Thanksgiving leftovers in hand
Chef-created sandwiches deliciously layer remnants of the feast
Chef-created sandwiches deliciously layer remnants of the feast.
So the big meal is history. You’ve done it all – brined, roasted, basted. You’ve peeled, you’ve mashed. Maybe you’ve even braised. Perhaps you have a burn or two. A scraped knuckle. Things happen. ❚ When the steam clears and the last dish is stashed, you’ll have a fridge full of leftovers and the perennial post-feast question: What’s for dinner? ❚ You could pop a plate of it all in the microwave. You could concoct a casserole, but after all that cooking, assembling a meal seems like a swell idea. And so the Thanksgiving sandwich — towering, layered, grilled — has lots of appeal. ❚ But what can you do beyond sliced turkey on sliced bread? ❚ Five Milwaukee chefs rose to the task. They got out the mayo and bread board and they got to work. Most quantities in their recipes are approximate – use as much turkey or cheese as you like. These are, after all, sandwiches, not soufflés.
Karen Bell has lived and worked in Paris, Madrid, San Francisco, Chicago. A Milwaukee native, she ran a restaurant in Madrid before coming back to Milwaukee.
In 2013, she opened Bavette La Boucherie, 330 E. Menomonee St. in the Third Ward, a classic, neighborhood butcher shop that also offers charcuterie, pâtes, cheeses, small plates and sandwiches. She was a semifinalist for the James Beard Best Chef-Midwest region in 2017 and was a finalist in 2018.
At Bavette, her lunch menu features adventuresome sandwiches — chicken curry with tzatziki, feta, garbanzos, broccoli, pickled apricot, olive and almond; a Cuban pressed ham with pickles, picked jalapeño and mustard, and a seared steak sandwich with truffled mushroom duxelle, kale, roasted grapes and onions.
So yeah, she was up to devising a post-Thanksgiving sandwich. Her creation, the Turkey Croque Madam, is a riff on the classic French Croque Madame — which is essentially a grilled ham and cheese topped with lush bechamel sauce and a fried egg.
Bell’s concoction calls for a little cooking, but it’s worth the effort. Leftover stuffing gets transformed into patties that are layered with “cranberry mostarda” (cranberry sauce spiked with Dijon mustard), sliced turkey, gravy transformed into a bechamel with the addition of cheese, topped with more cheese and then broiled. That gets topped with a fried egg and chives.
“I knew I wanted to use the stuffing somehow instead of actual sliced bread, so if that was the case, it would have to be an open face or at least a knife-andfork sandwich, which is when I thought of a croque madam,” she explained. “Then it made sense because I could reincorporate a lot of leftovers by swapping the ham for turkey and could transform the gravy as well.”