Why Hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man works to feed the hole inside his soul with soul food because he misunderstood what it meant. I’m your Gluttonous Golem, Jon O’Guin, and today’s recipe is a prime example of how doing ONE THING wrong in a list of successes can end up meaning the whole thing doesn’t work. It’s also one of our longest standing requests for the site, since we knocked out Cioppino a couple years back. IF you want to avoid the (relatively straight-forward) details and get straight to the recipe, click here. For the rest of us, laissez le bons temps roulez! 

Someday, we should see how they drink in Old Orleans.

In case you didn’t know from the title and the last sentence of the intro, I hope Title Jon has spilled the beans that this recipe comes from New Orleans, which we are highlighting today because tomorrow is Mardi Gras, so we wanted to be culturally relevant.

As culturally relevant as we can be, without a float or beads.

The muffuletta sandwich is a sandwich from Italian immigrants. Well, Sicilian immigrants, which is technically Italian. And that’s not just me playing my “Italy never agrees on anything, and Sicily agrees even LESS often” card: Sicily is specifically included in the Italian Constitution as one of 5 regions with greater than usual autonomy, BECAUSE they’re not quite the same as the rest of Italy, and Italy was worried they’d leave the country after World War 2.

Anyway, Sicilian immigrants came to New Orleans, and they did what EVERY group of Immigrants that has come to America does: they immediately upgraded the size and meat content of their dishes. Muffulettas in particular are a relatively uncomplicated innovation: Muffuletta is (and this is the ONLY part of the process that’s really complicated and makes me want to stab my eyes) an “Italianization”.

Remember that bit about Sicily being different? Yeah, that extends to their language: Sicily speaks Sicilian, not Italian.  And that may SOUND like splitting hairs, but imagine you were dropped into, say, a Cockney bar, and had to navigate the sentence, “oy, quit eyin’ me trouble’s Bristols and take a ball and chalk, berk, or I’ll dry slap your canister brown bread; how’s that for a Turkish?” Those are all English SOUNDS, hell, except for arguably ‘berk’, they’re all English words. But the hell if your average American would know what the hell was going on, except “stop X, or there will be trouble”. (The precise translation is “Stop looking at my wife’s tits, and go away, asshole, or I will backhand you across the face so hard you die; how’s that for something funny?”)

Grab some pies and mash and cool down, eh mate?

Anyway, the thing is that Sicilians make muffuletta bread, which is a wide round loaf a couple inches tall, topped with sesame seeds. Its name means “Little Mushroom” or “little Mitten”, with people not being 100% sure which. Hell, there’s a non-zero possibility it’s somehow connected to the Arabic for “flattened” or “broad”. The word’s been around so long that it’s hard to know which. Some claim it’s named after woolen mittens in Latin (muffula), others for mushroom (muffa), the Arabic noted above is mafaltah. The most frustrating thing is that they’re all plausible: Sicily was CONQUERED by Moors, so Arabic is involved in their language, which is mostly Latin based. The important thing is that they made the bread.

Now, in Sicily, these bread loaves were often stuffed with sausages, cheese, and flavorings for festivals. When the Sicilians came to America, they started filling the loaves with…sausages, cheese, and flavorings, just as, you know, Sandwiches instead of baking things IN the bread. The most prominent version of this, started in Central Grocery in the French Quarter, is the modern day understanding of a Muffuletta Sandwich. And it’s actually pretty simple.  

No disrespect, just noting that it’s pretty easy to see what’s in a sandwich.

The original recipe consists of a whole loaf of muffuletta bread, filled with sliced ham, mortadella, mozzarella, maybe some genoa salami, another cheese, and olive salad. What the hell is olive salad? Well, it’s basically just pickled vegetables and olives tossed in some seasoned olive oil.  A mixture of Giardinera and Tapenade, if you’re an Italian sandwich topping aficionado.

