When you really want to understand a
people and their food and their culture, I
always say go to the origins of those
cuisines. Go to the places that serve it
and have been serving for the longest
time. I'm excited I'm here at Central
Grocery to have my first muffaletta. This is
the place where they invented it. It's
called "Muffaletta Headquarters" for a
reason. So the legend of the muffaletta
sandwich supposedly started over a
hundred years ago in the French Quarter.
It was really Italian immigrants that
bought Sicilian bread with them. If you
went to Sicily and ordered a muffaletta,
you'd get a fairly large piece of bread
covered in sesame seeds, and what the local
immigrants did here is that they would
slice it in half and actually make
sandwiches out of it. The name of the
bread became the name of the sandwiches.
If you've ever been in any sort of
Italian grocery store that goes back
many decades, it looks like
this: Italian products, dry pastas, canned
olive oil — but this place is actually
trafficing more than anything in
this sandwich. People line up and you can
see that it's already early in the day
and already people eating the sandwich at
breakfast time.
So what's in this sandwich? While they
won't tell us exactly what goes into
this spread that goes on the top,
it's a salad of olives and other
vegetables with plenty of olive oil that
is laid on top of salami, mortadella,
imported ham, swiss and provolone
cheeses, all tucked into this bread, sliced
into quarters, and handed to you.
Here is the famous muffaletta sandwich,
thank you very much.
I may eat the whole thing. "Good luck!"
You can just see how big that
thing is, look at that sandwich!
So here is the sandwich, and I suppose
that this is a fine meal, but
why not go for the full monty.
Take a look at that, I'm gonna pop
the lid and just take a peek at the
olive salad. Now on the hamburger we
have the "Squeeze Test" — this is getting some
nice juiciness coming out of this guy.
I'm going in. I'm gonna go for the point
just because it seems like the right way
to do it. I can say that this sandwich's
fame is fully justified. This is
delicious.
It's obviously very evocative of Italian
subs. The first thing that really hits
you is this really picant and
flavorsome olive salad. There's also
chopped-up peppers and
onions and looks like celery in there.
Then you get this brush of fat
from the salami, it's got all the sort of
spicy notes to it. There's a mildness of
the cheese coming on, it's
creamy but because they're using provolone
and swiss, both are really tangy and
flavors and
finishes the palate really rather nicely.
The bread is not the most flavorful but
it's structurally really good. It's
got these seeds that give you some nice
nice textural contrast. Ok enough yapping,
let's eat some more.
You have this wad of delicious meat
and cheese in the middle and it's
dense and almost fuses into a
single entity. It's like a cold cuts steak.
Those flavors do kind of melt
together. You know the the old story
about Italian-American heroes, they'd
put them in the backseat of cars and the
kid would sit on them while they drove to
the picnic, and by the time they got there
they'd be flattened, and it really sort of
compressed all of those flavors. I'm
getting that kind of effect with this. I
think the longer
this sat around and kind of got
pressed down it would
almost improve.
This is the slowest-chewing thing I've ever eaten on
The Meat Show. I have to say that the bread
didn't hit me right away but it has a
pretty good flavor. The other
stuff is so pungent and spicy and
flavorful they mask it a bit but
now I'm really kind of appreciate and
its very good structure is really
holding everything together. It almost has
oiliness there and I think it's
almost like a foccacia. That's it from me
and this delicious muffaletta sandwich.
Catch us on the next episode of The Meat Show and
we'll see you soon.
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