Cool Tip: The Best Sandwich... and How to Get It!
- Jun 24, 2015
If we had to pick one sandwich to take with us if we were stranded on a deserted island, then it would be New Orleans’ incomparable Muffuletta. It’s a 10-inch round loaf of bread, cut horizontally and layered with a variety of Italian meats, cheeses, and a garlicky olive salad.
According to Wikipedia,
The muffuletta sandwich has its origins at the Central Grocery in the French Quarter of New Orleans. According to Marie Lupo Tusa, daughter of the Central Grocery's founder, it was born when Sicilian farmers selling their produce at the nearby Farmers' Market would come into her father's grocery for lunch and order some salami, ham, cheese, olive salad, and either long braided Italian bread or a round muffuletta loaf. In typical Sicilian fashion they ate everything separately, sitting on crates or barrels while precariously balancing their meals on their knees. Her father suggested cutting the bread and putting everything on it like a sandwich, even if it was not typical Sicilian fashion. The thicker braided Italian bread proved too hard to bite and the softer round muffuletta loaf won out. Shortly, farmers came to merely ask for a "muffuletta" for their lunch.
If you’re in New Orleans, then be sure to make a stop at the Central Grocery to try the original; you may have to stand in line, and the staff may be rude, but the sandwich is well worth it.
But what to do if you’re not going to New Orleans anytime soon. Don’t despair! There is a wonderful Muffuletta recipe on the Nola Cuisine site that tells you not only what meats and cheeses to get, but how to make the olive salad, and, most importantly, the bread. We were able to get a very good house-made olive salad at Genova’s Delicatessen in Napa, but the bread was nowhere to be found. So we decided to tackle that ourselves, to celebrate Mardi Gras.
We followed the recipe exactly, and our first one looked beautiful going into the oven, but unfortunately it spread too far, and wound up being about 11-inches in diameter with thin hard edges--not what we were looking for. On our second try, we tried something a little different: we took the ring from a 10-inch removable bottom tart dish, and put that on our baking sheet, then we placed the dough inside that for the last rise and the baking. Not only did it keep the loaf to the proper size with edges that were easy to cut into, but it also made a very pretty, slightly fluted loaf.
So today we have two Cool Tips: 1) try a muffuletta sandwich; it’s a special treat! And 2) if you make your own bread for it, then use a tart ring to keep it contained.
Laissez les bon temps roulez!