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Skip the Cheesesteak: Philadelphia's Roast Pork Sandwich

"Pork tender and dripping with juices; braised greens garlicky and mildly bitter; sharp provolone salty with the sour/bitter funk of an aged cheese, all contained by a terrific hoagie roll, crusty but light" Skip the Cheesesteak: Philadelphia's Roast Pork

If you are an American, or even an English-speaking citizen of some other country in the world who has a passing familiarity with American culture, such as it is, you have probably heard of the Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwich. You may even know some of the lore surrounding them–how there is an artificially hyped rivalry between the 2 cheesesteak restaurants situated opposite each other on the…

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December List Sandwiches and November Wrapup

In December, the Tribunal will feature Philadelphia's Roast Pork sadnwich, the Pit Beef of Baltimore, and Porketta from the Iron Range of Minnesota

December is going to be a killer month at the Tribunal. Some months are better than others, to be sure. We’ve had great months and not-so-great months. But looking ahead at the sandwiches in store for December of 2024, we are excited to try our hand at each of them in a way that we haven’t been for some time. But before we get into details, let’s first take a look back at the sandwiches of…

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West Virginia's Pepperoni Roll

"The bread was chewy like a good pizza crust, and the fat rendered from the pepperoni found its way into the roll's crumb, tinting the bread orange" West Virginia's Pepperoni Roll

Pepperoni, at least according to the general consensus, was invented in America. It is an example of salami–which is of course a blanket term for a specific class of Italian salume or “salted meats.” Salume includes whole-muscle meats like prosciutto and capocollo, but salami refers to ground meats, sausages that are cured and fermented and usually air-dried for a period of time. Many articles…

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Pav Bhaji: Top Tier Vegetarian Indian Street Food

"Pav bhaji's base of vegetables takes a back seat to the pungent onion, the deep and lasting umami of the tomato the brightness of cilantro, the sharpness of chilies, the aromatic spices of the masala" Pav Bhaji: Top Tier Vegetarian Indian Street Food

Bhaji is a word in several Indian languages–Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi at least–meaning vegetables or greens. Culinarily, the term describes 2 different vegetable preparations of which I’m aware. The first is a type of fritter made with chopped vegetables, often onions, suspended in a batter of chickpea flour and deep-fried, similar to a pakora. The second is as part of my own personal…

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The Canteen in Aberdeen: Pheasant Sandwiches

"The vegetables provided plenty of crunch, and the sweet/sour of the pickle relish helped bring out the flavor of the pheasant. More mayo wouldn't be unwelcome--but it would be unnecessary." The Canteen in Aberdeen: Pheasant Sandwiches

In December of 1941, only ten days after the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, the people of North Platte, Nebraska gathered around the local depot of the Union Pacific railroad, waiting for a troop train that, they had heard, would be carrying the members of their local National Guard company westward on their way to training and eventual deployment. In the 1940s, before diesel locomotives…

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November List Sandwiches and October Wrapup

In November, the Tribunal will be trying Indian Pav Bhaji, the Pepperoni Roll of West Virginia, and the Pheasant Sandwich popularized in WWII-era South Dakota

It’s November 1st–the kids are in candy comas and temperatures are dropping; Autumn is starting in earnest and if history is any guide, grocery stores near you already have turkeys on sale–you just have to walk past 3 aisles of Christmas displays to get to them. Finally, here at the Tribunal, we’re debuting 3 new sandwiches that we’ll be investigating this month–in November as we do in January,…

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Utah's Pastrami Burger

"The fry sauce is a bit sweeter than a Russian dressing but has more zip than Thousand Island; it works with the pastrami, the American cheese, the burger patty, even the pickles and onion slices--it ties the sandwich together." Utah's Pastrami Burger

In some ways, the hamburger is the culmination of millennia of culinary history, with two chains of causality converging–a line of events inconsequential and impossible to trace, stretching from the beginnings of cattle domestication in Stone Age Mesopotamia and the development of minced meat dumplings in ancient China, through the advent of kebabs and the subsequent spread of minced meats to…

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A Study In Beige: Sicilian Pane e Panelle

"The panelle are all texture, little flavor, and the brightness of lemon juice and the pungency of parsley do little to punctuate the overall beigeness of the thing." A Study In Beige: Sicilian Pane e Panelle

The chickpea is among the first crops that humans domesticated. Human agriculture began in the so-called Fertile Crescent, an area spanning the eastern end of the Mediterreanean shore up through Southeastern Turkey and down along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through modern-day Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait to the Persian Gulf. The archaeological record shows human consumption of chickpeas at sites…

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Teesside's Parmo, Not Necessarily A Sandwich

"The combination of the Parmesan and panko breading, the nutmeg of the bechamel, and the slight browning under the broiler brought a surprising nuttiness out of the cheddar" Teesside's Parmo, Not Necessarily A Sandwich

I have been bamboozled, suckered, fooled into writing about this particular Northeastern English delicacy. Delicacy is in fact the wrong word–the Parmo is anything but delicate. Originally a breaded pork cutlet–often served with chicken instead these days–fried up crisp, then covered in bechamel sauce and cheddar cheese before being finished under a broiler, it’s been estimated that a standard…

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October List Sandwiches and September Wrapup

In October, the Tribunal will be covering Palermo's Panelle, Yorkshire's Parmo, and Utah's Pastrami Burger.

