all-time high.   So while you’re taking your use-it-or-lose-it vacation time at home, don’t do stuff around the house – treat yourself to a really good sandwich instead.  Lunch at Alison Two in Ft. Washington gives you a travel inspired menu full of exotic and delicious flavors and that feeling of getting away, even if you don’t go very far.

Old Pennsylvania is a charming piece of preserved history.  The architecture is still standing in many locations, the stone bridges are still holding.  Among the sprawling hills and endless woods of back-roads Ft. Washington lies an enclave that has managed to remain beautifully green.  Here, inside a 150-year-old building is Chef Alison Barshak’s second and more ambitious eponymous restaurant.  The 2008 James Beard nominated Chef Barshak served as Executive Chef at Philadelphia’s Striped Bass before spending time in Santa Fe, New York and traveling the world.  Alison Two brings Chef Barshak’s diverse culinary influences to life with a cosmopolitan menu that still rings true when Alison passionately recalls her favorite green chile cheeseburger from a little café in a gas station near the Wal-Mart in Santa Fe.

The menu changes frequently.  And by frequently, we mean “printed twice daily.”  Produce, fish, bread and dairy all come from local/trusted sources so you can be certain that the food is fresh and natural.  The sandwiches (which we do expect will stick around) are diverse and each is substantial in its own right.  A po’boy with parmesan crusted oysters; a soft shell crab flatbread with a dipping bowl of curry soup; a meaty burger with sweet and spicy onion marmalade; house-smoked salmon served up like pastrami sandwich; a tuna nicoise sandwich served with limoncello aioli.  Chef Barshak and Sous Chef Eric Goods have developed a lineup of sandwiches that are immensely satisfying and rich with flavor.

The dinner menu’s popular parmesan crusted oysters emerged as a crunchy and satisfying po’boy on a crusty French baguette with fire roasted jalapenos and mustard aioli.  The tender oysters have a crisp and salty coating; the creamy mustard mayo helps cool the kick from the jalapenos.  Served with sliced grape tomatoes, arugula and shaved parmesan.

The soft shell crab on fresh tandoor flatbread comes plated with a dipping bowl of curry laksa, an Asian soup.  Fresh Maryland soft shells are dredged and fried, paired with pickled daikon and carrots, cucumber, red onion and cilantro to give it a bright vinegary flavor that complimented the rich curry dipping soup.  We found the best way to eat this sandwich was to roll it up and dip it into the soup, creating an experience similar to the kati roll, a popular Indian street food. The flatbread soaks up delicious flavors from the laksa, yet stays fluffy and crisp.

The house-smoked salmon on pumpernickel would satisfy any fish eater’s craving for a pastrami sandwich.  Kind of a cross between a reuben and a special, slices of hickory-smoked salmon (cured 36 hours) are topped with creamy cole slaw, sliced gruyere and served on buttery toasted pumpernickel.

The grilled tuna nicoise sandwich is more than a salad on a roll, thanks to the brilliant limoncello-inspired aioli.  Sure, it’s got all the usual fixings for a classic nicoise salad: tender poached tuna, capers, olives, egg, anchovies, potatoes and haricots verts on a toasted sesame roll, but the star of the show is the homemade lemon vinegar that is really a mock limoncello.  A white balsamic base is fermented with just a hint of alcohol, mustard, red pepper flakes and sugar until it becomes a bright lemon drizzle that brings this sandwich to life with a burst of flavor.

The juicy burger on seeded homemade bun places crispy fried onions and an onion marmalade atop a juicy patty of ground chuck and smoked aged cheddar.  The onion jam is a flavorful mixture of onions, chipotle, sugar, mustard and red wine vinegar, which gives the burger a sweet and firey zing.

