The Gatsby Sandwich: Possibly Great, Definitely Large

Having returned to the Sandwich Tribunal last month, I had determined from the start that this wouldn’t be some one-off, that I would become a regular contributor again. However, I felt more than a little daunted to see the list of sandwiches we had to work with this month. Fruit sandwiches, which frankly sounded a bit outside my realm of experience (unless jelly sandwiches count… I figured they didn’t); ftira sandwiches, which I had never even heard of before and come from the other side of the world from me; and Gatsby sandwiches, which seemed like the kind of thing I could maybe find at some random restaurant locally… but, upon googling, turned out to be completely unavailable in my area.

So… what to do? I know Jim cooks massive amounts of food every month in pursuit of his sandwich blogging–but then, that’s why he’s the boss around here. I’m a disturbingly poor trans girl with too much work to do in too little time, and I’m generally surviving on Taco Bell and tv dinners. Cooking is not something that happens very often in my life. I was determined not to have last month’s entry be a one-off, though, and therefore I bit the bullet and made a grocery store trip. I was gonna cook up this “Gatsby sandwich”–assuming I could find all of the ingredients.

The crucial ingredients were “polony” and “piri-piri sauce,” the only two ingredients on the list mentioned on wikipedia that I didn’t immediately recognize. The first was solved quickly enough–clicking on the wikipedia hyperlink for polony led me here. Oh. Bologna. That’s easy enough. Piri-piri sauce turns out to be known by a slightly different name here in America as well, but it turns out that peri-peri sauce is easily located on grocery store shelves. I grabbed a bottle, then ran through my list of ingredients quickly.

For bread, I grabbed some white bolillo rolls from the bakery section at the supermarket. These are about 8 inches long and as wide as a medium-sized baguette–hardly the gargantuan length and breadth typically discussed in articles about the Gatsby, but more than suitable for my solo eating requirements. I couldn’t resist picking up some thick-cut Oscar Meyer bologna from the deli section–sure, I’d imagine there’s much higher quality bologna available at my supermarket, but why not go with the dependable staple of middle-class childhood lunchboxes all over America? What’s funny is that I always hated bologna as a kid, and have stayed well away from it ever since I’ve had the option. It seemed like I could make an argument for making a Gatsby with almost any meat, which very nearly led to me using some of the grilled chicken breast pieces that are perennially in my freezer. But no, I ultimately couldn’t let myself go that route. Had to get the full Gatsby experience! And hope I wouldn’t regret it later.

Nothing I saw really specified whether or not Gatsby sandwiches have cheese, but I’m a compulsive overeater from way back (regardless of how my recovery is going/what the scale says now), so of course I had to grab a pack of Provolone slices. For french fries–apparently the most essential ingredient of these things–I just picked out a bag of generic frozen fries. Didn’t go with the shoestring or the crinkle-cut, I wanted the kind of thick fries that’d be most likely to be served at a food truck around here. To me, any sandwich with fries on it screams “street food,” and I love the street food aesthetic and wish to honor it whenever I can. Finally, I had ketchup in the fridge and vegetable oil in the cabinet. Hey, I may not cook at home much, but I try to keep at least a few staples around.

Both the french fries and the bologna needed to be cooked before I could assemble the sandwich in question. And while nothing I saw really specified bread preparation either way, I definitely wanted to at least heat it up before I tried to slap this many ingredients on it. Complication–my oven’s pilot light has been off for weeks. I’m not sure how to re-light it, and it appears that the floor of the oven literally has to be unscrewed and removed in order to light it. So I couldn’t use my oven in the preparation of this sandwich. Somewhat of a bummer where the fries were concerned, but hell, while I’d rather bake those, I could certainly fry them in a pinch. What to do with the bread? Well, if nothing else, gas stoves are certainly capable of producing open flames, and all of my burners are still working… soooo I cut the bolillo roll open and slapped it on a burner, which I then left on at the lowest setting for about a minute. (I should’ve taken a pic of the grill marks that resulted… put it this way, they weren’t ideal. But it could’ve been a lot worse, and the end result was close enough to a toasted roll that I really couldn’t complain.)

