Sausage Sandwiches

The entry on the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches describing Sausage sandwiches lists the origin as the UK and Germany, and describes them thus: “Sausage on a roll or bread, served with a variety of sauces and toppings.” The Wikipedia article on Sausage sandwiches expands on this:

A sausage sandwich is a sandwich containing cooked sausage. It may consist of an oblong bread roll such as a baguette or ciabatta roll, and sliced or whole links of sausage,^[1] such as hot or sweet Italian sausage, Polish sausage, German sausage (knackwurst, weisswurst, bratwurst, bockwurst), Mediterraneanmerguez, andouille or chorizo. Popular toppings include mustard, brown sauce, ketchup, steak sauce, peppers, onions, sauerkraut, chili, and salsa.

Like some other sandwiches we’ve encountered in the past few years, this is not so much a specific item as a category, and one we’ve dealt with extensively. From the Austrian Bosna in the early days, through Choripan and Morcipan, Cudighi, Leberkäse, Kottenbutter, Polish Boys and Maxwell Street Polish, Finnish Porilainen, the recently covered Sailor Sandwich or the perennial hot button topic, the Hot Dog, we’ve covered a ton, and that’s leaving out some I’ve forgotten or that included sausages but didn’t necessarily feature them.

Rather than make this a “clip show” though, and spend a few hundred words scrolling through our sausagey Greatest Hits, I wanted to take this opportunity to take a look around, to see what’s out there, to find some interesting sausage sandwiches that don’t get their own pages, or to pursue some ideas that I’ve had previously but haven’t fleshed out as yet. In short, to eat some damn sausage sandwiches this month.

This post will be all over the place. Let’s start, though, close to home.

Chicago

I mentioned the Maxwell Street Polish earlier. To be fair, it’s not on the List either, though I wrote a quick piece about it when I first started the site, trying to get some quick easy content together. Chicago has its own style of hot dog as well, which I’ve written about at length.

Equally well known, and equally not listed on Wikipedia, is the Italian sausage sandwich served by any of the city’s many, many Italian Beef stands. It’s simply a grilled Italian sausage, served in the same dense sandwich roll as an Italian Beef sandwich, whether as part of a beef/sausage Combo or simply a sausage sandwich. It’s funny, guys who would frown upon adding cheese or red sauce to an Italian Beef sandwich will get said accoutrements added to a sausage sandwich without batting an eye. Me, I’ll take my sausage the way I take my beef: hot and wet.

Chicago also has its own style of barbecue, commonly featuring sausages known as hot links. This is not the Texas style of hot link, which is similar to a spicy kielbasa. The Chicago hot link is a fresh sausage (not cured), in flavor similar to a fatter, spicier version of a breakfast sausage. It’s commonly served cut into slices and mixed with rib tips, on a bed of white bread, covered in fries, with thin sweet sauce over the whole. However, some places, like Exsenator’s BBQ in Markham, IL, serve a standalone hot link sandwich. This is a whole hot link, served in a bun, with fries on the side, and yes, doused in sweet BBQ sauce. It is a supremely cheap meal and tastes just fine washed down with an RC Cola.

US – South

I wrote about New Orleans’ Po’boy sandwiches a few months back. I didn’t really touch on andouille as a po’boy ingredient at that time, but that same Heaven on Seven location where I enjoyed the roast beef debris po’boy last summer also serves an Andouille po’boy with grilled onion.

That is all this particular po’boy is, in fact–andouille with grilled onions served on a standard Chicago Turano-type French roll toasted with garlic butter. None of the pickles, tomatoes, lettuce, and sauce I’d expect from a po’boy. The sausage was a bit overcooked and dried out but the grilled onions helped keep the sandwich from parching me too badly. Overall it was not great but I won’t let that keep me from trying someone else’s take on an andouille po’boy in the future.

The town of Lockhart may be considered the BBQ Capital of Texas, but Southside Market in Elgin, Texas, a smokehouse open since 1882, is the oldest BBQ spot in Texas. Here, in this town east of Austin, they invented a type of sausage known as “Hot Guts,” a spicy all-beef sausage stuffed into pork casings, smoked and sold by the link.

I was surprised and excited to see a Hot Guts sandwich on the lunch menu at local Chicago favorite Publican Quality Meats. I was even more surprised to see the sandwich once it arrived.

Rather than a link-type sausage, PQM’s take on Hot Guts is akin to a beef summer sausage, sliced fairly thin, grilled, and stacked fairly high. The sandwich is served with American cheese, corn relish, and aioli, and it’s not a bad sandwich at all. It’s just not anything like what I expected. Clearly a trip to Texas is in order, so I can try the real thing.

US – Northwest

There are a number of regional hot dog styles in the US. Thrillist named 41 of them in this article a few years ago. Last year my friend Daniel (whose food and travel blog The Wandering Hedonist should be on your radar, if it isn’t) visited Chicago, and after a marathon day of trying various local lowbrow culinary delights (which Daniel wrote about here), he and I discussed the Seattle style hot dog.

