Blueberry, lemon, turkey, bacon panini

Read Time: 10 minutes

This week, I stole inspiration for a sandwich from the Instagram account of a deli in a place called Durham, North Carolina. I’ve never visited their location, and I’ve also never tasted this sandwich. But the ingredients sounded like a lot of fun to combine, so I whipped up my version of this sandwich and wrote about it.

What is this sandwich?

The sandwich I’m making and writing about today is heavily inspired by but not quite a copycat of Ideal’s Sandwich and Grocery‘s BBL sandwich, which appears to be a special and not available on their menu all the time. The main reason I say it’s not a copycat is that I have no idea what Ideal’s version tastes like.

What is the BBL? No, it’s not a Brazilian Butt Lift, although my first thought was that that might jokingly be where the name came from. At Ideal’s Sandwich and Grocery, the name BBL stands for Blueberry, Bacon, and Lemon. But there’s a lot more going on here than just those three ingredients.

Now that we know what sandwich we’re going to be making, we’ll need some bread.

Medianoche sandwich rolls

As I said, Ideal’s sandwich description really reminded me of the Elena Ruz sandwich that I wrote about back in 2024, and that sandwich is panini-ed in medianoche rolls, so my mind immediately went there for the bread selection.

A Medianoche sandwich is a sandwich made in Cuba that fairly closely resembles what we might call a Cuban or Cubano sandwich. Pork, ham, Swiss cheese, mustard, and pickles are all components of both a Cubano and a Medianoche sandwich. The main difference is that a Medianoche sandwich is built on a Medianoche roll, which is a sweet, eggy, and enriched bread roll that is very similar to challah or brioche.

Because of this enrichment, the bread will have a yellower tint than something like a typical burger bun or sliced white bread. Medianoche in Cuba will often be made with lard as the fat in the dough, but you can (and I did this time) use butter instead. If you want a true Medianoche roll, buy some lard and put it to use.

Medianoche rolls are typically browned on the top and shiny, which happens because of an egg wash painted on the exterior before baking. Almost always, unless you see otherwise, an egg wash will be a whole large egg and 1 tablespoon of water mixed together and painted or lightly spooned over the top of the dough.

Here’s my medianoche roll recipe. If you’re not going to bake, you could just grab some sort of soft 5 or 6-inch roll from the store, and it’ll work just fine in this sandwich.

Roasted turkey

I’ve written about this recipe quite a few times. It’s very simple, and if you use an oven thermometer, it’s foolproof. You literally just coat the exterior of the breast with a tiny bit of oil, dust with Cajun seasoning, and then bake until the meat hits your desired temperature. It takes about an hour and a half to finish, but after that, it’s just a matter of allowing the meat to cool a little before slicing.

I own an electric meat slicer, but I did not use it for this sandwich. I just sliced the turkey fairly thin and left it a bit rustic rather than uniform, because I don’t think it really matters in the finished sandwich.

This is my roasted Cajun turkey recipe. You could buy deli turkey for this particular sandwich, but I would ask them to slice it thicker than a normal sandwich thickness just to give the turkey a bit more substance in the finished sandwich.

Bacon

As a sandwich blogger, I make a lot of bacon, and I almost always make it in the oven. You can cook more than a frying pan’s worth of bacon at once, the bacon slices stay straight, the bacon grease that’s created during the cooking process is clean and easy to collect, and as long as you’re ok with wasting some aluminum foil, the clean-up process is a breeze.

The method is easy. Cover the sheet pan with foil. Lay out your bacon without overlapping the pieces too much. Place the pan in a non-preheated oven that you turn on to 400 F (205 C) and bake for about 25 minutes. I will typically check the pan about 13 to 15 minutes into the process and rotate the pan 180 degrees to make sure everything is cooking properly.

At the end, you might want to use a fork or tongs to flip each slice, but it’s not always necessary. Remove the bacon to a paper towel-lined plate when it’s cooked to your liking, and after about 5 minutes, you should be able to carefully remove the aluminium foil from the pan to dump out the grease. Because you cooked it in the oven, the grease will not have the black or dark spots that will end up in bacon grease cooked in a skillet or pan, so you can reserve it in a jar for use in cooking eggs or toasting buns if you’d like.

I basically already told you the method/process for oven-cooked bacon, but here’s the recipe I use. You can also cook bacon however you’d like, and it’ll work the same in this particular sandwich.

Blueberry lemon mascarpone

I’m not a mascarpone scientist, but for me, a blueberry-lemon mascarpone would start with blueberry jam made from fresh blueberries, lemon juice, and some sugar. So that’s what I did.

Just a warning and a bit of a spoiler, this stuff may have the word blue in the name, but it’s so purple. So very purple.

To make this mascarpone mixture, first cook down some blueberries, sugar, and lemon juice until they’re thick like jam. Put it in a sealed container to cool and then refrigerate.

Once you have the blueberry jam, mix it in a 2 to 1 mascarpone to jam ratio and then add some lemon zest.

Making your own small batch of blueberry jam is pretty easy, but you could skip a step and make things a bit easier here by buying some store-bought jam if you wanted. Here’s the recipe if you need a new, fun spread for toast or your morning bagel.

Asiago cheese

Crispy fried onions

I did not fry shallots for this sandwich. I just used one of my favorite shortcuts, French’s crispy fried onions. These things were made by food magicians who were able to create something in their magic factory that stays dry and crispy, but still has some oniony flavor. I do have a recipe below for microwave fried shallots, though, that works surprisingly well.

These crispy onions do not add a whole lot to the sandwich. They do add a little bit of crunch and texture, and they complement the other savory ingredients fairly well. If you were going to pick a component to leave out, this is the one I would drop because, honestly, it doesn’t change much flavor or texture in the end.

Here’s my recipe for microwaved fried shallots. They’re crispy and flavorful, and you can cook them in less than 8 minutes or so, but if you want to skip that step, just use the store-bought crispy fried onions.

Arugula?

Did Ideal’s Sandwich and Grocery actually put arugula in their version of this sandwich? I didn’t ask.

I didn’t see anything green in the photo of the BBL sandwich, but they said it was in there, so I added it to one of my versions. I felt the sandwich was better without the Arugula, so I left it out of the full recipe. You obviously can try it with the arugula if you’d like. My wife pointed out that the combination of blueberries, lemon, meat, cheese, and arugula sounds like something you’d find in a fancy restaurant salad, so go for it if you think it would work well.

This sandwich is warm and cooked in the panini (and under the broiler), so it’s a little weird to put arugula in there in my opinion, but you go for it if you want.

Sandwich build, broil, and panini process

You can eat this sandwich cold if you want; it would still be pretty good. But I found it worked best if there was a two-stage cooking process. First, you assemble the bottom half of the sandwich with blueberry mascarpone, slices of turkey and bacon, and top that with cheese. Then you add both the top of the bread roll and the meat and cheese-topped bottom, and broil that until the top of the bread is toasted lightly and the cheese is melty. Then more mascarpone is added to the toasted top, and crispy fried onions are tucked into the cheese, and the sandwich is closed.

The top and bottom are lightly buttered, and the sandwich is panini-ed until the exterior is crispy and the interior is still very warm. That’s it, now it’s time to eat.

Here’s a quick slideshow of the build process for this blueberry, lemon, turkey, bacon panini.

Blueberry, lemon, turkey, bacon panini photos and recipe

Check back next week

Next week we’ll be cooking bacon again, and I’ll be writing about a cheaper, fake version of a sandwich I really enjoyed in Maine last year. You’ll have to check back next week to find out what I’m talking about.