I fried the french fries in an acceptable if not world-beating fashion (burned the sides of a couple of them, left the middle of a few others a little mushy, but the end result still tasted pretty good). I then threw three bologna slices into the same pan with a teensy bit more vegetable oil, which was probably way too much in hindsight–the bologna was still letting little oily drips fall from it when I ate the finished product. My calorie count probably would have fared better if I’d been a bit more scrupulous about this whole situation, but I told myself that the circumstances were unusual. (Also, I went for a two-mile walk within an hour of finishing the sandwich. I’m being good, doc, I promise.)

Frying bologna was a little weird. Turns out those slices, even the thick-cut kind, do not need long in a pan AT ALL. I had them fully cooked on both sides in about 90 seconds or so. Then it was time to assemble the sandwich. I threw the split/toasted bread into the middle of a plate and dumped peri-peri sauce on the top half. I maybe overdid it a little, but you know how it is when you first open a bottle of sauce and have no idea how quickly it will come out. I spread the excess evenly across the top half of the bread, and it pretty much all soaked in, so no harm done.

On the bottom half of the bread, I placed two slices of provolone cheese and my three slices of fried bologna. As I mentioned, there was a little oil dripping from the bologna, and by placing the bologna directly on the bottom half of the bread, the bread soaked up a whole bunch of that oil. The bottom piece ended up wet and sloppy enough that that might have been a recipe for disaster, but fortunately, everything stayed in one piece.

The moment of truth had come. The fries had been soaking on a few extra Taco Bell napkins I had in my purse (what? We were out of paper towels), and I grabbed them and dumped them onto the sandwich, adding a liberal covering of ketchup onto the top before smashing the whole thing back together. The halves of the bolillo separated instantly, which wasn’t ideal but certainly worked out better than the other alternative (all the ingredients of the sandwich falling out onto the plate). I cut the whole thing in half in preparation for eating it. The french fries and bologna provided a little resistance by being unwilling to stay in place, but I got the knife down to plate level without any major mishaps.

And then I ate it. All of it.

What was that like? Well, it was filling, to say the least. My calorie counting app supplied the information that all of the ingredients I created the sandwich out of had a combined caloric hit of 1,015 calories. So yeah, that shit hit my stomach like a brick.

A really tasty brick, as it happened. This is food for a person who is hungry, whether because they’re out in the cold wind or the hot sun, or just finished working really hard, or haven’t eaten anything all day. All of these are great reasons to eat a huge sandwich, and the Gatsby isn’t a bad route to take if such an option is available to you. I personally associate big subs containing fries with the New Jersey grease trucks, which I’ve always been curious about but never visited. If the sandwiches they serve there are as delicious and filling as the Gatsby I made for myself, I understand what all the fuss is about.

To get more specific, I really dug the peri-peri sauce. This stuff has some bite to it, though it’s not gonna knock you on your side the way a good Latin-American hot sauce will. It makes a sandwich like this spicy, and adds a tangy hint that is less hot and more just flavorful and memorable. I definitely noticed its presence even with the addition of a significant amount of ketchup, and I’m now pretty curious about what other things I typically prepare might taste like with peri-peri sauce on them.

I’m a bit less stoked on the bologna. Or polony, depending on where you’re from. Once it’s fried and slapped on a sandwich, it’s relatively interchangeable with a bunch of other meats you might encounter in the same situation. However, if anything about its flavor stood out, it was stuff that I consider less than ideal. I think people who consider bacon to be the best stuff since sliced bread will have very different feelings about the fried bologna on this sandwich, but as someone who’s never been wild about bacon, I could really take or leave it. As in favor as I am of getting the full authentic experience, I kinda wish I’d gone ahead with my plan to use chicken pieces instead. Considering the fact that I haven’t gone back for more of the bologna in my fridge since, and am probably just gonna end up throwing it away in a few days, that certainly would have been a more economical move.

But whatever. In the end, this was a pretty great sandwich, and even my lukewarm-at-best feelings about bologna can’t change that. I think truly attaining the standard Gatsby size would have resulted in a sandwich I had no hope of taking down, but my relatively manageable mini-Gatsby was perfect. My calorie counting app would really prefer that I not make an attempt at another one anytime soon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I found myself going for the remaining frozen french fries and peri-peri sauce sooner rather than later. Maybe this weekend I should go ahead and see what this sandwich would be like with chicken on it…

Drew

I’m a transgender weirdo who loves music, books, comics, and all kinds of other geeky crap. I edit an arts/music/culture magazine in my hometown of Richmond VA (rvamag.com). But let’s not talk about my day job. Let’s talk about food. I love food.