Why Hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe. I’m Jon O’Guin, and I am living with regret. Not for my secret monkey’s paw wish, no, that’s going roughly as I expected it would. No, today’s regret is over yesterday’s sloth, and how, as it always does, it’s made my life harder today. But, if you have little interest in that, or in the details of etymology, history, physics and math we’re covering in today’s post, you can jump straight down to the recipe with this link. But for those of you doughty of heart and doughy of body, let’s roll into the rest of the discussion.

When It’s Too Easy To Get Hard

I don’t think you thought through the implications of that phrase, Title Jon. Moving on. So, uh, I’m glad the guys in a hurry clicked the link, because the difficulty with today’s post is…well, I really don’t know what I’m doing with this post. Sure, I CLAIMED it would contain “etymology, history, physics, and mathematics”, but…look at the title. I’ve already given you MOST of the recipe with just the words there. It’s a transparently simple situation, which makes it a rather opaque topic to write about.

It’s my fault. I’m in Leavenworth for the Christmas season, and thought “Hey, if I churn out a couple recipes before I go, I can live on Ramen, Bratwurst, and Beer until I come back, and the site will be handled. BUT that meant I had to come up with recipes, and fun fact: that’s a pain to do around Thanksgiving. THEN, I CAME UP with recipes, and no one would agree to try them. I have a recipe for White Pesto Pasta that I COULD NOT get Nate or my mother to agree to eat, so I wasn’t going to make 4 servings for just myself. I had a chili recipe, but I kept not being 100% sure I had all the ingredients. The only two I was SOLID on were the Bitterballen from last week, and Fried Bologna Sandwiches. My intent was to use the post as a stealthy area to rave about how much I love Zapp’s Voodoo Heat chips, which are basically All-Dressed Chips if you replaced Sour Cream and Onion with Jalapeño.

And the packaging with rave lighting.

If none of that made any sense to you, All-Dressed is a variety of potato chip flavoring in Canada where they just straight-up toss the chips in ALL the flavorings: Barbecue, Salt and Vinegar, Ketchup (another Canada flavor), and Sour Cream and Onion. They’re zippy, a little spicy, and Lay’s has been selling them in America for like, 3 years now so go try them rather than ask me. (Note: the American mix is a little lighter in both seasoning and fat, so it tastes a little blander than the version in Canada, but you’ll get the gist). Thus, I’m saying that Zapp’s Voodoo Heat chips taste like a mix of Barbecue, Salt and Vinegar, and Jalapeño flavors. Problem is that I ate the bag of Zapp’s LONG before I made these sandwiches. So my sloth AND my gluttony undid me there.

And without that connection, I kinda lost a grip on the recipe. I mean, my family doesn’t eat a lot of bologna. My father had it as like, a generic go-to lunch sandwich, but I don’t know that, if asked to name his favorite foods, I’d have gotten to Bologna sandwiches within like, the top 20.

And this recipe is very direct: fried bologna, special sauce, bread, and lettuce. So what can I do? I guess unpack the bologna? Like, why is it spelled that way, what’s the etymology, all that? Well, that leads to the second problem.

A Load of Bologna Baloney

Basically, there’s two words in English, which are both SAID “buh-low-nee”. The first one, referring to the sausage, is Bologna. The second one, referring to lies, bullshit, and ALSO THE SAUSAGE, is “Baloney”. How did this happen? Well, no one really knows.

Right, random assortment of actors?

Well, I should clarify: no one is CERTAIN. The chain is pretty easy to follow: Bologna is an actual CITY in Italy, pronouncd, “Bo-LOW-nya”. And Bologna is famous for its mortadella, a type of smooth pork sausage studded with fat and flavorings, like pistachios, peppercorns, myrtle berries, etc. Actually, Bologna is famous for a LOT of shit. It’s the capital of Emilia-Romagna, the Northern Italian region that’s home to Parma (where they make Parmigiano-Reggiano), Modena (where Massimo’s restaurant is), and, for non-food related fame, where they invented Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, and Ducatis. Maserati and Ducati were literally founded and remain headquartered in, Bologna. As well as being the home of famed opera singer Pavarotti, famed opera WRITER Giuseppe Verdi, and…look, the sausage is the important thing.

The sausage is the thing, in which we’ll catch the pistachios of the king.

So Mortadella was being sold as Mortadella Bologna, and then, eventually, just Bologna. But…as I noted, Bologna isn’t SAID like “Bologna”. (Isn’t English a great language?) Why did it change? Well, there’s a bunch of theories, but the one I like best is that it got roped into a broader Anglicization. By which I mean, you know that, technically, it’s not NAMED Italy, right? It’s Italia. Italy is Italia in English. Sicily is Sicilia. A bunch of places that ended in “–ia” with “ya” sounds turned into “-y”/”-ee” sounds. And while Bologna doesn’t have the –ia, it DOES make the “ya” sound. So people put the Y on the end, and took out the now-silent G: bolony. But that LOOKS like it should rhyme with “Colony”, so they changed it to an A, and added an e. “Baloney”.

