This sandwich is based on a muffuletta, but it wasn't as simple as removing the meat and cheese and shoving in vegetables in its place. You have to first think exactly what it is that made the meat and cheese work in a real muffuletta in the first place. For me, the success is in the texture: moist and compact, but still toothsome and giving with a balance of flavors—funky, salty, sour, herbal, a bit of dried fruit from the well-aged cured meats.
Continue reading »
There are a number of ways to describe the
muffuletta from Eastmoreland Market & Kitchen. "Oily gut bomb" is one. "Damn delicious" is another.
Continue reading »
In New Orleans, the muffuletta is a sandwich that's made on a round, disc-like sesame bread filled with cured meats, marinated olives, and pickled vegetables. Though you
can buy mufffulettas at any number of places in the city, it all began at
Central Grocery in the French Quarter, where it came about as a way for Sicilians to combine the separate ingredients of their meal.
Continue reading »
"Aside from
Central Grocery,
who else makes a good muffuletta in the French Quarter?" Without hesitation, my bartender replied "Napoleon House." A
half muffuletta ($7.50) arrives piping hot from the oven, dripping with melted provolone and Swiss cheese and a healthy layer of ham, genoa salami and pastrami. It may not follow the blueprint of the traditional muffuletta, usually served cold, but a hot one makes a fine paring with a cold beer and a hangover.
Continue reading »
Say it with me now: The Central Grocery muffuletta. Luckily,
it wasn't a Monday. J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life in coffee spoons—mine could be described as a timeline of muffulettas.
Continue reading »
When you're eating lunch, do you ever feel inspired to write three metrical phrases about it? Haiku Lunchbox looks like the beginning of a great site devoted to food poetry. So far there are only four entries, but I felt inspired to compose a fifth: Salty meats, damp loaf From jars of olive salad Muffuletta, love Related Awesome Burger Haikus Awesome Pizza Haikus Food Poems [Talk]...
Continue reading »
From May 22 to May 31, I traveled across country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, California. Here's a snippet from that week. Left: Frank's, the muffuletta imposter. Right: Central Grocery's original muffuletta, the superior of the two, even if they look eerily similar here. Nobody warned me to avoid New Orleans on a Monday. So after miles of building up the city's sandwich staple, the muffuletta, only to find the mother source Central Grocery closed on Mondays, I felt cheated. Granted, it was Memorial Day Monday, but that didn't matter. Central Grocery is always closed on Mondays. Outside the shop, a herd of us victims huddled, as if awaiting an aproned man with the golden key from inside who...
Continue reading »