If you are not aware, Seattle’s signature hot dog is split, grilled, and served on a toasted bun with a schmear of cream cheese, grilled onions, mustard (whether the plain yellow or spicy brown variety), and often has something spicy added as well, whether raw or pickled jalapenos or Sriracha sauce. It sounded to me like a strange combination best appreciated drunk. Daniel confirmed the “best when drunk” theory and offered to take me to his favorite spot the next time I’m in Seattle.

I’ve not made it back to Seattle since then (soon, I hope!) but I have recently discovered another connection. For a time I lived and went to school in Carbondale, IL, where the hot post-bar nosh was served by Winston’s Bagels, a street food cart run by Winston the “Bagel Man.” Winston started up around 1983, several years before I arrived in Carbondale, and sold tens of thousands of late-night grill-toasted bagels over the next 34 years before retiring recently. I’m a member of a Facebook group for people who went to school at SIU in Carbondale, and roughly 60% of the posts seem to be about missing Winston’s Bagels.

It was on that same Facebook group though that I learned that before Winston, a man named Hadley Longe ran the bagel cart on Carbondale’s strip. After selling his cart (to Winston? Perhaps!) Hadley moved to Seattle, where he worked at the Bagel Deli in the Pioneer Square neighborhood. By night, he sold hot dogs from a cart, serving them on a long thin bialy (sort of a non-boiled bagel) with cream cheese. He’s only one among several who claim to have originated the style, but I was tickled to find that Illinois connection.

So though I still plan to take Daniel up on trying his favorite Seattle dog next time I’m out that way, I had to make it myself this month. I have been working on making homemade cream cheese, so I was excited to use that. I was also excited to use a good Vienna Beef hot dog rather than the generic Costco-style dog the style usually calls for. That was a mistake, as grilling (or broiling, if I’m being honest. I’m out of propane and charcoal is too much of a commitment for a couple of hot dogs) a natural-casing dog that’s been split along one side causes the whole thing to curl up in a circle as the casing renders and shrinks.

Still, I managed to put together a pretty decent Seattle dog, if I say so myself.

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Still, I had not had nearly enough to drink to appreciate it properly. We’ll fix that next time I’m in Seattle, Daniel.

UK / Ireland

It’s my experience that sausages are generally served in bread rolls rather than sliced bread. It’s also my experience that such sandwiches are not called “sandwiches” in Commonwealth countries but rather rolls, burgers, cobs, etc. Searching for “UK sausage rolls” however, resulted in a lot of recipes for wrapping bulk banger sausage in puff pastry and baking it. This is tasty, but it is not a sandwich.

“Sausage Sarnie” may have been the search term I was looking for, and the results I find when I google that phrase appear very similar to the “Banger sandwich” I had recently at local Irish market and deli, Winston’s Market.

Winston’s banger sandwich consists of banger sausages served in a bread roll with grilled onions and brown sauce, the whole toasted well in a panini press. It’s a tasty sandwich–brown sauce and bangers are a natural, and the sweetness of the grilled onions fits into that mix nicely. I hadn’t realized before that day that Winston’s sold prepared sandwiches, as I mostly went there to pick up Irish meats and dry goods. I’ll be back to see if there are any other surprises on the deli menu.

Germany

Historically, the Berghoff in downtown Chicago was one of the best-known German restaurants in the US. In early 2006, the restaurant closed, only to slowly reopen, piece by piece, over the next few years (the Cafe, the Bar, then finally the dining room). Chicagoans have strong opinions about this. Many I’ve spoken to feel that the closing and reopening was done to rid the company of its older, unionized staff and replace them with younger, lower-paid employees.

How does the food compare, though, to what the restaurant served back in the old days, when well-paid well-trained staff manned a carving station in the dining room? The author of the fantastic Chicago-based food site GreaseFreak.com has documented the decline of one item in particular–the bratwurst sandwich. Originally served between two slices of hearty, rustic rye bread, the fine-ground veal sausage is these days served in a stiff pretzel roll.

The rigidity of the bread combined with the softness of a fine-ground veal brat results in a sandwich where the fillings squish out the sides as you’re eating. The brat itself was OK, not as good as the veal bratwursts or Weisswursts I used to pick up at Delicatessen Meyer in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood, or even at the lesser known Lincoln Quality Meat Market down the street, but serviceable, though I did wonder for a moment upon realizing this was not the coarser style of pork bratwurst I’d expected whether I’d been given a stadium brat.

Mexico

It may not be what you picture when you think of a sausage sandwich, due to chorizo generally being served loosemeat fashion rather than whole or sliced. However, a chorizo torta, salty and spicy crumbled sausage glued to its grilled bolillo with a schmear of refried beans, topped with mayo, lettuce, tomato, and avocado, is a fantastic lunch, and you can get one almost anywhere.

