Fried Bologna Sandwiches Are Everything America Needs Right Now

By Jenn Rice

“Doesn’t bologna remind you of being a kid?,” asks chef Craig Deihl of Hello, Sailor. Originally from Danville, Pennsylvania, Deihl grew up snacking on bologna from his uncle’s butcher shop. Now you can find him serving up one of North Carolina’s most-talked about sandwiches, the “Chicagoish Fried Bologna” — a Carolina-meets-Chicago-style bologna sandwich that pays homage to owners Joe and Katy Kindred’s roots.

If you were raised in the South, a bologna sandwich was a crucial part of childhood. There’s no denying the satisfaction of a processed meat and cheese sandwich on “cheap white bread,” slathered with Duke’s mayo on each slice. (Bonus points if your mom fried the bologna.) If we could bottle and sell the smell of bologna sizzling on a pan, we would.

How To Make Fried Bologna Sandwich

This is a fairly quick recipe that yields four delicious sandwiches that are hot, fresh, and ready at the same time (you can easily scale down if you need).

Step 1. Prepare bologna: The first step is to preheat the oven so that you can keep the bologna hot and crisp as you work through cooking the batches. As the oven heats, you’ll mix together the sauce and score the bologna slices (more on that in a bit).
Step 2. Brown the bread: Next, you’ll butter one side of the bread and brown that side in a large skillet or griddle. Then flip the bread over and toast the unbuttered side (it’s fine that there’s no butter on that side) in the pan. You’ll take the bread out of the pan and set it on a wire rack to allow air to circulate and prevent that perfectly toasted bread from steaming underneath and getting soggy on the bottom.
Step 3. Fry bologna: Then you’ll crank the heat up under the pan and fry the bologna in batches. As each batch is ready, you’ll place it in the oven to stay warm.
Step 4. Add cheese: When all batches are ready, you should have four stacks of bologna on a pan in the oven. Onto those stacks go slices of American cheese, which melts in just a couple of minutes.
Step 5. Build sandwiches: Swipe on the mayo-mustard sauce, and layer lettuce, tomato, pickles, bologna, potato chips, and bread. The unofficial and optional last step is to smoosh the whole thing down a bit to break the chips up a little and make the beast of a sandwich more manageable to bite.

Fried Bologna Sandwich Ingredients

Several ingredients are very important to how good your fried bologna sandwich is. These are:

Bologna: We don’t recommend anything fancy. Supermarket bologna works perfectly; you can use either beef and pork bologna or beef bologna. We recommend regular bologna, not thick sliced, because it crisps up better.
Bread: Our favorite for this sandwich is Texas toast, which is thick-cut white bread with a square shape. Look on the bread aisle, and skip past the garlic bread–style Texas toast in the freezer section. If you can’t find Texas toast, any other thick-cut white bread will work.
Spread: We start with a mayonnaise base and stir in a hefty amount of Creole mustard, which makes for a tangy spread with nose-tingling pungency.
Potato Chips: If you’re not into chips on your sandwich, you can definitely leave them off and still have a delightful experience. We love dill pickle chips because pickles just taste great with bologna. The hearty crunch of kettle chips would be a little overwhelming, so we strongly recommend thin-cut chips.
Veggies: Shredded iceberg lettuce adds just the right amount of “fluff,” while tomato juices things up nicely. Bread and butter pickle chips deliver another hit of pickle goodness, just in a sweet format that pairs well with the salty meat.