My bologna had a first name…
…I’m pretty sure it was Erica. I guess we’ll never know for sure, though, because bologna doesn’t talk.
This week we continued our sandwichy journey across the U.S. with Arkansas’ sandwich — the fried bologna sandwich. Described as, “bologna [that’s] best served hot with lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, and mayonnaise,” this is about as sandwichy a sandwich gets.
A quick tickling of the QWERTY also made it clear that it’s also about as American as a sandwich gets. And by that I mean, “processed.”
Sorry America, we all know I’m right.
This was backed up by nearly every fried-bologna-sandwich related post on the Internet. People were emphatic that you must use white bread (“wonder bread is best”), Kraft American cheese (nothing that’s too real or you’ve gone too far), and simple, yellow mustard. This is not a Gray Poupon sandwich.
I have to say, for being a sandwich with ingredients that all individually had a list of ingredients that were unsettlingly long and unpronounceable, this sandwich wasn’t half bad! Dare I say….good?
To be fair, I’d set my expectations very low this week, especially since Arizona’s sandwich felt like such a deep burn. But this one proved to be processed food working together to be the absolute best version of themselves they could possibly be. Kinda like those dogs who win the ugliest dog in the world contests. They’re still ugly, but they made something of themselves. And someone — usually from someplace like Arkansas — loves them.
Should anyone be eating any of those foods ever? Probably not. Their textures are not things found in nature and I am certain that doctors must have all of those ingredients on a list of foods next to fettuccine alfredo and “anything on The Cheesecake Factory’s menu” that should never, ever, under any circumstances enter your body.
Yet, somehow it worked. And we sang high fried-bologna praise at the dinner table as we gleefully ate like we were college students at their first open bar. This is allowed? We can put this in our bodies and call it dinner? Where were the adults to tell us that we were being stupid idiots??
It didn't occur to us — two (allegedly) level-minded, adult humans — that we needed to be those responsible adults.
About an hour after eating we realized that fried bologna sandwiches aren’t something we should eat regularly. Or maybe ever again. The sodium hit our bodies all at once in one giant, dehydrating thunk, and the processed-ness of it all hit us like a lead brick.
Which, oddly enough, is what think those ingredients chemically turn into after they mix with stomach acid.
BUT, in a surprising twist, this sandwich still rates pretty highly for us. Of the four sandwiches we’ve tried thus far, Nate has it as his current number one. For me, on a purely tastiness level (and ignoring the after-effects), it takes second place after Alabama’s chicken with white sauce.
But it’s still early days. We’ve got 46 sandwiches to go and I’m fairly confident that the current 2–4 will move steadily down the list.
