The sausage is hot, HOT, and the crisp casing snaps and bursts as you bite into it. It’s salty, fatty, garlicky, smoky, pungent with mustard, sweet and aromatic with cooked onion, with a spicy-sour kick from the hot peppers.
What’s not to like? It’s well-seasoned sausage–coriander and mace are the basic spices behind a lot of the world’s great sausages, and the bread crumbs help the sausage crisp up nicely in the pan.
The savory meat and vegetable mixture, aromatic and pungent, spicy with paprika and cumin and dried chilies, glues itself to the flatbread as it bakes, remaining moist yet adhering itself to the surface.
I was right to go with the good quality franks–that snap made this sandwich, and the beef flavor was an excellent foil for the donut bun, the sweet heat of the mustard, the sour crunch of the pickle relish
The layer of hot sausage is blanketed in mild, buttery cheese enhanced by the juicy tomato, sweetish gherkins with just a hint of spice, and pickled chilies that make up for the lack of aggression with a pungent brininess and heat
There’s a familiarity to the combination that is comforting, a universality. It comes as no surprise that these flavors compliment a patty of garlicky sausage, crosshatched with seared grill marks and oozing with melted cheese.
It’s far more interestingly seasoned than a Midwestern Sloppy Joe. with a whiplash of flavors between the cool herbs and warm spices that kept me interested without fatiguing my palate.
All else took a backseat to the floral coriander, the earthy turmeric and cumin, the warming garam masala, the lush chicken thighs, the bright lemon-spiked red onion and the bits of hot chili pepper tangled up in its matrix.
The idea of replacing a more boring green like lettuce in a sandwich with a collection of herbs is exciting! In such a lineup of big flavors, the nominal star of the show, the Kalbas, is almost an afterthought, but it works.
The rye crust was too thick, brittle when it should be strong enough to hold together yet hard and impenetrable when I wanted to bite through it, unleavened and dense, with the molasses flavor of dark rye.
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