And that’s actually the number one reason this recipe has been so long to cover: because, when you get down to it, this is just an Italian sandwich with a special olive relish. Despite this simplicity, it’s been on lists of “foods I should/could make” on the site for YEARS now, because it’s just a recurring one that comes up when we discuss foods we’re interested in. Apparently, years ago, my mother had a great muffuletta while in the South on work, and she’s often considered having another one. I phrase it that way because, at MULTIPLE junctures, she has been presented the opportunity to order a muffuletta at restaurants, delis, etc, and has NEVER done so in my presence or two my knowledge. She ate the food ONCE, and refuses to try other versions before making me create it.

And since there’s no way I could hope to match those kinds of expectations, I went the opposite direction, and just didn’t try at all.

Half-Assing a Whole Loaf

That’s not ENTIRELY accurate, but it’s not too far off, either. Basically what happened is this: during a grocery trip just before Thanksgiving, I noticed that our supermarket deli was now offering a “muffuletta combo” of meats and cheeses: salami, ham, and mozzarella, all presliced and weighed. And I took a picture of it, and sent it to my mother, because I wanted to once again highlight that at ANY POINT, she could have a muffuletta, she just doesn’t want to.

Just so many opportunities.

But, that also got me thinking: one of the things I’ve hated about the idea of making a muffuletta is that A: I don’t like olives, so making my own olive salad is going to be a pain, and B: ordering 4-5 different meats and cheeses all cut to fill a whole LOAF of bread is going to be irritating, because I hate waiting at the deli. It somehow combines the worst parts of being at a grocery store and being at a restaurant: I have to wait for someone else to make the thing I want…and then have to actually make it into FOOD at home. And most of the delis in my town are part of supermarkets, so there’s no like, ‘take a number’ system, you just have to stand there and hope the old lady who’s been staring at the bean salad doesn’t want something, because that’s a situation that screams “I will take at least 20 minutes to handle”. But if half the work was already done for me, I could probably get all the meats and cheeses I needed without snapping an old woman’s spine on my knee like Bane…

So I was mulling that over, and decided to lo set it aside until I did my trip to Leavenworth and back. At which point I completely forgot about it until inside the only ACTUAL (Italian) deli in our town in late January, and realizing that they had most of the meat and cheese I needed as well. A quick google search told me that I’d just need an olive salad of chopped kalamata and green olives, red pepper, oregano, olive oil…and I realized this was almost entirely the ingredient list of the house-made Olive Tapenade they made.

Apparently I only took pictures of the actual tapenade, not its label.

And since this was a chunkier tapenade that many recipes, it was probably pretty close to the texture of the olive salad they used. So I sprung for the house-made tapenade, and then went to the other deli for the meats and cheeses because…well, honestly, because if I had used all the high-end Italian deli meats and cheeses, I’m sure the sandwich would have been delicious, it just also would have been $70-80. This way, it was only like…$30ish?

So enough set-up, let’s make this sucker!

Lay it On Me

Like I said, this is a very easy system. The ingredients to an original muffuletta are bread, meat, cheese, salad. That’s it. Now, since Muffuletta bread is fairly flat, and the round loaves you buy at the store are pretty thick, I decided to both ‘crumb’ the bread loaf, and press the final sandwich. Crumbing is the technical term for when you scoop out some of the “bread” in a sandwich.

A little bread bowl. Well, more of a bread plate.

I crumbed the bottom, slathered on some tapenade, and started layering, planning to crumb and slather the top when I got to it. My layers were as follows:

First the Mortadella

Seen here looking chunky.

As we covered back in December, the OG Bologna, Mortadella’s creamy texture is meant to sit right on the mildly vinegary and oily spread and soak it up.

On top of the mortadella, we did a hot Capocollo.

Thatsa spicy meat-a…slice.

Capocollo (also known as Capicola or, if you’re from New Jersey, Gabagool (because New Jersey Italians just…straight up BUTCHERED Italian half the time. Tore ending vowels off things, changed half the consonants…I thought I talked about this before, but the site and my internet history claim otherwise.)) is a type of salume that’s fairly close to prosciutto in texture, but it comes from the shoulder of the pig instead of the ham. (The “Butt” instead of the butt, as it were.) and is often a little more spiced. Some people argue that THIS is the “ham” or “salami” that should be used in the sandwich, but for my money, capicola is too expensive to have been the default meat in the sandwich. I included it here because I was including a second cheese, and wanted some spice to help cut that.

