Via email, Nick writes:

I am a sandwich enthusiast not unlike you. But one component you do net seem to delve into as much as you should is Ssuce. Not Sriracha or Cholula, I’m talking a sauce with many components that can turn a regular sandwich into… well I will let you finish that. Come on Ted, I am disappointed.

I followed up with Nick to ask what sort of sauce he meant, if not Sriracha or Cholula — two of the saucier hot sauces, for what it’s worth. He added:

I’m talking a house sauce. There’s a couple places in my home town that I go just to buy some sauce to keep in my fridge (picante, ranch). I put them on any sandwich to change the dynamic or to dip sandwich in. It is nearly impossible to replicate these sauces in your own kitchen and not your standard store bought. A good sauce is like the bloodline of good food.

I didn’t realize I have given sauces the short shrift here, so I apologize to anyone else disappointed or in some way offended. It’s always a case by case thing, but typically I feel sauces are best as a complement to the rest of the ingredients, not the dominant flavor. So I usually discuss sauces when they are incorporated in good sandwiches and rarely otherwise.

Here are three sauces I very much enjoy:

– Green sauce from Pio Pio: The green sauce from Pio Pio is pretty much the best thing. It’s spicy, but in a different way than most spicy things, and it’s creamy and tangy and somehow fresh tasting. There are a bunch of Pio Pios around the city. No sandwiches there, but the chicken is delicious. Get some, then take home as much of the green sauce as they’ll let you have. It’s good on everything.

– Honey mustard from Chili’s: Judge away. The honey mustard from Chili’s has to be at least 90 percent pure fat, with the remaining ten percent contributing to a pleasant honey-mustardy mix of sweetness and tang. It’s amazing. You guys.

– Barbecue sauce from Rocklands: Rocklands is a four-location barbecue restaurant in the DC area. One of the locations happens to be right near the now-closed bar where my band used to play every week, which led to a lot of Rocklands. Really good barbecue, really good barbecue sauce. It’s the more liquidy type of barbecue sauce, served hot with a ladle from a cauldron. And you have to work around the onions if you don’t particularly like onions. But it’s great: Very vinegary, a little bit sweet.

Obviously various breads are useful for various sandwiches, but for a straightforward deli sandwich I like a straightforward Kaiser roll. It’s got a nice crunchiness to the crust, it’s sturdy enough to handle a good saucing, and it’s airy enough on the inside to get out of the way of the sandwich stuff.

For what it’s worth, I generally prefer a Kaiser roll even to its larger cousin, the hero. No disrespect to heroes, but a hero is usually slightly more food and more bread than I’m looking to eat. Often I eat it all anyway, though.

Apparently, the Kaiser roll is thought to be named for Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. It was invented in Vienna while bakers there were experimenting with new leavening methods.

My method is to go to Fairway, hang around the cheese counter until the redheaded guy who kind of looks like Bill Burr shows up, then ask him what cheeses I should get so he tells me all about their cheese selection and gives me a bunch of free samples.

We brought something called Young Farmer’s Gouda to my parents’ house on Thanksgiving and it was excellent. I also very much like a cheese they have at Fairway called Midnight Moon.

I think a good method for a cheese platter is to mix up your cheeses. Maybe go with one from cow milk, one from sheep’s milk and one from goat’s milk, or one sharp, one mild and one stinky.

Can 1-year-olds eat deli meat? If you’re entertaining, you’re going to want a couple of things everyone likes. Turkey is always a safe bet, maybe honey-maple turkey if you want to be fancy about it. Maybe roast beef for that, too, but roast beef is tricky because good roast beef typically comes in huge slices that aren’t as easily manageable. Ham’s also fine, but I feel like people who are into ham would also be down with trying the soppressata and hot coppa that you should also buy, so it might be unnecessary. A lot of this depends on who’s coming over. If your friends are lame they’re not going to want to try exotic Italian meats, and you might want to consider making new friends.

