Sandwich aux Grillades de Valleyfield

An hour’s drive southwest of Montreal, in the part of Quebec where 95% of the population counts French their native tongue (as is mandated by law in Quebec), lies a pretty little river town called Salaberry-de-Valleyfield. Situated on Grande-Île, a large island in the St. Lawrence river just downstream from Lake Saint Francis, its many water features have earned it the nickname of ”The Venice of Quebec”. I’ve never been there, but it seems like my kind of place (apart from my francophonic ineptitude). In fact, it reminds me in several ways of my hometown of Quincy, Illinois (again, apart from the whole French thing).

Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, Quebec	Quincy, Illinois
Population (as of 2019): 42,410	Population (as of 2010): 40,633
They have Valleyfield College:	We have Quincy University:
They have the St. Lawrence River:	We have the Mississippi River:
They have Poutine:	We have… The Horseshoe?

OK, so Salaberry-de-Valleyfield may outclass Quincy a bit when it comes to street foods. Like much of Quebec, Salaberry-de-Valleyfield has a number of snack bars called casse-croûtes, where Quebecois and more general fast food items like Poutine, Montreal-style all-dressed hot dogs, burgers, and smoked meat sandwiches can be ordered. Valleyfield, though, has its own specialty that isn’t seen much past the shores of Lake St. Francis–a sandwich called grillade.

Is grillade really the name of the sandwich though? Grillades literally means grills, and just like in the US, there are many different kinds of restaurants, restaurants that don’t necessarily serve this sandwich, that use the word “Grill” in their names–kebab joints, upscale Portuguese, the sugar shacks where maple sap is boiled down into syrup. The meat used in the sandwich, thick slices of fresh uncured pork belly that are cooked over grills or in griddles, are also called grillades. When searching Google for the sandwich, to really get specific results, I’ve had to use the phrase “sandwich aux grillades de Valleyfield.” But grillades appears to be a common shorthand for the sandwiches, and in fact that is how they are listed in the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches that brought them to our attention, so that’s what we’ll call them.

Just up Lake St. Francis from Salaberry-de-Valleyfield lies a little town with a popular beach on the lake called Saint-Zotique. Since 2014 (barring 2020 of course, the Year Of No Fun) Saint-Zotique has held a Regional Grillades Festival, with both amateur and pro categories for area restaurants and enthusiasts to pit their grillades chops against each other. The competition is fierce but, one assumes, friendly, and in only a few years the festival appears to have become a part of the town’s fabric, perhaps due to the preexisting fascination with the sandwich. Early in the pandemic, the area’s representative in Canada’s Parliament released a grillades-themed social distancing guideline (which I have borrowed from the festival’s Facebook page)

In both 2018 and 2019, a Salaberry-de-Valleyfield restaurant called La Patate Taz (yes, they appear to be Tasmanian Devil themed) won top honors at the grillades festival. La Patate Taz’s menu features many delicacies we’ve mentioned in these pages previously, from the strictly Quebecois to the universally loved–smoked meat sandwiches, hot chicken sandwiches, hot dogs, burgers, club sandwiches, an enticing array of poutine variants. The menu even lists one of this month’s other sandwiches, the Guédille (though it is spelled Goudille in this instance it appears to be the same sandwich). I’ll be damned if I can find a grillade on that menu though. (I did find this photograph of an example from nearby Restaurant le Bidon though)

The sandwich specs are fairly standard: there’s the grillade meat, yellow mustard (described as “sweet” in many of the writeups I’ve seen), onion, and tomato between two slices of untoasted white bread. Having so little variation to work with in the sandwich, competitors distinguish themselves by the flavor of the meat, attempting to make theirs stand out in the field of competitors by variations in seasoning or cooking method.

The secret to a good grillade, say some of the competitors, is in the spices. There are several different brands of Epices Grillades de Valleyfield available commercially in Quebec, but the most successful competitors do things their own way. One team bastes the belly in a Jack Daniels sauce; others use their own custom spice rubs added directly to the meat as it cooks. Most of the teams appear to cook the grillades over charcoal, though the versions sold in local snack bars or made in homes are as likely as not to be cooked in a griddle.

So what goes into this spice mix? Well, as they say, it is a secret. There are pre-mixed spice blends, but they are generally not available for purchase in or shipment to the US. I found one recipe online calling for coriander seed, black pepper, pink pepper, dried garlic, red pepper flakes, sugar, salt, onion powder, sweet and hot paprika, and mustard seeds. It looks interesting, but when I zoom in on a product photo of the commercial spice mixes, I think there’s more there. For instance take a look at the image on the right.

I’m seeing plenty of coriander seed here, and the overall red color does suggest paprika. There are shapes that appear to be flakes of dried garlic and/or onion, and others may be mustard seeds. There are clear indications of red pepper as well. Seeds that are likely cumin. Some oblong green items that may be an herb like thyme. Most of the seasonings in the recipe line up, but there seems to be something missing. Additionally, every Grillades spice mix is different. So I made up my own.

I will stipulate right off the bat that this is likely nothing like a spice mix you’d taste on a real grillade in Quebec. But it was a pretty good one, and the flavors worked well with grilled pork belly.

Jim’s Grillade Spice Mix

Did I go heavy on the sweet paprika? Most likely. Could I have made it spicier? Definitely. But the combination of fennel and herbs de provence with the slight sweetness from the brown sugar was a great match for pork. Please, if anyone in Quebec with their own recipe for Grillade spices would like to give some constructive criticism, or possibly share some recipe tips, I’d love to hear from you!

