Pork Roll Sandwiches of New Jersey

We were already due to arrive late at the bed and breakfast, later than one should probably arrive at what is essentially a private home where strangers are letting you stay and then cooking for you. The blizzards holding up air traffic over the northeastern United States that evening made us later still. The time was just a couple minutes shy of 1:00 am as we turned into the quiet, wooded Maplewood neighborhood that was our destination. We trudged as quietly as we could up the steps to our room, looking forward to the few hours’ sleep we’d get before moving on to the Hoboken hotel we had booked for the remainder of our trip. The B&B had only been able to fit us in for one night, but Mindy was taken with the place, and if not for the snow we’d have had a few more hours to make fuller use of the “Bed” half of B&B.

As for the other half, a block from the hotel, Mindy gasped and pointed out a little cafe that even in the dark of midnight looked… well, it had a definite vibe, a sort of genuine thrown-together kitschy look, the kind of thing that casual-dining chain restaurants shoot for and miss. Google told us that it was called True Salvage Cafe and that it would open at 8:00 the next morning, and we decided we’d be there.

We slept a bit later than that though, showered, packed, and planned to get on our way after a quick stop at the cafe for breakfast. But our hosts did not want to let us leave without feeding us, and it would have been rude of us to refuse. So we had a piece of toast, some brown-and-serve sausages, and an egg; a piece of melon; and whatever else it was that they put in front of us that morning. We chatted idly with our hosts and another late-rising guest or two, gushing quite honestly about how beautiful the house was, and watching our morning slip away. Finally, we said our goodbyes and then we trudged in 3 or 4 inches of early March slush down the block to the cafe to have our second breakfast.

Given the calories we’d already downed that day–and the calories we had ahead of us, since this visit to New Jersey back in 2019 was ostensibly to investigate the New Jersey style Sloppy Joe sandwich–we couldn’t eat much. But we decided to split one of their Taylor Ham, egg, and cheese sandwiches, and I ordered a coffee as well, and we sat down at one of the odd little mismatched tables they had inside and waited, not too long, for them to bring us out the sandwich. It wasn’t the first time Mindy or I had tried Taylor Ham–or “pork roll,” depending on where in New Jersey you are–but it was the first time we would be trying it on its home turf. (I am agnostic as to the name, not having spent much time in New Jersey, but I lean toward saying “pork roll” as the more technically accurate term.)

This wasn’t the sandwich I was in New Jersey to write about, and I didn’t work as hard as I should have to get a good photograph of it. Despite our almost complete lack of hunger, Mindy and I devoured this sandwich. It was beautiful–the hot, soft folded egg, the firm, salty, crisp-edged pork roll, the oozing, melted American cheese. All of it came together into what we thought at the time must be a very special sandwich. The following year we were gratified to have that opinion validated, as writer Pete Genovese from NJ.com named the True Salvage Cafe version the best pork roll sandwich in New Jersey.

The sandwich had been made with some care, but among the many admirable things about the sandwich what stood out to us more than anything was the fantastic bread. The proprietor was happy to share that they used the “Village rolls” sold by Balthazar bakery right there in New Jersey, a larger production facility associated with the bakery of the same name in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood.

Pork roll doesn’t seem to have caught on much outside New Jersey, and while you can find it at a few stores here and there, it’s not an everyday item on menus in Chicago. Friend of the site Titus Ruscitti has pointed out a few on his great blog, and for a time there was one on the menu at the Blissful Banana Cafe in Orland Park, but I haven’t seen it available there for a while. When I want pork roll, I have to import it. I brought several packages of Taylor pork roll back with us from that New Jersey trip–they lasted a few months. I brought some back from Philadelphia when I was there in November to try the Philly taco. Those, too are gone. This time I mail-ordered it.

The red boxes each contain 8 slices of pork roll, enough for 2-4 sandwiches depending on how pork-heavy you want to get. The chub is a slightly smaller diameter sausage than what comes in the boxes but otherwise interchangeable. The pork roll itself is a mix of finely ground cured pork and fatty bits in a sort of rough emulsion that may or may not be safe to eat as-is out of the package but, like SPAM, will certainly be better pan-fried.

In New Jersey, a pork roll sandwich is generally going to be made on either a kaiser roll or a bagel. Some say it must be an “everything” bagel but I don’t think that’s legally binding. Works just fine on a plain bagel, as well as a poppyseed kaiser roll.

In any case, probably best to avoid using a blueberry bagel or anything like that. Since I still had some shokupan leftover from my post on Japanese pizza toast along with some white American cheese though, that was one of the first pork roll sandwiches I made this month.

Pretty sure the NJ hard-liners aren’t going to care for that one but it was a good sandwich anyway–4 slices of pork roll to cover the larger area of a slice of milk bread; white American cheese, melted atop the pork roll on the griddle; 2 eggs, beaten, seasoned with salt and pepper and folded; and more white American cheese between two lightly-toasted slices of shokupan. Milk bread is a sturdy bread, fluffy but springy rather than squishy, and holds up well to the pile of fried things and cheese I laid upon it. It’s missing the outer crust of a bread roll or bagel but toasting the bread makes up for some of that textural lack.

But I did want to try and keep my versions of this sandwich as close to New Jersey standards as possible, so I tried it on an everything bagel. Not a good everything bagel, sadly, but the closest approximation I could find on a Sunday morning. OK, I was lazy and ran through the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru.

The bagels toasted with a little butter on the griddle while the pork roll finished cooking. Then I added the pork roll along with a melted slice of cheese and the folded egg along with another melted slice of cheese. Finally, for a true Jersey style sandwich, I added SPK–salt, pepper, and ketchup, the requisite trinity of condiments for a breakfast sandwich in the Garden State.

