In Praise of the Hardee’s Hot Ham and Cheese Sandwich

What do you eat when you’re a picky child who doesn’t like hamburgers but still feels like dinner out at a fast food restaurant is a treat?

These days it’s easy. Every restaurant has a chicken sandwich, or nuggets, and all manner of wacky one-off gimmicks.

Back in the 70s and early 80s though, burgers were your lot (unless you could talk Mom into Arby’s or fried chicken instead). You had the regular burger, and the quarter pound burger. McDonalds, Burger King… the names changed, but the basics were the same. Sometimes you’d get something like the Big Mac–I learned to love the Big Mac, but it has always been more about the special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions and the sesame seed bun than the 2 all-beef patties.

McDonalds also had the Filet-O-Fish (sometimes), but that is just an awful sandwich.

All that changed for me when I was in sixth grade and we moved to Quincy. Sure, Quincy had 2 of the big 3 burger franchises–McDonalds & Wendy’s, eventually even a Burger King. But Quincy had something that has always been rare in Chicagoland. Quincy had Hardee’s.

Quincy had several Hardee’s restaurants in fact–three of them. I’d never seen one before. McDonald’s is all over Chicagoland (and damn near everywhere else in the world) and is in fact headquartered in west suburban Oak Brook. Wendy’s and Burger King aren’t uncommon sights either. But I’d never seen a Hardee’s before, and the menu kind of blew my mind.

They had roast beef sandwiches! Chicken sandwiches! Cinnamon-raisin biscuits! and of course they had the hot ham and cheese sandwich, an instant classic to a burger-averse middle-schooler.

When I saw we were doing ham and cheese sandwiches for The List this month, the Hardee’s Hot Ham and Cheese sandwich was the first thing I thought of–though of course we have written about many many ham and cheese sandwiches in the past. The hot ham and cheese from Hardee’s is still among my wife’s favorite fast food items, and to be honest I crave one myself from time to time. For a while there we were even lucky enough to have a Hardee’s about a mile from our home (they do encroach into Chicagoland from time to time, then retreat, like a meaty tide lapping against a beach made of hamburgers) but it closed earlier this year. The nearest Hardee’s to us is about an hour’s drive from us at this point.

You know what that means:

It was an excellent day for a road trip; the bluest of skies–clouds, sure, but nice fluffy ones–warm but not oppressive, not much to do but plenty of time to not do it in. There was a nasty bit of construction-related traffic toward the end of the trip but before I knew it, there we were, looking up at the familiar Hardee’s sign.

That star wasn’t always there, nor was the script lettering–those came along since the ’90s, when Hardee’s, spread throughout the American South and Midwest, merged with the West coast and Southwestern chain Carl’s Jr. Back when I first encountered Hardee’s, the signs were different, all blue and orange with lettering that bridged the gap between the aesthetics of sci-fi B-movies and the comic sans set. See the photo at the bottom of this page for reference.

“I guess we’re in Plainfield,” my wife said. I thought maybe she was making a joke about the neighboring cornfield, but she pointed out the town’s nearby watertower. The rurality seems to also be part of the Hardee’s aesthetic. That kind of hairy-chested manly-man all-American thing. Back in the 80s, Hardee’s tended to do things either regular or Big. Now, Hardee’s does things Big or Thick or, preferably, both.

For a while, their commercials featured guys in flannel and hard hats grunting into massive double-fisted burgers, breathing heavily while juices dripped down their chin. Nowadays, they’ve bypassed that and gone straight to the soft porn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdNXJAhafPw

The menuboard consists of one massive pile of meat after another (although looking at this again, I do see that they’ve also got a “little” thickburger. Only 1/4 lb. Isn’t that cute?)

While Hardee’s does do a BIG Hot Ham and Cheese sandwich (more on that later), I always preferred the regular one. My wife and I ordered a couple of them (along with the Bacon Cheddar Fries featured on the above menuboard–we couldn’t help ourselves!) and sat down to wait for them. Here is one thing I do like about Hardee’s (maybe not universal, but common at locations I’ve been to): when they say Hot ham and cheese, they don’t mean lukewarm ham and cheese that’s been sitting under a warming light for a half hour. That sandwich hits the table nice and hot.

The Hardee’s Hot Ham and Cheese comes in a standard small-sized sesame seed bun. It’s a decent amount of smokey ham with a slice of whitish cheese that they call Swiss but melts like American. It was everything I remembered.

The Bacon Cheddar Fries, however, were a disappointment. Pump sauce and bacon bits. Tasty but forgettable, though it does look like Hardee’s has changed up their fries again at some point in the last decade.

Let’s get back to that sandwich though. What I like about it is that it’s just enough ham for that size of bun, with just enough cheese. Even the bun has just enough sesame seeds.

It’s not BIG or THICK or extreme in any way, it’s just a tasty snack that, along with some fries and a pop, makes a decent lunch.

I was never a fan of their BIG Hot Ham and Cheese sandwich–I always thought that it was just a similar amount of ham and cheese on a bigger bun. I ordered one of those as well (for science!) this time and discovered that there is precisely twice the amount of both ham and cheese on it. In fact, it is 2 identical cheese-topped stacks of ham, as if the ham and cheese for these ships stacked and frozen and just gets nuked when it’s time to assemble. That may be the case, but that doesn’t make the sandwich bad. It is, in fact, one of the few items still on the Hardee’s menu that shows any semblance of balance.

I ordered yet another Hot Ham and Cheese to go, and deconstructed it when we got home (by which time it was an Ambient Temperature Ham and Cheese sandwich).

The bun has gone through the “caramelization” process I remember well from my days at McDonald’s–the bun is put into a griddle or press long enough to heat it, soften it, and give it some color without adding any type of crisp texture (which would be destroyed once it’s slathered in toppings and wrapped in paper anyway). It does also protect the bun from being soaked in said toppings and disintegrating, one of the reasons you don’t wear more of your big sloppy fast food sandwich than you already do when you’re done.

It contained precisely 8 paper-thin slices of ham, stacked neatly but folded over a bit to give it some bulk and a more attractive appearance. The top bun, also caramelized, retained a good amount of the slice of cheese, which did appear to have a couple of holes like a baby Swiss, but otherwise had the same great-melting waxy texture of a processed American cheese.

That may not sound terribly appetizing but this is one of those sandwiches where the total exceeds the sum of its parts. One of these, an order of curly fries, and…

Shit. Curly fries.

We were so blinded by the glorious-looking (but ultimately unsatisfying) Bacon Cheddar Fries that we neglected an essential part of the Hardee’s experience, the curly fries.

Nowadays it seems like every fast food joint has some type of seasoned fries–except McDonald’s–but it wasn’t always that way. See, McDonald’s has always had the fries thing on lock. They don’t change what they’re doing (apart from using healthier frying oil these days) because their fries have always been the best. They don’t need to change. But most other fast food places do not sell the same type of fries today that they did 10, or 20, or 30 years ago. They’re still playing catch-up. 30 or 35 years ago, a few places started introducing seasoned fries, as if to say, “Look, we know we can’t top Mickey D’s when it comes to regular fries but look at these! It’s like they’ve got the salt built right in!”

Curly fries were every bit as much a part of the Hardee’s experience as free refills of pop and singing Weird Al songs at the top of our lungs until we got kicked out at 1am. (Warning: Hardee’s experience described in previous sentence may not hold true for every reader)

I wasn’t driving back out to Plainfield in the middle of the night just to eat curly fries and potentially get thrown out of a fast food joint. Fortunately, curly fries are available in the freezer section of just about any grocery store, you can have as many drink refills as you want when you own the refrigerator (and the toilet), and hot ham and cheese sandwiches are easy as heck to make at home.

Make your curly fries (use a fryer–oven baked fries are crap). Caramelize your bun (just throw each half cut-side down in a hot pan for 10 seconds or so, smooshing it down a bit with your hand and moving it around until it’s just browned and warmed through). Stack 8 slices of Buddig-style hickory-smoked ham on a plate with some kind of melty white cheese (I used Havarti, which melts well and tastes great but lacks the salty-waxy character of the “real” thing) on top for 45 seconds or so. Pour a Coke over too much crushed ice (do not neglect to use a straw. You need a straw to really nail the experience). And voila!

Now, put on some sunglasses, rattle your straw around your cup to get that last little bit of Coke from the bottom, and sing along with me:

How come you’re always such a fussy young man
Don’t want no Captain Crunch, don’t want no Raisin Bran
Well, don’t you know that other kids are starving in Japan
So eat it, just eat it…