My weekend in sandwiches, March 2, 2015
A couple of quick hits here, as I had a bit of a theme going this weekend and I thought I might take a moment to tick off the purists.
I live a stone’s throw from a popular local spot that’s well known for its excellent pork chop sandwiches (and its giant rotating pork chop shaped sign), Hog Wild.
When I say a stone’s throw, I mean, you’d have to throw it with a trebuchet or something similar–the record for pumpkin chucking is damn near a mile, and we’re about a quarter mile on a straight line from Hog Wild. Because of a forest preserve, train tracks, and a busy street, it’s less convenient for us than you’d think but still a regular destination for my family when one of the kids has an achievement to celebrate. It’s an inexpensive, cash-only, quick-service place that still boasts a line out the door during the dinner hour most evenings. Damian earned a medal in Scholastic Bowl recently, so on Friday we went for dinner.
I had ordered a brisket sandwich the past few times I’d been there, as their brisket is not bad, thin-sliced and piled on, with an obvious smoke ring. I find brisket hard to pass up (sadly there are only a couple of things on their menu I’d recommend though).
@El_Josharino @dodecaphonix #SandwichTribunal BBQ beef brisket sandwich at Hog Wild, a local joint. pic.twitter.com/NGDCUxFIXf
— Sandwich Death Panel Czar (@JimBehymer) April 27, 2014
On Friday though, I returned to Hog Wild basics and ordered their (excellent, unassailable) Pork Chop Sandwich.
Hey, there’s two pieces of bread, right?
You may have noticed that this doesn’t appear to be what you’d call an actual sandwich, just a big (1 1/4″ thick) bone-in pork chop sitting on top of bread. (The side dish is their “oven brown” potatoes which are just a slightly tastier type of fried potato product than their crinkle-cut fries). I guess this falls under the category of the “open-face” sandwich, a bit of a controversial topic at the Tribunal. I myself am not sure where I fall on this particular subject. On the one hand, there are two pieces of bread there, but the chop’s not between them. It’s not a big old sloppy mess like a lot of open-face sandwiches, but you still have to eat it with a fork and knife.
What I do know is, I have never been disappointed in Hog Wild’s pork chop, and Friday’s was the best one I’ve had yet, perfectly cooked, juicy, fresh and hot, yet hitting the table practically before I was done ordering it. Not sure how they pull off that trick. I’m not a big fan of their BBQ sauce, which is a bit of a Sweet Baby Ray’s knockoff but with an unpleasant chemical fake smoke flavor, and the only hot sauce they have on site is Tabasco, which is kind of pointless, but this pork chop is worth eating no matter what you put on it. And the bread that’s soaked up the pork juices is delicious as well. I really should start bringing my own sauces though.
Sunday night, Mindy and I decided to go out for a drink, so we left the boys with instructions to fend for themselves in the Sandwichdome for dinner (I’m definitely calling our kitchen the Sandwichdome from now on, that’s awesome) and the two of us visited Horse Thief Hollow in Beverly. She ordered a cocktail–the Hop-a-rita, a margarita-type drink using New Holland‘s Hatter Royale Hopquila. I ordered Ambiguously Grain Duo, the sticke Alt HTH collaborated with Revolution to brew for their 2nd anniversary. We perused the menu for an appetizer to split and instead found “The Shoe” under the entrees section.
I grew up in Central Illinois–Horseshoe territory. The Horseshoe is a specialty of Springfield that consists of an open-faced sandwich of burger patties, ham, chicken, turkey, or various other meat possibilities, covered in French fries and cheese sauce. It’s terrible, and terrible for you. Most of the versions available in Quincy were especially terrible, with canned cheese sauces and frozen hockey puck burger patties and crinkle-cut fries.
You might have gotten the impression that I’m not a fan of crinkle-cut fries. Allow me to commend you for your observational skills.
Even as bad as most of the horseshoes in Quincy are though… it’s still one of the things I miss the most, since I live in the Chicago area now and you don’t see them too often above I-80. (Now if we can just get a place around here to do a decent tenderloin!) I excitedly pointed it out to Mindy, who agreed to split one with me.
We ordered it and our waitress actually asked us how we wanted the burger cooked. I have never once had someone ask me how I wanted the burger in my horseshoe cooked. This was a very good sign. We asked for it medium rare.
Mindy and I made small talk and nursed our drinks (to the apparent consternation of our waitress, who seemed to think we should be drinking faster) while we waited for “The Shoe” to arrive. And then it did.
This plate was about 14″ in diameter. That’s a lot of food.
These are not crinkle-cut fries. This is not canned cheese sauce. It’s a tasty cheddar-based sauce, whether Welsh rarebit or mornay, very slightly grainy as those sauces tend to be, enough to convince me of its realness but not enough to be unpleasant. Obvious care had been taken with the fries to cook them well enough that they could survive a swim in cheese sauce without immediate soggification. They brought out a second, empty plate and I cut the burger in half and moved Mindy’s share over.
That’s medium rare all right.
The patty was cooked just how I liked it, and the meat juices, as with the pork chop sandwich on Friday, deliciously soaked into the substantial piece of bread underneath.
Normally, a horseshoe with only a single pile of bread and meat would be referred to as a “ponyshoe” and the full horseshoe would have two of each. However, this is a good 1/2 lb beef patty, equivalent in size to the full order at most places (and far surpassing them in quality). Perhaps the ambiguity is why HTH simply refers to this dish as “The Shoe.” Notably, HTH also does not call this a sandwich, instead placing it in the entrees category of their menu. However, many places will have it listed among their sandwiches, and in fact it’s on our List of Sandwiches (currently projected to be covered in September of 2016). It’s sloppy as hell, and there’s no way you’re eating one of these without a fork. Or without being thrown out of the restaurant.
It was delicious.
So what’s the deal with open-face sandwiches? I’m pretty inclusive as far as these things go, but I find it hard to come up with a definition of sandwiches that will include the open-faced variety. Even Jeb Lund’s (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) broad universalization of sandwiches in the Guardian last summer drew the line here. So how can we jibe this with our mission? How do we cover open-face sandwiches here if we don’t really think they’re sandwiches?
Here’s my idea: a sort of genre ghettoization. Picture a lopsided barbell of a Venn diagram where we say, OK, these are sandwiches, and, here’s a skinny little line that represents the idea of combining bread with other things, and waaaaaaaay over here, this little dot over here, these are things that are also called sandwiches but aren’t really. They’re sandwich-related. Sandwich-adjacent. Sandwichesque. But they’re on the same playing field.
Basically, I’m proposing that open-face sandwiches can be considered the platypus of the sandwich world (despite this guy’s claim that the hot dog should have that spot–we’ve already established that we consider sausages-in-a-bun to be mainstream sandwiches, and damn him anyway for coming up with that phrase first). Who’s with me?
I like sandwiches.
I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great
Recent Comments