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Buy the Good Bologna: A Guest Post from Mason Hereford, Author of Turkey and the Wolf
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What a treat that we can now experience the delectable down-home Southern food from chef Mason Hereford’s awarding-winning New Orleans restaurant Turkey and the Wolf from our own kitchen! Mason’s style is irreverent, fun, and joyful, filled with total delight for high-end ingredients drawing on inspiration from his childhood to offer bold, fresh twists on some of the most beloved Southern dishes. With recipes for a Sweet Potato Burrito, Meatloaf: The Sandwich, Not the Musician, Corner-store Pork Rind Tacos and a quick how-to for the perfect steak, it’s safe to say you can go ahead and undo that top button. Here, Mason Hereford talks to us about his famous Bologna sandwich and the inspiration behind it!
The story begins with a bad sandwich. I grew up in rural Virginia, in the tiny town of Free Union. My formative food experiences were at shabby, family-run country stores — part gas station, part convenience mart, and part takeout counter. They sold beer and gas, lures and ammo, chili- cheese dogs and biscuits with white gravy. Some sold the delicacy that my mom calls “rat cheese,” a wheel of fake cheddar that sweats all day on the counter, typically unwrapped and unrefrigerated, to be purchased by the hunk and eaten with some saltines. It’s the dairy equivalent of a loosie cigarette.
Sometimes when we were hard up for lunch, we’d stop at one of these stores and my mom would grab us some bologna sandwiches. I hated those bologna sandwiches. I hated the texture of flabby off-brand cased meat. I hated the yellow mustard (which I couldn’t stomach unless, for some reason, it was on a McDonald’s burger). The only way I knew how to turn that sandwich into something worth eating was to load it with salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Never would’ve guessed that some twenty years later, my version of that bologna sandwich would be featured in magazines, on food TV shows, and, most important, in a mayonnaise commercial.
The bologna sandwich at Turkey and the Wolf took a lot of people to become awesome. We rely on tubed pork from my friends Leighann and Dan’s butcher shop Piece of Meat, David Weiss’s white bread (which he created for us), and homemade chips that, thanks to a quick pickling, clock in somewhere between salt-and-vinegar and plain. But at the end of the day, it’s just a bologna sandwich, and at home you’re not going to break your back to make it. Instead, you should hit the store and follow your heart. Buy the good bologna (mortadella works, too), select a nice squishy white bread, and grab a bag of chips.
But, and this is important, do make the sweet-hot mustard! I inherited the recipe from Tay, my great buddy Via’s mom. And when Tay offers you a recipe, you make it, or in my case, you pair it with Duke’s mayonnaise and build a restaurant around it.
Intrigued? Check out 3 of Mason Hereford’s/Turkey and the Wolf’s Signature Recipes:
