The Art of Building the Perfect Mortadella Sandwich

As we begin our journey to create the perfect mortadella sandwich, we start with a locally made deli meat from Sanna Goons. This thinly sliced mortadella is cut by a very helpful deli counter assistant named Lucy at Santa's Delicatessen in Kensington Market, Toronto. We carefully add a good layer of this delicious meat to our sandwich, making sure we have enough for each subsequent layer.

Next, we add a layer of cheese - a rich and creamy provolone that perfectly complements the flavors of the mortadella. We give it a gentle push down into place, ensuring a smooth and even distribution of flavors throughout the sandwich. With the cheese in place, we're ready to move on to the next layer: our ham. This is a beautiful Grandfather Ham, renowned for its full-bodied flavor and rich texture. We love this meat, and it's a perfect addition to our sandwich. A good layer of ham is added to the mix, followed by a sprinkle of cracked black pepper to enhance the flavors.

Now that we have all the essential layers in place, it's time to add some spice with our spicy salami. This is a Sopressata-style salami, adding an extra layer of flavor and complexity to our sandwich. With everything in place, we gently push down on the ingredients, making sure they're all nicely aligned.

The final step before assembling our sandwich is to prepare it for its journey into the fridge. We carefully wrap each component in plastic wrap, making sure that every last bit of the salad is covered. The sandwich will be refrigerated for at least an hour, allowing the flavors to meld together and the oil from the salad to soak into the bread.

Once our sandwich has had its chance to rest, it's time to cut it up and serve. Without unwrapping it first, we slice the sandwich in half once more, making it easier to handle and enjoy. But that's not all - we're going to make a small adjustment to our sandwich. We'll spread a little bit of butter on the outside of the crust before heating it up in the oven. This non-traditional step may seem unusual, but trust us, it makes a world of difference.

With the butter side down, we place the sandwich in a cast-iron grill pan and cover it with another flat pan. The result is an impromptu panini press that crisps the bread and warms the filling through without melting the cheese. After just a few minutes, our sandwich emerges from the oven looking delicious and inviting.