And that’s the best guess. It makes sense, it fits the historical record, there’s just no like, definitive line. The best we get is a Vaudeville routine referring to a “Baloney Sassage” in the early 1800’s. The rest of the definition of “baloney” built over time, with inexperienced but large boxers being called “baloney” (either because they had sausage for brains, or were stuffed like a sausage), and then big dumb guys. At around the same time, the term “phoney baloney” became popular for a form of fraud in New York.

And I never like to focus on “well, we don’t KNOW, but this is the best GUESS”, so I was leery of basing a whole post about just the Etymology. “Well, okay then, how about the history of it? The regionality? I mean, I was probably in college before I ever HEARD of a Fried Bologna sandwich, but it’s a staple sandwich in the South. Is there an interesting story to that?”

Which Wich is Which?

Not…really? Bologna sandwiches got big, basically, because of the Great Depression. Bologna was (and sometimes is) made of pork scrap meat: the odds and ends of cutting roasts, filets, chops, all ground up with added pork fat. That makes it very cheap to make (since it is, by definition, essentially recycling), and the added fat made it stay moist longer. It was the perfect cheap meat for working men, struggling families, etc.

And it’s not like slices of onion and mustard are very expensive.

This combined with the 1920’s growing fascination with Sandwiches, and then the commercialization and industrialization of food we’ve talked about happening in the 40’s and 50’s. And…that’s kind of it. There’s no real explanation for why the South loves Fried Bologna sandwiches over cold, other than MAYBE it was a little healthier back in the day. Like, if you think back to that start, in the 1920’s, that was just before mass refrigeration was becoming a thing. And while the high-moisture of baloney keeps it better tasting longer, it also makes it a much more inviting target for bacteria, mold, etc. So perhaps Southern regions (with their hotter climate) found that a quick sear on both sides did wonders in killing any bugs that had just barely gotten started.

A BETTER conversation would be about regional varieties of bologna, as there’s quite a few. I even considered making one of these sandwiches from Lebanon Bologna, a smoked bologna closer in taste and texture to a salami.

Seriously, these are both called “bologna”.

It’s not FROM Lebanon the country, but Lebanon the County, in Pennsylvannia. (Weirdly, a lot of America bologna is connected with GERMAN immigrant population centers, despite it being named after an Italian city)  But that’s really more a Thursday post: pointing out the distinctions between olive loaf, ring bologna, etc.

So, what about the physics/mathematics? Well, to bring those up, we gotta actually start cooking.

Talking Myself in Circles, and Slitting Meat Pi’s

So, the important trick to frying bologna is you have to cut the circle if you want the best (ie, the most consistently browned, crispy pieces.) results. Just cut in from the edge about an inch every quarter of the circle.

Make a little meat clover. Or, if you’re a white nationalist/skateboarder, an Iron Cross of meat. (That is a weird overlap, but we can’t blame the branding of the 90’s for assuming white nationalism was dead.)

 If you want to get REAL precise, actually cut from the inside of the circle to the edge. (So like, start with the point of the knife an inch in from the rim, and pull/slice toward the edge) This will help prevent the baloney cup effect, which is displayed here:

I had ONE extra piece of baloney more than I needed for the recipe, which turned out to be perfect.

See, as you cook baloney, it has a tendency to ‘cup’ itself. This is due to, well, physics and math. Mathematically, a circle of bologna’s area has a complicated relationship with its circumference. And a piece of baloney is almost 25% fat by weight, and holds a ton of moisture. Frying my boloney slices caused them to lose 57% of their weight in cooked off fat and water content. (I had 7 ounces of baloney, that cooked down to 3.) That fat and water isn’t distributed evenly, and what happens is, as the baloney cooks, it shrinks. But it does so unevenly, which causes wrinkles, as the area of the baloney shrinks faster than the circumference. Add to this the liquid on the bottom trapped and boiling into steam. This steam lifts the baloney where it’s trapped (primarily in the wetter middle), reducing the heat it absorbs, causing the edges to cook more, thus CONTRACTING more, pushing the inside higher, increasing the effect.

By cutting the channels, you reduce the amount of steam that doesn’t have a nearby escape point, allowing the baloney to sit flat and brown more thoroughly.

And let tell you, these suckers will BROWN.

Which is a great tip for cooking baloney…which is not an issue I’ve run into in the previous 30 years of my life, so exactly how valuable could it be to my average reader? That wasn’t going to be enough for a post.

What about the rest of the sandwich, is there anything interesting going on there?

A Saucy Little Loaf

Now THIS had some promise. The sandwich was comprised of 5 parts: the baloney itself, the bread, some iceburg lettuce, a secret sauce, and a lettuce dressing. And MOST of them were at least KIND of weird/interesting.