Welcome to October, sandwich fans! As always, a new month brings 3 new sandwiches for the Tribunal to investigate, and there are some good ones coming! But first, as ever, we must review what we learned in September. September’s Tribunal sandwiches included the Mulita, a Mexican melt from Tijuana involving 2 handmade corn tortillas, plenty of Oaxacan cheese, meats like carne asada or carnitas,…

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The North Shore 3-Way

"The main draws of the sandwich are a great pile of rare, juicy roast beef and that vinegary, savory, very mildly sweet James River barbecue sauce, but it wouldn't be a 3-Way without the mayo and cheese." The North Shore 3-Way

There are a lot of great roast beef sandwiches across the US. Some of them we’ve covered already: Upstate New York’s Beef on Weck is an all-time great, and of course Chicago’s Italian Beef is one of my personal favorites. Maryland’s Pit Beef sandwich is a delicious option we haven’t explored fully enough here at the Tribunal, and there are plenty of hot beef sandwiches–whether they’re called…

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Senegalese Pain Ndambe

"Black-eyed peas have a nutty flavor that, combined with the cooked onions sweetness, extra umami from the seasoning cubes and tomato paste, and the slight kick of habanero spice, give the bean spread more than enough flavor." Senegalese Pain Ndambe

In 2019, the website Thrillist declared the Summer of the Sandwich, with articles celebrating the sandwich in its many forms, anchored by a massive piece called Around The World In 80 Sandwiches. If this opening sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve brought it up before–the piece refers to me as an “enterprising investigative sandwich blogger,” a title that I’m still crowing about 5 years later. But…

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September List Sandwiches and August Wrapup

In September, the Tribunal will be trying the Mexican Mulita, Senegalese Ndambe, and Boston's North Shore 3-Way.

Welcome to September, sandwich fans! We’re a couple days late posting our September sandwiches, but as long-term readers may be aware the Tribunal has a big event every Labor Day Weekend that brings us to a farm in Northeastern Missouri with little connectivity to the outside world. But before we can unveil September’s sandwiches, we need take a look back at August! August 21st marked the…

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Dutch-Surinamese Broodje Moksi Meti

"I got serious bánh mì vibes from this sandwich. The savory/sweet mixture of meats and slightly sweet pickles pointed in that direction. Better bread would have helped; cilantro and hot peppers would have sealed the deal." Broodje Moksi Meti

Broodje is a word in Dutch meaning bread, or bread roll, or more specifically a sandwich made in a bread roll–the German equivalent would be brötchen. Our first Dutch broodje at the Tribunal was Broodje Kroket way back in the early days, though more recently we’ve also tackled Broodje Haring and Broodje Hete Kip. The latter in particular was based on a dish popular in Paramaribo, capital and…

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Mlewi, Tunisian Flatbread

"Laughing Cow has a mild, creamy flavor that along with the neutral bulk added by the egg and potato, helps offset the fiery heat of the harissa nicely." Mlewi, Tunisian Flatbread

We’ve covered just a few Tunisian sandwiches on this site–Fricassé got its own dedicated post earlier this year, while we worked Casse-croûte Tunisien into a more general Tuna Sandwiches post back in 2020–and from what I can see, Tunisian sandwiches tend toward a common set of ingredients. Casse-croûte featured tuna, harissa, boiled eggs and French fries with various pickle and salad ingredients,…

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10 Years of Sandwiches

The Tribunal has been writing about sandwiches for 10 years now, and if we've learned anything, it's to eat more sandwiches!

10 years ago today, on August 21, 2014, I registered the domain sandwichtribunal.com. A Quick Recap I’ve told the story before but essentially, early in 2014 my friends Josh and Thom and I started tweeting pictures of sandwiches at each other, basically bragging about the delicious things we were eating. We started calling ourselves the Sandwich Tribunal in jest. @dodecaphonix @El_Josharino 2…

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French-Algerian Merguez Frites

"There's more to the merguez frites than just the fries: harissa, spicy and smoky, bright and earthy; merguez, salty, fatty, warmly aromatic, now brightly citrusy; sauce Algérienne, spicy, savory, citrusy and sweet." French-Algerian Merguez Frites

The Maghreb is an area of Northern Africa west of Egypt covering the modern states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and the disputed territory known as Western Sahara. Apart from the lush thin strip of Mediterranean coast and the high plains of the Atlas mountains, the area is mostly desert, the vast arid expanse of the Sahara. In Arabic, Maghreb means “the West”–the area is…