As for the “sweet” mustard, some classic yellow mustards in Canada appears to be sweetened with brown sugar, and adding sugar and possibly some other flavors to mustard appears common as well. What seems most Quebec of all, though, is the existence of Maple Mustard. To make my own version of sweet mustard–but not too sweet–I added a tablespoon of Canadian maple syrup to 5oz of pungent American yellow mustard. Since I like my mustard to have some bite, though, I added a half-teaspoon of Colman’s English mustard powder as well.

I bought the best beefsteak tomato I could find (in Illinois. in December. Slim pickings), a sweet red onion, and a loaf of soft but crusty French bread from usual suspect Breadsmith, and I was ready to make some sandwiches. Except… these grillades are meant to be grilled, aren’t they? In February?

The snow had come in deep and wet and heavy over the course of a day or two. Then the temperature dropped. That wet, heavy snow became a thick layer of aerated ice, upon which several more days’ worth of snow then fell. I don’t generally have much problem grilling or smoking meats in the winter. This particular week is especially brutal though. And my charcoal grill is currently completely engulfed in snow, I think.

My propane grill is in the garage though, where it’s been since we made Chopped Cheese sandwiches back in October. And the stainless steel griddle I have for that grill is the perfect thing for cooking pork belly, which can cause extreme flareups over an open flame as its fat renders.

I sliced the pork belly into 3/8″ thick strips, similar to a thick-cut bacon, and seasoned both sides on the griddle as it cooked. This was a test run; I wanted to get a feel for the flavors and the technique before serving grillades to my family on Super Bowl Sunday. Once I’d finished cooking these three strips, I was ready to assemble.

We start with a simple slice of white bread. The few versions I’ve been able to find online seem to use something better than the bottom-shelf supermarket brand squishy white bread, but less fancy than an artisanal sourdough boule. I went with a French loaf from a nearby chain bakery.

On the bottom slice of bread I added my sweet(ish) maple yellow mustard and a few rings of onion.

Atop this went our cooked pork belly, the grillades. Yes, they look quite a bit like bacon. Without the curing process the bacon goes through, they don’t retain the pinkish color the bacon does while cooking, but they do brown similarly when fried up in a griddle. The taste is completely different though–these do not have the signature heavy hit of salt and smoke that defines bacon. Instead, they taste like pork, with a bit of sweet paprika and garlic, and… something. Not quite enough of the seasoning stuck to the grillades to give them the level of flavor I was looking for. I also overcooked them a bit–if this were bacon, it would be just right. An unsalted pork belly should retain a bit of the unrendered fat though–crisp on the outside, with just a bit of a soft, supple interior. They’re good, but lessons have been learned.

It’s a better tomato than I could have anticipated, for a grocery store tomato, in the upper midwest, in February. Thank you, science!

It’s… well the bacon is too long, jutting out the sides of the bread, and like I said the pork didn’t quite have the punch I was looking for. But the basics are there. The sweetness of the mustard brings out a similar sweetness in the tomato, its pungency complementing the onion as well. The grillades need to be a bit more assertive to stand up to those flavors, but overall this is quite a good sandwich.

Is it a Super Bowl worthy sandwich, though? Let’s fix what went wrong the first time around.

First, the grillades. Instead of seasoning them on the grill, I’m laying them out in a baking sheet ahead of time and seasoning each side raw, giving the spices a few minutes to adhere to the meat before flipping and seasoning the other side. Additionally, the spice mix could have used a bit more salt to help those flavors soak in–I’m salting the pork belly just a touch to make up for that.

Second, the strips were too long. I’m cutting them in half before adding them to the griddle. This will allow more of the meat to stay inside the sandwich, where we can layer them a bit to help balance out the strong mustard/onion/tomato combo.

Third, the grillades were cooked too hard. I’m turning these sooner and moving them around on the griddle to get each piece its time on the hotter spots, and pulling them before I would pull a similar slice of bacon.

The finished grillades smelled outstanding. They had nice crisp edges from the griddle but retained some flexibility. They’d taken on much more of the seasoning flavor, but the sweet paprika, the fennel, the aromatic herbs de provence only served to emphasize their essential porkiness.

Again, we start with the sweet mustard on one slice of bread. Some of the versions of this sandwich that I’ve seen keep the onion and tomato together on one side of the grillades, but I’ve chosen to separate them.

The onion and mustard seem to be a natural pairing. Tomato is always a welcome partner to bacon, and should be to the seasoned pork belly of these grillades as well.

I used just a bit more meat this time–4 full slices instead of three, and stacked them to get a full double layer of pork.

Now that was a sandwich worthy of the Super Bowl. Every piece of this worked, the sweet maple and the tomato picking up the fennel, the herbs de provence, the floral aroma of the coriander, balanced by the pungency of the onion, the mustard, the cumin. Should the bread have been buttered? It didn’t need it. Could it have used mayonnaise? Mindy put some on hers–I refrained. It didn’t need it. The tomato alone keeps things from being too dry but the fatty pork belly, when not cooked to a crisp, provides its own lubrication. What about lettuce? I’ve seen an example or two online that use it, and I wouldn’t count it out, but this tight little package is a perfect sandwich as is.

We’re covering two sandwiches from Quebec this month, and in happier times I might have taken this as an excuse for a return trip to Montreal. I do hope to go back one day. Maybe when I do, I can visit during Le festival régional de la grillade de Saint-Zotique. Wandering around lakeside on an August afternoon, tasting grillades and poutines, and ending the day with a concert and a fireworks show is exactly the kind of thing my stir-crazy snowbound cabin-fevered quarantine-fatigued mind dreams of daily. In the meantime, though my version may not be ready for competition, it will do.