Like, the bread: in the South and Midwest, the rule is EASY: Bologna is served on white bread. Often the softest or cheapest White bread you can find. Because, again, we’re talking about a meal made for convenience and frugality at first, so most people connect that soft white bread with the sandwich. Which is why it was so interesting that Bon Appetit (the source of today’s recipe) went in a different direction, that my family accidentally doubled-down on. See, Bon Appetit put the sandwich on seeded Rye bread, as part of an ongoing argument they were making that issue that Rye bread is the sturdy, flavorful bread that all sandwiches deserve. Which is a bold stance that I don’t know that I agree with, but I can respect the moxie. I couldn’t find seeded rye, so I bought a hand-made Marble rye. Then it got moldy before I bought the baloney I needed. (I kept getting to the grocery store after the deli closed due to rehearsals, and wanted meat with a little more panache than Oscar Meyer.) So I asked my mother to pick up “Rye bread” with no distinction. She picked Dark Rye Bread.

Let the bread flow through you. Embrace the Dark Rye.

Which worked for me, because it’s still a soft bread (though denser), which contrasted with the Crispy Fried Bologna, and the crisp iceberg lettuce…that I couldn’t buy due to a recall on ROMAINE lettuce throwing the supermarket produce section into disarray. I ended up robbing a salad mix. And the dressing…well, to explain the dressing, we have to explain the sauce.

The Special sauce for this was, I thought, something of a genius move, but also, in my mind, and imperfect one. Secret or special sauces tend to follow the same basic set-up: They’re flavored mayonnaise. Typically mixing ketchup, mustard, mayo, a spice or two, and a chopped pickle. This one was notable for 3 things: firstly, that it didn’t use ketchup, just being mustard, mayo, black pepper and pickle. Second, it relied on spicy stone ground mustard, and MORE of it than mayo, for the base.

I have already mixed the mayo in. AND the pickle. The mustard has consumed them all.

And third, it used a diced dill pickle. And THIS is where it lost me. I’m just not a big dill guy. I much prefer sweet or bread-and-butter pickles. And I especially think it would work well HERE. We’ve got crisp and crispy, we’ve got meaty, crunchy, and we’ve got this nasal-clearing, fat-blasting sauce, why not add a little sweetness? I ALMOST convinced myself to do it, except for 2 things:

1. The association of Dill pickles and rye breads are long-standing in America, due to the prevalence and excellence of Jewish delis from coast to coast.

And

2. You use the pickle juice as a drizzle-over dressing for the lettuce. And I felt that THAT might have been too much sweetness for the sandwich. So I stuck with dicing half a dill.

Not so much of a big dill now, are you?
I don’t know why I’m flexing on a pickle.

Then, you toast the bread in the rendered baloney fat, smear with mustard sauce, stack up your crispy baloney clovers, top with lettuce and a drizzle of pickle juice, and cut that bad-boy open.

It looks kinda like a BLT.

Is it the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten? No. It wasn’t even the best sandwich I had that week. (Though, to be fair, it came in second, and first place was “maybe the best sandwich I had all year”) But it was pretty damn good, and I felt like it was a good stable canvas on which to explore other breads, sauces, and (probably) pickles. It was satisfying and enjoyable, and I would have happily paid for it at a restaurant.  And for something I wasn’t sure I could make a post at all, that’s a pretty good turn out.

Help Jon afford more bread and baloney by supporting us via Patreon this holiday season. Or just share our content on social media, via Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, where I was GOING to post a picture of the sandwich, but I apparently didn’t TAKE one, like an idiot. I am so bad at this.

THURSDAY: MAYBE WE TALK ABOUT BOLOGNA. MAYBE WE TALK ABOUT RYE. MAYBE WE DO SOMETHING ELSE.

MONDAY: TIME TO EAT OUR CAKE AND HAVE IT TOO. WAIT.

Recipe

Fried Bologna Sandwich

Makes 2 sandwiches

Ingredients

2 Tbsp. spicy brown mustard

1 Tbsp. mayonnaise

1 Tbsp. finely chopped dill pickle, + 2 Tbsp. brine

Freshly ground black pepper

7 oz. thinly sliced bologna, separated into 2 equal stacks

4 slices rye bread

Iceberg Lettuce

Preparation

1. Mix mustard, mayonnaise, and chopped pickle in a small bowl to combine; season with pepper.

2. Take one of your bologna stacks. Starting near the center and working toward the edges of the stack, cut four 1"-long slits, spaced evenly. Repeat with remaining bologna stack.

3. Heat a dry large skillet over medium-high. Working in batches, arrange bologna slices in a single layer in skillet and cook until browned all over and crisp, about 2 minutes per side. Transfer to a plate as they are done. Reserve fat in skillet.

4. Arrange bread in a single layer in reserved skillet and cook over medium high until golden brown, about 2 minutes per side. Transfer to a cutting board.

5. To build sandwiches, spread mustard mixture evenly over each slice of bread. Divide bologna between 2 slices and top with lettuce; drizzle with pickle brine. Close up sandwiches and cut in half.