Well, a sandwich on a croissant is fine. In that case, the croissant’s basically just acting as a soft roll and it’s plenty delicious.

A burger on a doughnut is another thing entirely. I haven’t tried one and I haven’t had the opportunity to try one. It’s a bit like bungee jumping, in that it’s something I will always maintain and actually believe that I’m willing to do until I’m faced with actually being able to do it, at which point I grow timid. Burger on a doughnut. It’s obviously gimmicky, and I think it might be taking everything way too far. It’s hard for me to figure out how a doughnut would improve a burger.

Dark meat and it’s not even close. The myth of white-meat superiority in poultry is one of our nation’s most persistent, but I’m fine with people perpetuating it as long as it means more (and less expensive) dark meat for distinguishing carnivores. Dark meat is moister and tastier. And as an added bonus, turkey legs are the obvious best for eating with your hands like you’re Genghis Khan in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Well, it’s all about proportions and structure, and you sort of need to eyeball it as best you can and trust your instincts because everyone’s working with a slightly different arsenal of ingredients. Heartier breads and rolls are obviously going to be better for holding the sandwich together, but using them means you’re going to want to go easy on the stuffing — an integral element of the leftover sandwich.

I will say this: Turkey — especially white-meat turkey — can be pretty dry, and cranberry sauce packs a very powerful flavor. You’re going to need some condiments to moisten up that turkey, and it’s going to be tempting to just slather on enough cranberry sauce to do the whole job. But unless you want to eat a sandwich that just tastes like cranberry sauce, you’re making a mistake. I’d probably use mayo on one side of the bread and cranberry sauce on the other, to keep things moist but moderate the cranberry flavor.

It’s very flattering. Same thing any time I get an email from a reader who has just enjoyed a sandwich somewhere.

Part of the appeal of sandwiches, I think, is that they’re practically universal. So many people eat sandwiches. Many of us have eaten, in our lives, a ton of sandwiches. Nearly every culture has its own version of protein wrapped in starch. They’re often inexpensive, they’re (at their best) unpretentious, and in many cases they can be eaten almost anywhere.

When someone is excited after eating a delicious sandwich, he could email just about anybody he knows to tip them off and elicit some sort of response. Think about it: Say you got a random, unsolicited email from a former colleague at an old job that you hadn’t spoken to in years, and the subject line said, “great sandwich!” You’d open that email, right? And even though you might think it weird that he thought to share the details of his great sandwich with you of all people, you’d ultimately be pretty happy that he did because now you know about it and who doesn’t want more great sandwiches on their radars?

So every time someone emails me with a sandwich tip or asks for my opinion about sandwich construction, it feels pretty great. Thanks for choosing me as a source of sandwich information or as a comrade in sandwich passion. I mean it.

You know? It’s a novel idea but your question suggests you know the reason why it doesn’t exist: I don’t think turkey presents enough value over chicken to make it worth dealing with on a more regular basis. Turkeys are huge and cooking them is a pain. What’re you getting in a turkey taco that you can’t get in a chicken taco? Slight turkey flavor. Not worth the trouble, I don’t think.

The sandwich: Milano Special from Milano Market, 89th and 3rd in Manhattan.

The construction: Ham, salami, ham capicola, mortadella, lettuce, tomato, and roasted peppers with oil & vinegar on semolina bread. On the menu, the Milano Special comes with provolone cheese, but I substituted fresh mozzarella.

This is important: If you’re getting a sandwich from an Italian deli boasting homemade mozzarella, always get the mozzarella on the sandwich. That’s no knock on delicious provolone, it’s just that fresh mozzarella is pretty much the creamiest, tastiest, best thing. And chances are whatever sandwich you’re ordering already has all the saltiness you need and then some, so while the provolone might be a bit more assertive, it’s probably unnecessary.

Important background information: Milano Market gets its second Sandwich of the Week due mostly to its proximity to my apartment. My since-revived car died in a parking spot right outside Milano Market, so a visit became inevitable as soon as it was clear I’d have to spend time waiting by the car for roadside assistance.