As for Chef Barshak, whose extensive travels and culinary adventures have exposed her to countless ethnic sandwiches, she has come to a few conclusions: a grilled ham & cheese sandwich is just about as good as it gets.  And the pan fried cod sandwich at Mary’s Fish Camp in NY is also as good as it gets.  Get a muffaletta from the Central Grocery in New Orleans.  In Paris, there is only one sandwich you should eat: cheese and ham on a baguette with that unmistakable French unsalted butter.

Chef Barshak likes the interplay of hot and cold on a sandwich, like with souvlaki or schwarma, mixing lamb with cool yogurt and cucumber on warm bread.  She implores you to smash some chips in your tuna hoagie to give it crunch, and  pickles are a must have on the sandwich.  Barshak hinted at a few sandwiches that may show up on the menu in the future, including a monkfish torta and a skate sandwich she’s been tinkering with.  Whatever the future menu does hold in store, it’s a sure bet we’ll be there.

Gallery

Alison Two
424 S. Bethlehem Pike Ft. Washington, PA 19034 (Google Map)

This isn’t the first time I’ve poured out my sandwich love or written about my theory that they are this country’s first fusion food. You can read some of this previously published material in Esquire and Travel + Leisure.

When I am working on a story for Travel + Leisure, it’s my job to hit a city’s culinary highlights. But I always make it a point to start with that city’s signature dish as a way of understanding local history. Iconic regional dishes can be used to reveal the roots of local immigration and determine what each ethnic group brought to the community culture.

The great chef John Besh explained to me that New Orleans is unique as a historical port because it was settled with very little Anglican influence, and that the one-pots (like gumbo) are a link to its cultural mix of Spanish and French colonists with a large enslaved Afro-Caribbean community. He told me to look at those long lists of herbs and spices: “Everyone stirred a little bit of their culture into the pot.”  Or, when I was working my way through the menu at a Zingerman’s Roadhouse in Ann Arbor Michigan (specializing in “Great American Food,” regional dishes from around the country), I learned the background of chicken fried steak. Due to the prominent role Germans and Austrians had in settling Texas, it doesn’t take much to view that dish as a frontier translation of Wiener Schnitzel (staple of Central European cuisine).

The connection is even more obvious with sandwiches. Most of the country’s great urban sandwich places are in former factory (and working) neighborhoods where immigrants quickly set up shop and folded their native ingredients (and/or cooking methods) into mainstream cuisine. As the quickest way to layer the tastes of the old country into the new, sandwiches are probably our original fusion food.

There are plenty of American regional sandwiches (with accompanying stories) like the Beef-on-Weck in Buffalo or Loosemeats in Sioux City, IA. But I decided to limit myself to tracing the outline of the country, starting in Maine and working down the coast to Miami, over to New Orleans and then across the Texas land border, up the West Coast and across the Northern boundary to Chicago.

This was not an exercise in “best:” I am not much of a food ranker. I like to think about context, and although there may not always be perfect symmetry between city and sandwich, here is my version of the United States, according to sandwiches.

From Maine to Connecticut, the lobster and clam roll
There might not be a specific ethnic link for the lobster roll (many folks like Red’s Eats, Wiscasset, Maine, a picturesque road side stand that’s been around since 1938).  But there is an “embarrassment of riches” aspect, common in many immigrant family kitchens. In the 1988 film Mystic Pizza, townie waitress Daisy (Julia Roberts), invited to the summer home of a rich WASP boyfriend (played by Adam Storke in a classic James Spader role), is less than thrilled when dinner turns out to be lobster—a staple in her family’s household because her Portuguese-American mother works in a lobster plant on the docks.

Maine was the site of the first recorded European colony in 1604 and according to the state’s Department of Marine Resources, lobster fishing is “probably the oldest, continuously operated industry on the North American continent.” Prior to commercialization, every lobster caught in Maine stayed in Maine. (Early records are scarce, but in 2000, the lobster harvest yielded 57,000,000 pounds.)  So imagine what lobster was at one time: poverty food. Indentured servants (who exchanged labor for passage to America) had it written into their contracts that they would not have to eat it more than three times a week, and a law guaranteed prisoners the same protection (cruel and unusual punishment by crustacean).

