We’ve been saying it to ourselves for months, but haven’t really gotten to it until now: We have to start doing some side by side sandwich comparisons. Today was pork. The main objective of this process is to create good recipes, but the other part is deciding where to place standards for what the deli will serve.  We weren’t sure how many levels there were between that’s great and we nailed it and hoped that doing this would help us to figure that out. A sandwich can be great standing on one or two really tasty ingredients, with some others adding a bit, but not fully meshing. Thinking that we nailed it seems to come either by quite a bit of fumbling around and changing ratios, or more rarely by a chance risk or flash of insight. When it all comes together I can barely stop myself from pulling people off the street to try things.  That’s about the point of all this.

We used the same pulled pressure cooked pork base for all three. Chunked shoulder was pressure cooked at 15psi for ~45 min in about an inch of east end big hop, various spices, and lime leaves. On its own it was good, but not too special. We intended to spice it differently for each of the three ideas.

There were two that we re-adapted for this. First was a pizza that we had in Fayetteville WV. It was pork, feta, carmelized onions, jalapenos, cliantro, crème frache, pineapple. That pizza was great. We’ve thought about it now and then until now and wanted to try it in a sandwich instead. It’s a pretty safe one. We felt a little lazy, but thought it would be a good baseline.

I did a second one based some tacos that I made for Maggie a little after we met. I flubbed them. I burned the pork a bit, which wasn’t too bad, and the tortillas I had were horrible, which it couldn’t recover from. The pork was blended with molasses and seared. I deveined and scraped out as much heat as I could from some habaneros and cooked them down with some vinegar and more molasses. I added some raw onion, tomato, cilantro, and crème frache.

Maggie worked out one based loosely on the pizza idea, but removing the pineapple and working around ground cherries instead. Pork, ground cherries, carmelized leeks, crème frache with lemon, parsley and mint.

The pizza based one was good. We were happy with it, but it was missing something more than just tweaking. It tasted too familiar maybe. We might have just talked ourselves out of it, but there was something missing that would make it more than good.

The taco one was pretty great. I don’t really think you can go wrong with pork, lime, cilantro, and habanero though. I’d be pretty happy with doing something like this off the normal menu at the deli

Maggie’s sandwich was the best of the three. Between the ground cherries and the sauce and the pork it created something more than its ingredients. The flavor develops slowly and unexpectedly. It tasted bright and floral, then dark and woodsy. It was unlike anything we’d ever made. Nailed it.