Also: I worked in an Italian deli for three years and made countless Italian heroes. But though it’s entirely possible the deli had some set list of ingredients for an Italian hero specified somewhere, I never, ever followed it. To me, a request for an Italian hero meant an invitation for improvisation. The sandwich created depended on my levels of energy and enthusiasm that day, the customer’s friendliness while ordering, and the meats we had at our disposal.

For the uninitiated, the following is a brief primer on select Italian deli meats less common than Genoa salami and pepperoni:

Capicola: Not to be confused with Ham Capicola or Cappy Ham — ham seasoned in the style of capicola — legit capicola (or coppa) might be the most underrated and underutilized Italian cold cut. It’s cured ham that packs a ton of salty flavor, and the hot variety adds a lot of peppery spice. Capicola needs to be sliced thin or it will be too chewy for sandwich purposes, but it can be a fine, less-expensive substitute for prosciutto.

Mortadella: Basically the Italian version of baloney and, in fact, the Bologna-based product from which every first grader’s favorite lunchmeat derives its name. Mortadella brings a slightly porkier taste than baloney and perhaps even more grease, as evidenced by the visible hunks of lard in its constitution. Mortadella is most useful to add bulk to a sandwich, and can be avoided on Italian heroes aimed at finer palates. For some reason, some mortadellas contain pistachios. No one knows why.

Pancetta: Rarely incorporated on sandwiches despite extraordinary awesomeness, pancetta is a fatty Italian jowl bacon that complicates the sandwich-making process by being better cooked. A great option for an Italian take on the classic chicken cutlet with bacon and cheese.

Prosciutto: Extremely expensive and difficult to work with, prosciutto is awesome on its own or wrapped around appetizers but often suboptimal on sandwiches. Prosciutto sliced thicker than transparently thin becomes unwieldy on a sandwich, so its inclusion requires an expert deli person and a well sharpened slicer. It boasts so much flavor and is so costly that you’ll rarely see more than a thin layer on a sandwich. Due to its delicate nature, prosciutto is often at its best on simpler sandwiches, perhaps just with some mozzarella and roasted peppers.

Soppressata: For my money, soppressata is the best deli meat. It’s a more coarsely ground cousin to the common salami with a heartier, spicier flavor. Salamis are by their nature both very airy and very easy to slice thin, so ordering a half pound of soppressata yields a much higher stack of meat than the same weight in ham.

If I’m putting together an optimized Italian hero and I’ve got everything available, I’m probably using ham cappy for some meaty bulk, coppa and soppressata for flavor, maybe a thin layer of pepperoni for spice and color, fresh mozzarella, oil and balsamic vinegar, and roasted red peppers.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Like a solid Italian hero. Which is to say: unspectacular, but delicious.

The dominant texture comes from the bread, a crunchy, crusty enclosure for the hunk of meatstuff inside. The lettuce provides crispiness too, and helps give the thing a pleasant, familiar party-hero feel. But since the slipperiness of the lettuce also made the sandwich more difficult to hold together while eating, I’d quibble that its added value in texture did not compensate for the hassle of negotiating it. But that’s often the case with lettuce on sandwiches.

Though, as is typical, many of my favorite Italian deli meats are not on this particular Italian hero, the meat flavors here all blend together into a tasty, salty, greasy, porky combination, all complemented by the sweetness and tang from the roasted red peppers.

And fresh mozzarella… man. It’s a weird thing the way something so subtle on its own can so strongly improve any sandwich, but it’s undeniable. Its hint of flavor powers through, and it provides a sort of fluffy creaminess that both thickens and moistens the sandwich from the inside. Outstanding.

What it’s worth: $9.50, but it’s probably enough for two meals if you’re not hungry from sitting by your car looking at the delicious hanging meats and piled breads in the windows of Milano Market.

How it rates: 72 out of 100. Not something I’d go out of my way for and not close to the best sandwich I’ve had at the Milano Market, but a strong neighborhood Italian hero.