To me, a heap of lobster in a roll that requires a good grip is nothing more than a device to turn seafood into a solid meal: heavier, heartier family fare is typically achieved by adding bread (even those crunchy Trenton oyster crackers soaked in chowders qualify).

The same theory can be applied to the clam roll, a shoreline staple along the Connecticut coast. Since the Native Americans showed colonists how to harvest clams (the white shells were carved into beads and used for currency, or “wampum”), shell-fishing has been a vital part of the state’s economy. But you can’t feed your family a steady diet of clams on the half shell, which accounts for some of the heartier regional clam dishes, like New Haven’s famous clam pizza.

In Madison, Lenny and Joe’s Fish Tale serves a clam roll made with breaded whole or full-bellied clams (also known as Ipswich or steamer clams, these have a thin brittle shell which doesn’t completely close because of its protruding long neck or siphon). No pre-breading and sitting around for these clams. Instead, they are batter-dipped, rolled in cracker meal, and fried to order. Since the breading is done at the last moment, the clams remain completely coated, forming a protective crust on contact with the hot oil which produces the internal steam necessary to properly cook the clam, and in the process, creates a sandwich of delicious contrasts: crispy but tender.

A regional requirement: both of these sandwiches must be served on a toasted top-loading New England hot dog bun, which looks like a small rectangular “box” made of white bread. I imagine it was invented like this: a hungry guy in a hurry took a piece of toast and folded it in half with one hand, letting the seam rest along his palm like a trough. Then he filled it up.

Pastrami in New York
More than a decade ago, the late Abe Lebewohl, founder of the Second Avenue Deli, showed me how to hand-slice pastrami. Now this is an instinctive art. You have to be able to “feel” the pastrami because each one is different, taking into consideration how hard or soft the meat is after steaming as well as the fat content. Placing a whole brine-cured and smoked beef belly on a narrow wooden counter (where it fit perfectly into the indentation shaped by the thousands that went before it), Abe trimmed off the crisp, spicy edges, pushing them into a little mound and motioned for me to “eat, eat.” I left that day with a securely foil-wrapped packet of still warm and beautifully fatty pastrami in my purse, feeling like I was transporting an organ.

Although it is more of a global village now, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was once the epicenter of Eastern European immigration, packed with pushcarts peddlers and synagogues, and Abe, known as the Mayor of Second Avenue, was a throw back to the day when that street was lined with theaters and called the “Yiddish Broadway.” Like Ukrainian refuge Lebewohl, pastrami has deep Jewish roots (explanation better left to an expert like Joan Nathan)  even appearing as a cultural stereotype in Woody Allen’s great urban romance Annie Hall (1977), when Midwestern transplant Hall (Diane Keaton) orders a “pastrami on white bread with, uh, mayonnaise and tomatoes and lettuce,” and New Yorker Alvy Singer (Woody) looks embarrassed and then a little afraid.

I have my own procedure: Order pastrami on rye—no trimmings or toppings. When the sandwich arrives, use my thumbs to pick up the edges of the bread (as though I am shuffling cards) and then, because the fat to meat ratio is never exactly “right,” peer down at the pastrami and give a little philosophical shrug. Add mustard.

In 1996, the wonderful Abe Lebewohl was murdered while making a deposit at a local bank. I went back to the deli once after that, but it didn’t feel right. Then it closed. But recently, I read that his nephew opened a relocated Second Avenue Deli, where I have yet to go.