Scandinavia

My local grocery store, Berkot’s, has an excellent meat department that makes fine sausages in-house. I recently found one I had not tried previously, a “Swedish potato sausage,” and knew I had to find some way to work it into this post.

I slowly simmered the sausage for an hour before pan-frying it to finish, which seems to be the accepted method for preparing these sausages. The sandwich I made might not be the most authentic preparation for the sausage, but it seems to be true to Nordic food traditions. I sliced the sausages and served them, alternating with pickled beets, on rye bread buttered with Finnish butter and spread with horseradish.

This was very good, but would have been even better on some actual Danish Rugbrød rather than this German rye–the German rye was too large and not rigid enough, though it tasted great.

South Africa

I’ve been fascinated by and wanting to try South African boerewors sausages since hearing about them years ago from friend and sometimes Sandwich Tribunal commenter Marinus. While looking for unique sausage sandwiches available in Chicago this month, I found that my old neighborhood of Lincoln Square has a “South African BBQ” restaurant called Baobab BBQ. While most of the barbecue served is traditional Southern US barbecue fare, there are several South African touches, such as the “Monkey Gland” sauce option (worry not, no monkeys were harmed in making this sauce), desserts such as Melktert and Malva Pudding, and of course Boerewors sausages served with Chakalaka on a bun.

Every individual piece of this sandwich was great–the sausage had a meaty, slightly sour flavor I’d learned to expect from Marinus’ description, the Chakalaka was great, spicy and more bean-forward than I’d expected but a delicious accompaniment, and the bun was toasted perfectly. It was difficult to eat as a sandwich though, the sausage texture being too soft to provide enough resistance for a proper snap to the natural casing. I think I would eat this all day minus the bun with a fork and knife though.

Southeastern Asia

Readers who’ve been with us for a while may remember the trip Mindy and I took to the Hmongtown Marketplace in St. Paul, Minnesota 2 years ago when I was writing about the Jucy Lucy. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned a more recent trip to Milwaukee, where we found another Hmong market, though smaller than the one in St. Paul. Both of them had great food, and while the raw beef laab I had in St. Paul is something I still rave about from time to time, at both places I was especially impressed by the Hmong sausages. Bursting with garlic and ginger flavor, served with a spicy chili-and-cilantro dipping sauce, these sausages are both surprising in the flavors they use and yet somehow comfortable and right.

I’ve been meaning to take a shot at making my own for a while now, and this post seemed like the custom-made excuse. After perusing several recipes online, I chose one that used pork and fatty pork, with ginger, garlic, shallots, salt, lime juice, fish sauce, green onions, and cilantro. I did not use curing salts, though the bright color of the sausages in my photos from the time suggest that they likely do. These ingredients were mixed and left together overnight before being coarsely ground and stuffed into hog casings.

I twisted the sausage into links, fired up the grill, and promptly ran out of propane. I ended up having to finish these sausages under the broiler, though they turned out nicely that way.

What would make a good sandwich for featuring a Hmong sausage though? As it turns out, the Hmong people make their sandwiches on baguettes with toppings very much like a Vietnamese banh mi. So I prepared many of the traditional banh mi accompaniments–pickled carrots and daikon, cilantro, sliced chilies, sliced cucumber, Vietnamese-style mayonnaise (a little heavier on egg yolk, using lime juice as the acid and fish sauce for salt and umami). I also tried my hand at Vietnamese-style demibaguettes.

They were not quite as good as they appear to be, with a crumb a little denser and stiffer than I’d hoped for, but they were still quite good.

I also made the Hmong chili sauce that I remembered so fondly from my visits to Hmong markets. I ground Thai chilies with a little garlic and sugar in a mortar and pestle, then added green onion, cilantro, lime juice, and fish sauce. It was spicy–really spicy–but addictively good as well.

To make the sandwiches, I split open a demibaguette and spread with the homemade mayonnaise and a little Hmong chili sauce.

Then I added the sausage whole. I considered splitting it in half to cover more of the bread surface, and in fact if I make these again I may do that. But the whole sausage is what I used this time.

Then I finished the sandwich banh mi style, with a good handful of drained pickled carrots and daikon radish, sliced jalapeno, sliced cucumber, and cilantro leaves & stems.

I was ready to declare this the best sandwich I’d ever had. But small things held it back–the density of the bread, the slightly wrong texture of the sausage. I still think a Hmong sausage banh mi could be the world’s best sandwich. I just haven’t had it yet. Maybe I’ll get it right next time.

Sausages of the World

Not every culture in the world has a sausage-making tradition, and not every sausage is likely to find itself wrapped in bread. Still, the sampling of sausage sandwiches here and in other articles on this site barely scratches the surface of what’s possible, or even commonly available. Tell us about your favorite sausage sandwiches in the comments, please. I’d love to try them someday!