Muffaletta Sandwich Recipe

[Saviolo]

This week, hubby wanted to do some comfort food for him growing up, a twist on the classic Cajun Muffaletta sandwich! This sandwich is an amazing culinary intersection of Cajun food and immigrant Italian food, and has nearly infinite variation. The real secret here is the "olive salad" that makes this sammy truly unique. You can personalize this with any sort of combination of meats and cheeses you like, but for our money, it needs three things: a deli-cut basic ham (black forest, Virginia, or in this case an in-house made grandpa ham from the local butcher), a spicy salami or capicolla (like a spicy genoa salami, or a sopressata), and a deli cold cut like bologna, mortadella, or pariser. There are tons of variations you can do with this, as well.

Likewise with the olive salad, you can use whatever kinds of olives and pickles you like. We have a lot of homemade pickles on hand, so we used those mixed with some lovely kalamata olives. You can use green olives, too, and just about any kind of vinegar or fermented pickle you can imagine, whatever is to your taste. But it is important to let that olive oil soak into the bread for a couple of hours (or even overnight in the fridge!) before you cut and heat up the sandwich, it really does make a world of difference.

[Callalily]

1. Yum, that is one of my favorite sandwiches!

[rownesheck]

2. Jeez.

Was thinking of what to eat for lunch. Was probably gonna do arby's. Now i may have to head over to Jason's deli. I love their muffaletta.

[Grasswire2]

3. Interestingly...

Panera has an Italian sandwich on the menu and the olive salad on it is just delicious.

The cashier told me that many people don't like the olive salad. But I ordered an extra helping of it. Tiny chunks of crispy cauliflower and carrots along with green olives and stuff in a vinaigrette.

I used to often make muffaletta for casual entertaining. A feature is the pressing of it. I've seen it made on Food Network recently and they did not press it! Huge fat sandwich. Not authentic.

[Saviolo]

4. We also prefer it pressed.

With a little butter on the outside. We pressed it between two pieces of cast iron for our video, and it worked extremely well.

And I can totally see how someone may not like the olive salad. Younger me probably would have hated it, honestly, but I've come to really appreciate and love bold tastes like that now. It's a very intense flavour, and that puts some people off.

[Hortensis]

5. Yum! That looks beautiful. My recipe's similar to yours most of the time.

I'll usually add a layer of green, like arugula, and have been known to sub marinated artichoke hearts in with the olive salad if I don't have the giardiniera, which these days I just buy in a jar. It lasts forever in the fridge.

We love muffalettas too, but I usually make them for their durability under adverse conditions, like when some of my husband's fishing buddies come to visit. Pressing makes it a very tidy on-the-lap or -go meal. As you say, it can be sliced and served for a picnic the same or next day, but leftovers will be just as good for guys to grab and shove in their ice chests for another couple of days.

Fwiw, for others who don't have traditional muffalletta rolls available, I've found that Italian ciabatta is solid enough not to get mushy from the juices while the crust is not so chewy as to risk pulling it apart while eating. I'm also one of those who hollows the loaf out a bit to hold more of all that good stuff securely inside.