Philadelphia and its connection to New Orleans
Slide down the map until you get to Philadelphia, the largest fresh water port in the world and surely the sandwich capital of America. This is a city with several iconic regional specialties: cheese steak, roast pork, and the hoagie are a few.  For this purpose, I settled on using the hoagie, reportedly named for the Italian immigrants who labored in the iron and steel building naval shipyards on Hog Island (the world’s largest shipyard during WWI). The “hoggie” was a meal on the move with all the flavors of home: an assortment of cured pork meats (prosciutto, sopressata and coppa), sharp provolone cheese, and a make-shift salad of sorts (lettuce, tomatoes, onions and hot peppers, dressed with oil, vinegar and a pinch of dried oregano). The bread—typically a crunchy seeded crust with a soft but substantial interior—was merely transportation.

At this point, jump over to the port of New Orleans because one of its signature sandwiches—the muffuletta—is exactly the same as a hoagie—only different. Like two dialects of the same language, the central elements are there: a layering of meats (with the inclusion of mortadella, a pork bologna) and cheese. But while Philadelphia’s turn-of-the-century Italian settlers came from the Southern provinces of Italy, 90% of those who came thru New Orleans were from Sicily. That explains why their sandwich (“invented” in about 1906 to feed that city’s wharf workers) is on round, soft, slightly hollow Sicilian bread (or muffuletta), and the standard hoagie salad toppings are translated into an idiosyncratic pickled olive-laden vegetable medley, distantly related to the regional Sicilian specialty of caponata (a sweet and sour eggplant relish reminder that Sicily is a leading olive and caper growing area).

When I made this very same American iconic regional sandwich trip years ago, I got a warm muffuletta at the Napoleon House and a toasted Frenchuletta (on a baguette) at Luizza’s. But like most visitors, I also went to Central Grocery in Viuex Carre or French Quarter, once known locally as Little Sicily. Slightly spongy (to absorb the olive salad) and intersected by a ribbon of meat/cheese filling, this huge muffuletta is pre-cut into quarters and wrapped in old-fashioned sturdy white paper. Although the highly-hyped grocery may look like a tourist trap, don’t be put off by the discarded Barq’s root beer bottles, crumbled Zapp potato chip bags, or the long lines. The people of Central Grocery are sandwich professionals.

(There is also a link between NOLA’s shrimp/oyster po’ boy and Connecticut’s fried clam roll: both turn local seafood into heartier fare. I got my po’boy from Parkway Tavern, at the corner of Hagan and Toulouse, overlooking Bayou St. John.)

Breaded and fried shrimp (served with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and pickles) on distinctive New Orleans–style French bread (lightly crisp crust, interior as airy as cotton candy) from celebrated Leidenheimer Bakery.

Editor’s note: Part 2 covers the iconic sandwiches of the American South, Southwest, West Coast and Midwest.

Today is Fat Tuesday and here at Unbreaded, the only thing that means to us is Louisiana-style sandwiches. According to our crack research team, the “Po’ Boy” originated in a New Orleans restaurant, frequented by street car conductors. During a strike with the street car company, the restaurant’s purveyors jokingly referred to the conductors as “poor boys” which in a Louisiana drawl, translated to “po’ boy”. 

No matter what the filling, whether it be fried shrimp, crawfish, or oysters, there is no question that the finest po’ boys in the world come out of Louisiana. Still, we think there is a particular take on the sandwich here in Philadelphia that competes with the best. Grace Tavern which is owned by the same people behind Monk’s, Nodding Head and Fergie’s Pub, continues the trend with delicious food and a great beer selection. Their Oyster Po’ Boy stays true to tradition, served on a French baguette from LeBus that is spread with garlic butter, topped with chopped lettuce and remoulade. The perfectly breaded oysters have a light, crispy outside and are cooked exactly right, not too tough or tender. I highly suggest substituting the frites for the optional side of blackened green beans tossed in Cajun seasoning and served with Bourbon mayo.

So tonight, before you start drinking until you can’t see straight, enjoy the savory side of Mardi Gras with an oyster po’ boy at Grace.

Get your sandwich on:

Grace Tavern
2229 Grays Ferry Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19146 (Google Map)