Speaking of, we actually put our FIRST cheese here, the sliced mozzarella, a word I NEVER type right on the first try. (For some reason, my fingers are CERTAIN it’s “mozzeralla”)

My EYES are pretty sure it’s supposed to be round, but maybe they’re also mistaken.

That’s a nice soft, creamy cheese in a mountain of salty meats and vinegary olive salad, so it’s understandable why you’d include it.

After that comes the Ham. The original ham was “imported”, which could mean…well it could mean damn near anything, but the muffuletta mix I was using has Polish ham, which I thought was a good choice, since it would have been imported in both Italy AND America.

Is Polish ham famous? I’m the food guy, and even I don’t really know.

Then came the genoa salami, which is an ingredient I sometimes struggle with. Because one time, and this was YEARS ago now, but one time I had a sandwich with Genoa salami that for some reason did NOT work for me: all I could taste was a metallic flavor not unlike the iron-copper taste of blood, and NO ONE I brought it up to noticed it, dismissing it as “just how salami tastes”.

Then, I slapped on some provolone for a top layer of cheese, and spread the olive tapenade on the top bun, and ….fuck.

Can you spot where we went wrong?

In case you, like me, forgot, I was supposed to crumb this loaf before spreading. Damn it, this was even the side with more bread! THIS is the mistake that I mentioned back at the start: this one mess-up meant that my sandwich had almost TWICE the bread it was supposed to, which made it pretty dry. And I couldn’t FIX it, because I’d used too much of the Tapenade on the first slathering.

As such, I gritted my teeth and accepted my screw up. After it’s all assembled ,the next step is to press the sandwich. This makes the bread somewhat thinner, but denser, and allows all the flavors to really get to know each other. I used a set of cast-iron pans to squish down the bread for about 30 minutes, though many recipes suggest an hour. The result?

Look at that damn top layer. Offensive.

Overall, the sandwiches were dry, as predicted, but by no means inedible. Nate and I had slices for lunch over the next couple days.  I’d actually say I made three mistakes with this sandwich worth addressing: the first is the bread issue, obviously I mean, just LOOK at that picture. The second is that I’d want to do something with the cappocollo. While I liked the spice it gave, it held together a little too well in the middle of the sandwich, making it harder to bite through. I might replace it with another hotter meat (pepperoni springs to mind as a quick option), or chop it up to eliminate that structure, I don’t know. The last one is that I think the straight tapenade needed a little more zip. Add some vinegar, or diced pickled peppers, something to make it a little brighter. But overall, this is a nice chassis for some experimentation, and while I don’t count it a win, I’ll give it an honorable mention.

THURSDAY: I THINK I’LL DO THAT POST I WAS CONSIDERING LAST WEEK, SO I CAN BUY SOME TIME TO WATCH ANOTHER FOOD SHOW.

MONDAY: WE START GEARING UP FOR ST PADDY’S DAY WITH A RECIPE THAT’LL TAKE QUITE A BIT OF TIME.

Recipe

Muffuletta Sandwich

Serves 8

Ingredients

1 loaf of round Italian bread

2/3rd cup – 1 cup Olive Salad or Chunky Tapenade (upgrade with diced peppers, and/or vinegar)

 2 lbs of meat and Cheese, arranged as you like, including the following:

              - 1/2 pound sliced mozzarella cheese

              - ¼ to ½ pound mortadella

              - ¼ - ½ pound salami or ham

- Additional ¼ pound servings of white cheeses such as swiss or provolone and hams/salumes (prosciutto, coppocollo, salami/ham(whichever you didn’t pick before))

Preparation

1. Slice the loaf in half horizontally, and crumb the bread, removing excess bread in the loaf until the remaining bread is about ½” thick.

2. Spread half of the tapenade/olive salad on top of the bottom half of the loaf, and layer the meats and cheeses to your liking. Spread the remaining tapenade on the bottom of the top half of the load, and place it on top of the meats and cheese. Wrap the sandwich with plastic wrap or butcher paper, and press for an hour under a weighted pan.

3. Slice into wedges and serve.