27 October 2011


This is kind an unusual recipe, but it's fun.  It's a recipe for making sandwiches in the slow cooker.  I don't mean "sandwich filling", I mean the entire sandwich, bread and all!  Kind of like grilled cheese sandwiches with deli meat in them.  It's certainly not the best way to make a sandwich, but it's fun to try.  I saw this recipe on the Crock Pot Recipe Exchange blog.  Here's my adaptation.


Slow Cooker Sandwiches


Ingredients:
1 round loaf of a hearty bread
8 slices of cheese
8 slices of deli meat
Condiments


Directions:
Slice the bread if it didn’t come that way from the store. You should get enough slices to make 4 sandwiches out of it.


Start stuffing the loaf with the cheese and meat. Start in the center and stuff every other slice.  Make sure the cheese is touching the bread, not the meat.  So each sandwich will be bread-cheese-meat-cheese-bread. 


Wrap the loaf tightly in parchment paper (or foil).  Then wrap it again in foil.


Place a small glass or ceramic dish upside down in a 6 qt. slow cooker.  Add ½ cup of water to slow cooker. Place the wrapped sandwich loaf on top of the upside down dish and put the lid on the slow cooker.  Turn to low and cook for 6 hours.


Once it is done, remove the sandwich loaf from the slow cooker.  Unwrap it and lay the individual sandwiches on a cooling rack.  If desired, place sandwiches in a toaster oven to crisp up the bread.  Add any condiments you like.


Makes 4 sandwiches.

Now, obviously, in the picture above, I did crisp up my bread in the toaster oven.  You don't have to do this step.  I wouldn't say that the bread was soggy when I unwrapped it, but it was really super soft and kind of "moist".  Laying the sandwiches out on a cooling rack helped a lot and actually we ate ours that way for dinner that night.  There was one sandwich leftover, and so the next day I heated it up in the toaster oven and that's the one in the pic above.

The benefit to using parchment as the first layer of wrapping is that the cheese won't stick to it as much as it will to foil.  I was out of parchment, so I used foil.  The cheese did stick a little bit, but it wasn't too bad.

Here are a few pictures of the process.


 The loaf stuffed and ready to be wrapped.  I got a loaf of sourdough that was already pre-sliced.  The original recipe said to slice it yourself, and not slice it all the way through, leaving a little bit at the bottom still attached.  I didn't really see the point in that, and I think it would be more of a hassle to finish slicing it after it was cooked and softer.  So go ahead and buy the pre-sliced stuff if you want.

For my sandwiches, I used turkey and thin slices of havarti cheese.


 Wrapped and in the crock.  The loaf sits on a little upside-down dish to keep it out of the water.


The loaf after cooking.

I served these sandwiches with my Bleu Cheese Tomato Soup.  Perfect soup and sammie meal!

Like I said above, it's not the most efficient way to make sandwiches, it's probably a lot easier to just make them on the stovetop, but it's kind of fun to make them in the slow cooker.


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3 comments:

  1. How interesting! I would have never thought of something like this!

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  2. Now this looks kinda fun, and healthier, since no butter as you would in a grilled cheese. I wonder if after you remove it from the crock pot, if you put the entire loaf in the oven for just a bit, if that would "toast everything up, or just dry it out?

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  3. Hey Lesa !
    I'm Chef Corey from Family Fresh Meals. THIS IS AWESOME! So unique. I have never heard of crockpot sandwiches! I can't wait to try it out :) Anywho, I just started a new recipe Linky called Sunday Funday: Recipe of the Week.This recipe would be perfect for the first week theme CROCKPOT. Each week will be a new theme. Once this Sunday Funday gets going, I would LOVE to do a random gift card giveaway each week. But I am going to need a good amount of posts to start that, so come join the fun each week. At the end of the week, a recipe/blog will be picked at random to be the featured recipe for the following week. Hope you stop by and join!

    http://familyfreshmeals.blogspot.com/2011/11/sunday-funday-recipe-of-week.html

    XO Chef Corey

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