Aj Maiorana wrote this
The Pigeon Coop’s Gritty Sandwich
On the podcast, we’ve addressed a few food items inspired by the Flyers frighteningly fun new mascot, Gritty. Specifically, we tackled the chicken-based sandwich by Urban Saloon, and Christian has mentioned a Gritty cheesesteak multiple times.
Now, we did completely miss out on the Gritty Sandwich Showdown that took place on October 20th (Apparently that cheesesteak up there won the whole thing), but that won’t stop us from putting together our own iteration of a great new food trend.
We didn’t get as creative with our ingredients because we thought this up on the fly about an hour before we actually recorded the episode, but isn’t that kinda the spirit of Gritty? Our spirit is a quick meal for some people in a rush to the Flyers game or hungover from drinking away the mental stress of going to a Flyers game. It’s something you could make yourself or maybe something a local hoagie shop like maybe, Fink’s Hoagies could make just a bit better. Hey Fink, let’s talk.
The idea for our humble Gritty Sandwich came by accident while staring at the deli-meat cooler in the Dietz&Watson pop-up store on South Street. What had inspired us to go down to the hot-dog door handled store was the special edition condiment they offered exclusively in the store, the Gritty Sauce. We originally wanted to do just a tasting on the podcast, an idea that certainly would have produced tremendous content for a purely audio medium.
Unfortunately, there was no way we could go as off the wall as the Gritty Puckster from Big Gay Ice Cream, which may actually capture the chaos of Gritty the best.
The Criteria?
It’s Gotta Crunch
Like that Sandwich Showdown, one of our main criteria was getting this sandwich CRONCHY. I couldn’t tell you the exact reasoning behind this.
Maybe we’ve been influenced by the waves of sandwiches before us that included Cheetos and Doritos, maybe it’s the “Philly ain’t soft” mentality. Maybe I don’t wanna put too much more thought into it because it turned out good.
Orange?
A Gritty sandwich has to kinda look like Gritty right? Short of gluing pipe cleaners all over a bun or getting good with frosting decoration, the main criteria for looking like gritty is…….orange, right? Look, the Gritty sauce is already kinda orange, cheeses is always gonna be orange, it’s hard to not make it orange we did fine here.
A Little Bit of Pain
For some reason Gritty is always associated with some form of torture; physical or emotional. I don’t know why that is as he’s just a squeaky being of mischief, but we’ll roll with it if it adds some good flavor to the sandwich.
Alright Just Tell Us What’s in the Thing Already.
Alright, okay, sorry. Well since we were already in the Dietz&Watson store we picked up the main elements first…except for bread. What we got was some Buffalo Chicken Breast slices as our main meat and Colby Jack Cheese as our main cheese. Of course we had to include the Gritty Sauce which, kinda unfortunately, is not its own new flavor, but just a special package Sriracha Aioli. We went back and forth on what type of spicy we wanted to fill this thing and decided not to double down on sriracha with a sriracha chicken.
Now that’s a spicy sandwich, but it’s really nothing special yet, right? So a necessary trip to Acme provided some extra inspiration. A couple of Liscio’s 6′ rolls won out over the other bread choices which included an Italian roll and some ciabatta buns. The rolls also toasted up pretty nicely later on which added to the crunch that we wanted.
What we found in Acme was a little nostalgia (or maybe you still eat these regularly, I don’t know) in a bag of Andy Capp’s cheddar fries. Main crunch acquired. We also picked up a pack of bacon because “Everything needs bacon right?” I disagree, but it worked out great in our case.
And finally, we went looking for some wiz because we had to.
Toast that bread up, get that bacon nice and crispy, slather the Gritty sauce on top, throw some wiz on the bottom, fill with a couple layers of meat and cheese and cram some Andy Capp’s in there. You got yourself a Gritty sandwich.
Now, I might be a little biased and I’ve never had any of those other sandwiches, but I feel like this one is the best. If you want to hear our mumbling, full-mouth thoughts on what we made, be sure to listen to the podcast (Episode 13).
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