St. Louis’ Gerber Sandwich

Growing up in Quincy, Illinois, St. Louis was the “big city” we’d go to for concerts, for museums, for the zoo, or just to hang out. Quincy is about 100 miles northwest of St. Louis–too far to be a suburb, but close enough for a day trip or a night out. I spent my fair time rocking out at Mississippi Nights or just hanging out at the U City Loop. We listened to The Urge, we drank Anheuser Busch products (when we weren’t drinking bum wine), and we ate…

We ate some things in St. Louis that you don’t see much anywhere else. Toasted Ravioli seems to have migrated a bit–or at least as far as my hometown, ’cause it’s all over the place there–but I haven’t seen much else of native St. Louis cuisine elsewhere. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The food culture of St. Louis runs the gamut, ranging from the divine (Gooey butter cake) to the mundane (pork steaks), from the excessive (the Slinger) to the absurd (the St. Paul sandwich). And then there’s the infamous–St. Louis-style pizza.

My first experience with St. Louis style pizza came one night when, crashing with a friend in the ‘burbs after nearly getting our asses kicked at a hoosier party, we ordered some pizzas from a place I hadn’t tried called Imo’s. My friend’s pregnant sister was also there, and she ordered her pizza with green olives, black olives, jalapenos, and pineapple. That combination of toppings was not the most horrifying thing about the pizza though. The most horrifying thing about the pizza was the cheese.

Provel is the taste of Midwestern shame.

Provel cheese is what makes St. Louis style pizza unique. Sure, there’s the tavern cut or the cracker crust, but other Midwestern styles share those features. Only St. Louis style pizza uses this… processed gunk, this weird attempt to make something that melts like American cheese but otherwise looks like it might belong on a pizza.

It doesn’t, though. Provel tastes OK, with a stronger, more distinct flavor than the wax, salt, and something-like-a-hint-of-cheddar that you get from American cheese. It might work in a salad, or a sandwich, or melted on chips. I think it would make a pretty excellent burger cheese. But on a pizza, the main purpose of Provel is to sit placidly in an easily separable melted sheet, then immediately leap off the pizza and attach itself to the roof of your mouth when you foolishly attempt to take a bite. Provel is the trojan horse of cheese food products.

Provel goes well with iceberg lettuce. It goes with an iceberg lettuce salad like Mexican Percocet goes with your recovery from a kidney donation you don’t remember making after a night of Vodka-ritas at La Grosero Cabrito cantina in Tijuana.

So why am I going on about bad pizza cheese from St. Louis? This month, we’re covering another St. Louis delicacy–of which I was previously unaware–that uses Provel cheese, called a Gerber sandwich. The Gerber is essentially a ham melt on garlic bread–sometimes instead of ham there’ll be turkey, sometimes roast beef, but apparently to be a real Gerber, it must use ham and it must come from a specific restaurant–Ruma’s.

So I guess if I make one at home I can’t really call it a Gerber, but ham melt? Garlic bread? That doesn’t sound too bad, right? In a hot sandwich, a lot can be forgiven of a cheese that melts well, and Provel is a melting champion, Frankensteined together out of Provolone, Swiss, and Cheddar in some weird underground lab for no other purpose than to melt. Probably foreign accents and a lightning rod were involved. I dare not speculate.

Can this sandwich truly be the best use of the worst cheese?

Provel isn’t easy to find outside of St. Louis–you can get it shipped, but be prepared to buy way more than you need (and pay way too much for it). However, the magic of google helped me find a grocery store in Chicago’s north suburbs that carried it, and my work pal Dan who lives nearby picked some up for me. When I opened the package I was not encouraged.

That’s not shredded cheese. That’s a pile of extruded cheeselike plastic squiggles.

It’s not even legally cheese. It’s melted plastic from the ’80s.

OK, the cheese isn’t promising, but let’s look at what else we have to work with. The bread is alternately described as French or Italian bread, so I decided to try both in the form of a baguette cut into sandwich-sized sections and some of the Italian rolls common in Chicago.

It’s supposed to be garlic bread, though. Some recipes call for adding garlic powder to some butter but no. I’ve gotta use real garlic.

I don’t need 4 heads though. Just one will do.

One whole head of garlic is about enough for 2 sticks of butter and yes, I used (nearly) 2 whole sticks for these sandwiches. I don’t fuck around when it comes to garlic bread.

Meantime, we’re gonna need some ham. I’m using 2 different kinds of ham, cheap-ass Buddig-style Black Forest ham and a nicer deli-style ham off-the-bone.

This is an open-faced sandwich, so we cut the bread all the way open and lay it out flat to begin with.

Assembly is simple: spread the garlic butter on the bread, put the ham on, then put the plastic cheese squiggles on top of that and shake some paprika over the top. I’m mixing it up and using each type of ham on each type of bread, to make 4 different combinations of bread and ham.

Then we just put these in the oven at 350 for 15 minutes or so.

Wow. That cheese really melts, doesn’t it?

So how is it? Well, I don’t think the ham mattered that much, it’s just a bit of salty meat and I could just as easily have put deli turkey or roast beef in there. The biggest flavors are the garlic butter and the melty cheese, with the hint of liquid smoke in the latter supplemented by the smokey pepper flavor of the paprika. The breads have different textures–the baguette isn’t a very good one, uniform and dense, while the Italian rolls are lighter with a more irregular hole structure. Still, the impact isn’t huge either way; this sandwich is really all about garlic butter and cheese.

Well, something like cheese, anyway.

In summary, Provel cheese = Soylent Green.

But how did it taste? To be honest, it’s pretty damn good. Like I said, melty cheese makes up for a lot, and what this open-faced melt lacks in balance, it makes up for in loads of garlic butter and melted cheese. I could try the turkey and/or roast beef options, but I think I have the hang of it. If you find yourself in St. Louis and you absolutely have to try Provel while you’re there, I’d certainly suggest getting yourself one of these over a visit to Imo’s.