Salt isn’t really necessary for a sandwich that already contains pork roll, which is itself quite a salty meat. But there may something to the combination of the three. At the very least, I will say that the pile of salt, carbs, and fat that constitutes a pork roll, egg, and cheese sandwich, delicious as it may be, can only be improved by adding something with a little sweetness, a little acidity, and a little heat. Sriracha might be better (note: it’s not. I tried) but SPK does the trick.

With all the pork roll in my fridge, I had no intention of getting too fancy with this sandwich–just make a few, eat a few, talk about what makes them good, and then call it a day. That’s when Tribunal contributor Brian had to throw a wrench in the works by asking, “are you going to make your own taylor pork roll? Can I have some?”

Well now I am. Gosh.

I was able to find several recipes online for homemade versions of pork roll, all with certain similarities. They all used about a 70%/30% mix of pork shoulder and smoked bacon, salt and curing salt, dextrose for sweetness. black or white pepper for flavor. They added a bit of sourness, whether by a brief fermentation or the addition of food-grade acid. One of them used a more complex set of flavorings–both black and white pepper, garlic, cayenne, onion powder. The other two both added port wine. I went with one of the latter versions, one that used a starter culture and an overnight fermentation.

I spent a week curing a 5 pound section of pork belly, hung that overnight to dry, smoked it over applewood, then lopped off 3 pounds of it to combine with a deboned pork butt, ground all 10 pounds of meat, mixed in the seasonings and the port wine and about a quarter cup of yogurt for my starter culture, then stuffed it into fibrous casings and hung them in my utility closet overnight. You can see more of the process in the Tiktok video at the end of this post.

One of those chubs has about 5 ounces of giardiniera mixed into it, oil and all. I haven’t gotten into it yet. I’m hoping inspiration will strike.

The next day, I vacuum-sealed the chubs and held them in a water bath for 90 minutes and… whoops.

I must have let my water bath get too hot. More of the fat than I expected rendered out of the sausage. (Guess I’d better get myself one of those sous vide contraptions) However, I cut into it and it still looked pretty good, though maybe a bit coarser and leaner than Taylor brand pork roll.

I can also confirm that it fried up fine and made a heck of a breakfast sandwich on a Turano French roll, which isn’t exactly New Jersey compliant but made a pretty good sandwich regardless. My homemade pork roll is not as salty or fatty as Taylor Ham, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It allows for some of the other flavors to come out, most notably the slight sourness of a fermented meat, like you might experience in a good salami or summer sausage.

I still have 9 or so pounds of this–minus the 3lbs 4oz chub that will be going to Brian (thanks for the inspiration)–and I’m sure I’ll find plenty to do with it. In fact I used it in the Tiktok video you will find below that accompanies this article. But first, I had a job to do. I needed to recreate that Taylor Ham sandwich from True Salvage Cafe.

To do that, I would need to first recreate those rolls. The rolls had a dark brown crust, specked with a coating finer than seeds but coarser than flour, and a large-holed crumb that recalled ciabatta to some extent. A cached Google result leading to a 404 error gave me a hint.

So I found a good, high-hydration baguette recipe with some long rests of the dough that looked like it would lead to a tasty, large-holed, crisp-crusted result, and I adapted it to make something like the rolls Mindy and I have been pining after for 3 years.

Here’s how they came out:

The hole structure isn’t quite as large as I was looking for–maybe the cornmeal and oiled plastic wrap kept them from rising as much as they should, or perhaps a slightly longer proofing period would have helped. In any case, they are fine rolls and if anybody can improve on the technique, please let me know how you did it!

My own photos above do not really give much of a hint to the structure of the sandwich. However, some other photos on the internet do. Note that there are 2 layers of melted American cheese–one on the bottom, between the egg and the bread, the other on top of the fried pork roll. 4 slices of pork roll are used, and what appears to be 2 eggs, beaten and seasoned with salt and black pepper, cooked on a flattop and folded.

I toasted a buttered roll on a griddle while pan-frying the Taylor-brand pork roll on one side, then made the folded egg while they finished, gathering the pork roll into a loose stack and melting a slice of American cheese on both the meat and the eggs.

To assemble, first I inverted the egg cheese-side-down onto the bottom roll.

Then placed 4 fried slices of cheese-covered pork roll on top.

And here it is, my version of New Jersey’s best pork roll sandwich.

The folded egg is fluffy but firm, an ideal texture for use in a sandwich, where a more custardy egg would lose cohesiveness and squish out the sides with every bite. The pork roll is salty, chewy, and firm, with that slight fermented tang, hinting at the flavor of a more high-end cured product like a country ham without really reaching the same depth. American cheese is American cheese: despite its detractors, it melts like no other cheese can and is ideal for a breakfast sandwich. The bread roll, meanwhile, is not quite there. It’s great; it toasts up nicely; it developed quite a bit of flavor during its long fermentation. But the texture is just a bit less pliable than what I remember of the Balthazar roll.

It’s great, and I’ll certainly make it again. I’ll almost have to, given the amount of pork roll I have on hand currently. It’s close, so close that it’s almost more frustrating than a clear miss would have been. They’re very good rolls, almost great, and I’ll crack the code next time, or the time after perhaps.

Compare this photo to the one above and you’ll see what I mean. Better yet, if you find yourself in New Jersey, visit True Salvage Cafe yourself and try the real thing. While you’re out there, head over to Balthazar Bakery’s retail location in Englewood, New Jersey and buy a few bags of the village rolls to bring back to me. I’m good for it!

@sandwichidiot Pork Roll Sandwiches of New Jersey #porkroll #taylorham #sandwichtribunal ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer