DIY Graham Elliot Turkey Confit Sandwich... err... "Grahamwich"

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I love sandwiches. I love Thanksgiving. Put those together in the form of a Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich, and you've won my heart over completely. So when famous Chicago chef Graham Elliot opened a new restaurant near my workplace featuring gourmet sandwiches and including a sandwich inspired by turkey leftovers sandwiches, I had to give it a try.

This Friday I had a chance, and I can say without exaggeration that it was the best sandwich I've ever had. Problem is, the sandwiches at this place (Grahamwich) are ten bucks apiece, plus 11% downtown sales tax, and they don't take debit cards, so it wasn't something I could really make a part of my daily lunch routine.

As a way of conquering this bit of injustice, I spent the weekend trying to recreate the sandwich at home on my own. Sure, I probably spent more on groceries than I would have at the restaurant, but being able to make the thing on my own gives me at least some power over the situation. Once I had a completed sandwich, I took a picture and tweeted my results to mild fanfare.

Even Graham Elliot himself was impressed! (I guess he keeps an eye on Twitter mentions of his name, to see if anybody is badmouthing his soup).

In the spirit of a tradition I started six years ago and immediately abandoned, I photographed every step of the process so I could produce a bit of a walk through for you all to enjoy on your own, or at least so you can appreciate what nice pots and pans I have (Circulon Infinite; they were a birthday gift, I recommend them highly).

Graham Elliot doesn't publish many recipes, so I had to use at least 70% of my cunning to try to recreate the experience from taste memory and the sandwich description.

It's a pretty basic sandwich, though made of pretty atypical ingredients. The description on the menu just lists:

1. turkey confit
2. candied yams
3. stewed cranberries
4. field greens
5. sage mayo
6. Hawaiian bread

So I'll go through the ingredients piece by piece. Click any of the pictures to see full-size on Flickr.

Turkey Confit

Confit (cohn-fee) is an old French culinary term that, over the centuries, has almost entirely been separated from its definition. It officially means "various kinds of food that have been immersed in a substance for both flavor and preservation", but what the heck type of cooking does that not describe? Confit is mostly associated with duck confit, a staple in classic French cuisine wherein a bit of duck is cured in salt then poached, roasted, or boiled in its own fat. Duck confit is actually more popular than the term confit itself, so "confit" has been sort of come to be associated with that dish than the actual meaning of the word. So.. to confit something else (like a turkey) usually (but not definitively!) means to cook it in duck fat (even if the thing you're cooking isn't duck).

Yeah, French cooking is confusing. For the purposes of the recipe, I would say that the turkey confit is basically just stewed (or slow-cooked) shredded dark meat turkey. Throwing the term confit in there needlessly complicates things for the purposes of cooking this sandwich at home. Of all the ingredients to this sandwich, this is the hardest to come by. You can buy chicken, pork, and beef pre-cooked in any configuration you can imagine, but except around certain Thursdays in November, turkey meat products are limited to basic deli meats, whole frozen turkeys, and simple butcher's cuts of either breasts, drumsticks, or thighs.

I'm generally a fan of white meat, but in the interest of pointless originalism I decided to go with dark meat. Drumsticks and thighs are the dark cuts, and my grocer (Peapod) only had drumsticks available, so drumsticks I got.

Sadly, to produce some cooked turkey meat I would have to actually roast these drumsticks like a turkey, which would be plenty tempting to eat on their own.

Since it's against the law to cook a turkey without brining it, and the classic confit paradigm calls for salt-cured meat, I decided to let the drumsticks sit in the refrigerator for a while covered in what would seem to be an excessive amount of salt. The salt is just to tenderize the meat (horray for chemistry!), and it'll be wiped off prior to cooking, so don't feel bad about completely smothering the meat in it. Once salted, I put the drumsticks in the fridge for about 2 hours, but you could go as long as 24. I was in a hurry. After chilling out in the fridge, I wiped off the salt with a paper towel and prepared the drumsticks for roasting. I added a more reasonable amount of salt, plus some pepper, thyme, and some poultry seasoning. I also made sure my oven was pre-heated to 350 degrees, even though I hadn't mentioned that until now. Into the oven they go. Notice the oven thermometer? You really can't trust the sensor on the oven. I can tell doneness with my nose and my eyes, so I didn't really time the cooking. It was probably between 1.5 and 2 hours. I held onto the drippings from the pan, as they will come to use later. Oooh, baby. Must. Not. Eat. Once they had cooled down, I stripped the meat from the drumsticks. There are a lot of thin bones and tendons in drumsticks, so I had to be careful to make sure all of the non-meat was removed from the is-meat. At Grahamwich, the turkey is probably shredded naturally via some excruciating slow-simmering method. I haven't the patience for that, so I took the shortcut of shredding the meat by hand. Two forks in a bowl is how some people shred meat. You could also use a food processer with a dull blade, or the sharp blade turned upside down so the dull side is out. I'm a masochist, so I did it by hand. Shred shred shred! I then poured the pan drippings over the shredded turkey, then topped it off with turkey broth. I forgot to buy turkey broth, so I had to make some the old fashioned way with the bones and scraps from the drumsticks. You can see how that works in three steps here.

I put the broth-covered meat in the fridge overnight. Hey, it's not leftovers until the next day.

The Next Day

The natural collagens and gelatins in the drippings/juices/broth most likely solidified in the fridge. This process does amazing things to the molecular structure of meat, and explains why sometimes reheated stew tastes better the next day than fresh from the pot. Yeah, that looks pretty solidified. I dumped the whole turkeybrick into a saucepot on medium-low heat and forgot about it for a while. Do not think about cat food during this step. After a few minutes, the brick fell apart and began simmering and smelling amazing again. I let this simmer for about half an hour so it could absorb more of its juicy goodness.

Sage Thyme Mayo

The Grahamwich sandwich lists sage mayo, but I made an executive decision to go with thyme instead. Sage and thyme are both classic turkey seasonings to the point of interchangeability, there was a lot of sage in the poultry seasoning I used on the turkey, and thyme comes in a much finer powder compared to sage (which has a consistency like lint) so it would integrate into the mayo easier.

I just took some mayo, scooped it into a bowl, sprinkled on some thyme and pepper, and mixed it up. Not complicated stuff here, people.

Hey, that spice container looks familiar...

Stewed Cranberries

A fancy way of saying "cranberry sauce." (How do you make cranberry sauce? You stew cranberries). Unlike most of my family, cranberry sauce is a favorite and integral part of the whole thanksgiving turkey oeuvre to me, and it's one of the best parts of the leftovers sandwich.

Most grocery store deli areas have a pretty good pre-made (in the store) cranberry sauce/relish/compote/chutney, so there's no reason to make one from scratch for the purposes of a sandwich. I happen to know that Peapod has a quite amazing cranberry sauce (with bits of citrus peel in there), so I just went with that.

Candied Yams

Emphasis on the "can."

I do feel kind of sleazy using canned sweet potatoes, but like the cranberries, it didn't feel worth it to make some from scratch just for a sandwich. The only reason I went through all the trouble for the turkey was because it's impossible to buy shredded roast turkey, let alone in dark meat.

I drained the yams from the syrup (no high fructose!) and sliced them into thin planks that would make sense on a sandwich. Done!

Hawaiian Bread

Perhaps a rarity to some, King's Hawaiian Sweet Bread has been a favorite of mine since I was young. You can find it at most grocery stores, and it's great for everything from sandwiches to french toast. I was pretty excited to see it in this sandwich. It comes in wide, round loaves so I cut off two of the heels so I could have a crusty top and bottom slice. I toasted it very lightly, on the very lowest setting my hey-look-how-fancy-my-toaster-is toaster allowed. You don't want a crunchy toast texture, just enough of a browning to let Maillard do his work. Just look at that! Awesome-looking grill marks totally unintentional.

(Also note: I'm skipping the "field greens" ie lettuce ingredient because that's pretty obvious. Get some nice, green leaf lettuce. Romaine or bibb. Just not iceberg)

Sandwich Assembly!!!

Cranberries on one slice, herb'd mayo on the other. I microwaved the sweet potatoes for about 30 seconds, just to get them lukewarm so they wouldn't be cold and gross, then shingled them on one of the slices (the one that would become the top slice) Then I added some lettuce (in that picture, probably too much) and scooped some of the turkey from the pot. I had to squeeze it to get rid of most of the juice, as I didn't want it to be a drippy sandwich. Join the halves into a sandwich, cut it diagonally, and stack it like a true sandwich artist and take your vanity picture before scarfing down.
Your final product:

Two drumsticks probably made about 3 or 4 sandwiches worth.

It wasn't as amazing as the Grahamwich original (there's some kind of sweetness to the turkey there that I can't put my finger on, I might have to eat two or twenty more to get a better idea), but for home cooking it was pretty great. My leftover turkey sandwiches are usually made of large and unwieldy chunks of turkey that always fall out the sides when I take a bite. Shredding the turkey and simmering it in its own juices made it much easier to eat and gave it an awesome extra-turkey boost.

I might try this again soon with white meat, just to see how it compares.