The final product is a bold and intense flavor sandwich that's full of surprises. With its many layers of meat, cheese, and spice, there's something for everyone to enjoy. Whether you like provolone or another type of cheese, cold cuts or spicy sausages, pickles in your salad - this recipe is adaptable and open to interpretation. So feel free to get creative and make it your own. If you like this recipe, please be sure to like and subscribe to our channel for more culinary adventures. And if you have any recipes you'd like us to try on the channel, don't hesitate to let us know in the comments below!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enand welcome back to love your food this week we have a Cajun classic straight out of Louisiana this is the recipe for a muffaletta sandwich so this is a classic sort of Cajun style sandwich it's got a bunch of different cold cuts in it and the thing that makes it unique is the olive salad that that will show you how to make so let's start with our ingredients so we have some beautiful mortadella there's amazing grandpa ham which is locally made some really nice spicy capicola we have some provolone this beautiful big loaf of bread that we're gonna cut in half some black olives just some kalamata olives with pit still in and some various pickles that we're gonna use for the olive salad so that's pickled cauliflower carrots some pickled turnips some regular pickled cucumbers and some pickled poblano peppers now these are all homemade pickles a lot of the recipes for these are on our Channel and to finish off we have a little bit of olive oil which you can see here so we're gonna start we've had we've put all of our pickles into a bowl just to let them drain a little bit we're going to be adding some liquid we're going to be adding some oil to the olive salad before we add it to the bread so we do want to get some of the some of the pickle juice out because we don't want that soaking into the bread we want the super flavorful olive oil to soak into the bread instead so we're gonna take all those out of the bowl and leave behind some of that pickle juice at the bottom if you're a fan of dirty martinis you can always add the pickle juice to a to a dirty martini as well and then we're just going to chop all of our our pickles up pretty small honestly especially the crunchy parts so if you have something crunchy like carrots we do want those pretty small the cauliflower also is pretty crunchy so we want that in slightly smaller pieces so here you see chef caleb is just gonna give everything ISIL chopped here then we're going to move that into our now pickle juice free bowl and then we're going to move on to the cauliflower and we're just going to give that nice little chop as well I'm gonna mostly fast-forward through some of the chopping cuz we've seen a lot of chopping on this channel now softer things like the pickles and the turnips these can be in slightly larger pieces and we're going to add that to our Bowl there we go and then the poblano peppers we're gonna cut it into long strips and then once we've got it all into long strips are gonna cut it into nice little small dice there and it's nice to add something that has a little bit of heat to it little bit of zing so that's where the poblano peppers come in so once that's done we're gonna pop those into the bowl with everything else and that's just sort of the base of our of the olive salad of course we're still missing the olives so we're gonna pit them so you can do it a couple different ways you can cut them in half as you saw I should kill up there if they're soft enough you can just sometimes just pull the pit right out and then once you've got all them all of the pits out we can just give them a nice little chop make sure you have all the pits out before you start chopping you don't want to ding your blade on on one of the olive pits because they are incredibly tough and they don't have to look all that particularly nice they are going into this salad so just a rough chop is fine let's go and join all the rest of our ingredients in there then we're going to add a generous portion of olive oil in there the olive oil is going to soak in it's going to take in all flavors of these wonderful pickles so we're gonna give this a nice little stir and once we've added this to our bread it's gonna soak into our bread as well and just spread that flavor all the way through the sandwich so that's really the the sort of the heart of this sandwich once that's well stirred and everything is well combined we're just gonna put that aside and let it sit I'll let the flavors marry a little bit together everything's well mixed in there don't need to add salt for sure those pickles have a lot of salt in them and then we're going to cut our loaf of bread in half this is a big sandwich you can definitely feed more than a couple people with this you can traditionally it is made on a big round loaf like this and then cut into wedges now some people want to make a little bit of room in their loaf so what they'll do is they will just pull a little bit of the bread out of there you don't want to pull a lot oh you'd want to go all the way to the crust just a small little indentation to give a little bit of room to some of those great ingredients that we have so you want to just gently tug that out and there we go we have a little indentation in the top of our loaf there and take a look at the bottom now it's it's a good wide crumb so it's going to compress a little bit when we get all of our ingredients in there so we're gonna start by putting about half of our olive salad on the bottom half of our bread and we're just gonna spread that pretty evenly across our bread and that that beautiful olive oil is going to soak in that that nice it's soaked in the flavors of those pickles everything's just going to soak into the bread really nicely and then we're gonna add the other half to the top you want it pretty evenly distributed make sure if you have a lot of olive oil sitting at the bottom that you save some and put some of those at the bottom as well make sure it's pretty even you we want a good penetration of that oil into the bread and we're just going to spread that on the top half as well that's just gonna go into the indentation we made in the top and then we're going to start adding our ingredients so we're starting with our mortadella now this is a locally made mortadella from Sanna goons it was cut super thin by our a very helpful deli counter assistant Lucy at Santa guns here in Kensington Market in Toronto and we're just gonna add a good layer of that we made sure that we had enough of our various deli meats here for a good layer on each for each layer of this after that we're gonna put our layer of our cheese so here is our provolone there we go just give it a good little push down and on top of that we're gonna start putting our nice ham this is a beautiful grandfather ham of really full flavored excellent excellent deli meat we love this stuff makes an amazing sandwich great flavor in there so we're just gonna put a layer of that down and when that's done now it's a good time to add a little bit of cracked black pepper as well so once we've got that layer of hand laid down we're just gonna add a little bit of black pepper once again you don't really need to add any more salt to this the the pickle salad has a lot of salt in it deli meats also tend to be a little bit salty as well so some black pepper will go nicely but we don't need any more salt we do need more cheese so here's our another care of our nice provolone cheese and then with the spicy so here's our nice spicy salami I think it's existen was a sopressata difficulty chemical at the beginning it's it's more of a sopressata so a layer of that we're just gonna give everything a good push down and then we're going to lit it so if you can remember which direction the lid goes you want to just quickly flip it over make sure you get all of the salad in a side of the loaf now we're not gonna eat it yet we do need to wrap it this needs to sit for a little while so we're just going to wrap this in plastic this is gonna go in the fridge for at least an hour if you want you can actually leave this overnight even so we're gonna give this a really good wrap make sure it's well well covered in in the plastic wrap here and we're gonna put this into the fridge we want the flavors to again kind of meld a little bit we want the the the oil from the salad to soak into the bread a little bit this is all just part of the process of this sandwich really really helps that end result you'll really notice the difference in flavor once it's sat for a little while and it's had its chance to sort of everything to mix together in there and that's going to go into the fridge so once it comes out of the fridge what we're gonna do is without unwrapping it we're gonna cut it in half just make it a little bit easier so a good sharp knife just give it a good cut in half and you can see there oh we have some really great penetration of that oil into the bread looking really good there all of our nice layers so we're gonna cut that in half one more time and you can you can if you're really hungry a quarter you can eat a whole quarter of this great if you'd rather eat an eighth of it you know cut it again now a little bit non-traditional here we're going to spread a little bit of butter on the outside of the crust and we're gonna heat this up in the oven in our cast iron again this is not super traditional part of this sandwich but it sure is delicious so we're just gonna add a little bit of butter on the outside here and we're gonna put that butter side down in our cast iron grill pan you can see it's already hot there's a bit of steam coming off as the butter hits the hot cast-iron and then we're gonna put our flat cast iron pan on top sort of like an impromptu panini press and that's just gonna sit in the oven not for very long we don't want the cheese to melt or anything we just want it to get a little bit warm through so it's not gonna it's gonna be under 10 minutes to warming up and it comes out looking a little bit like this absolutely delicious this is a really bold intense flavor sandwich it's got a lot of things going on easy to change anything up if you don't like provolone use the different cheese use whatever cold cuts you like we like having a ham some kind of a sausage something spicy use whatever pickles you like in that olive salad it's all up to you if you like this recipe please do like and subscribe and if you have any recipe you'd like to see chef Caleb try on the channel please let us know in the comments below and remember to love your food\n"