In the second of my two part Schlotzsky’s series I made a cheesy and slightly spicy variant on their sourdough rolls that’s stuffed with a bunch of meat and melty, smoky cheese. This is my beef bacon smokecheesy.

Posted on | by Jonathan Surratt
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Read Time: 10 minutes

Over the past two weeks, I’ve written about two different sandwiches that you could get from a fast casual restaurant chain known as Schlotzsky’s Deli. I typically like to change up what I’m writing about from week to week to keep things interesting, but I needed a bit more time and sandwich creation to build my sourdough sandwich roll calculator that I shared last week, and I used it again this week to make jalapeno and cheddar bread for the sandwich you’re currently reading about.

What is this sandwich?

In this blog post, my goal is to discuss the attempt to create a sandwich that I’ve never actually eaten. This is my version of a beef bacon smokecheesy that you can find on menus at Schlotzsky’s Deli. I was already working on the Schlotzsky’s Original and their sourdough bread roll recipe and felt it needed more testing, so I decided to do back-to-back Schlotzsky-style sandwiches.

This blog post and accompanying recipe are dedicated to their beef bacon smokecheesy, which appears to be a pretty popular offering on their menu. It’s entirely vegetable-less and full of roast beef, slices of bacon, and smoked cheddar, along with some chipotle mayonnaise (almost a vegetable?).

Here’s a piece of illustrated marketing that I created for my version of the beef bacon smokecheesy.

Just like all of Schlotzsky’s Deli sandwiches, you can choose your own bread option, and instead of making just the regular sourdough roll that I was testing, I decided to turn this one into a jalapeno and cheddar style roll with just two extra ingredients in the sourdough calculator I was testing. Turns out that works almost better than the plain roll.

Here’s the official photo and description of the beef bacon smokecheesy from Schlotzsky’s ordering system. These are Chicago prices as of June 2026.

Schlotzsky’s Deli shared a quick video showing what the build process for a Beef bacon smokecheesy might look like.

I did recently take a trip to a nearby Schlotzsky’s to try one of their sandwiches, but not the beef bacon smokecheesy; I did see it on the menu and felt it was worthy of some attention.

As I said, I never actually tried this sandwich, but other than the chipotle mayonnaise, everything sort of explains itself, and it was pretty easy to create what is probably a fairly accurate copycat version. This is a pretty simple vegetable-less sandwich that is fairly simple in design, with flavors that you probably already know. But it’s good, and I thoroughly enjoyed eating about half of all of the sandwiches I made (they’re big!).

IF you want to read more about Schlotzsky’s, go back a week in sandwich time to read about what I wrote about The Original and how it was the only sandwich on the menu at the beginning of the chain’s history.

More beef + bacon + cheese
The sandwich that I’m making today is pretty familiar in ingredient choices to the sandwich I wrote about in the second half of 2025: Arby’s no longer available Three Cheese and Bacon sandwich. These two sandwiches are not identical, but neither sandwich contains a single vegetable, and they’re both full of beef, bacon, and cheese. They’re also both Good Mood Food.

We have the meats! And also 3 cheeses. I wrote about this beefy and bacony sandwich back in November of 2025.

Dough-ah Wyle’s new job as my sourdough starter

If you were reading along last week, I introduced my newest sourdough starter. I won’t get into it here, but my last sourdough starter was unrevivable, and I replaced it with a new one that ended up picking up the name of Dough-ah Wyle.

Dough-ah got involved in this sandwich again this week, which makes sense since I’m literally making the same bread again with the additions of jalapenos and cheese. I’m a refrigerator sourdough baker, which means I keep my starter in the fridge and pull it out to reactivate and feed it a day or so before I want to bake.

Professional bakers are constantly feeding and using their sourdough cultures, so they are very strong and able to produce lots of growth. We don’t see that sort of action in our home kitchens, but you should be able to refrigerate your starter for a week or two and then bring it back up to full action with 2 or 3 feedings.

For example, if I know I’m baking on Saturday, I will bring it out of the fridge Friday morning, feed it, and then also feed it later in the day on Friday for the starter to be active enough for baking on Saturday.

I named my sourdough starter and then created a digital promotional illustration for it. Everyone does that, right? Say hi to Dough-ah. He’ll be back soon.

With sourdough, you sort of just have to get into a rhythm and a schedule, and you should be all good. I’m not really a strong sourdough baker; my strong suit is yeast-leavened bread and buns, but the best advice I can give you is to just think of sourdough baking as an experiment that you can’t really mess up too badly. You can be as serious or as loose with it as you want. The starter can handle a lot of variability. If you accidentally give it too much flour, you can offset it with that amount of water. Just keep the water and flour amounts for each feeding about the same, and you should be fine. Remember, people have been making sourdough bread since the time that bread was invented. They certainly didn’t have electric scales in their kitchens at that point.

Sourdough discard ideas?

For me, the most frustrating thing about sourdough baking is disposing of the discard when you feed the starter. It seems very wasteful and quite a bit messy. But you can use that discard. I try to make things from the discard when I have the time, like these cheddar and black pepper sourdough discard crackers and sourdough buttermilk pancakes.

The main thing to remember is that most sourdough starters are simply half of some type of flour and half water with an unknown but very small percentage of naturally occurring yeast. This means you can literally use discard in anything that is supposed to contain flour and water. Want to make sourdough discard cookies or something like pie dough? King Arthur Baking has a dedicated section to sourdough discard recipe ideas.

Dough-ah Wyle is contributing its love to my loaves, and because of that, I do my best to keep it active and ready to bake.

Now that we know what sandwich we’re making, we need to start with the bread.

Jalapeno and cheddar sourdough rolls

Instead of regular sourdough rolls, I added cheddar and jalapenos to the mix and turned these into something just a bit different to change things up. I used my sourdough calculator set to 3 pans that were 5 inches in diameter. I think this pan size is the sweet spot for the calculator, but a 5-inch roll leads to a pretty hefty sandwich when you get all the ingredients in there.

Inside those rolls, I added 60 grams of cheddar and 36 grams of diced jalapeno. I recently shared a cheddar and jalapeno bagel recipe, and during that process, I came up with a ratio that was somewhat similar to this amount, which worked pretty well.

This is a fairly sticky dough, so I go ahead and add the cheese and jalapeno right at the start.
Make sure to lightly oil the pans and sprinkle on just a touch of cornmeal to make sure nothing sticks.
These have a nice color on the top. Some of the darker flecks of color are coming from the cheese.

The cheddar contributes flavor, but it also helps add interest to the top of the bun while it bakes. The extra color, plus the small pops of green jalapeno, help turn this roll more visually appealing to me. Once again, just like the regular Schlotzsky’s sourdough rolls, these get a scattering of sesame seeds on top.

These rolls are 5 inches across, which makes a pretty large-sized sandwich.
This dough is baked similarly to focaccia with much less oil in the pan. The finished roll has a nice crispy bottom.
I didn’t say this in the recipe or last week’s blog post, but an offset spatula can be helpful for getting the rolls loosened from the pan.

The good things about using cake pans to bake these rolls are that they’re fairly cheap and you can buy them in multiples. They also make it so your rolls are super consistent in their shape and size.

Sourdough rolls typically will take a bit more time than a regular sandwich roll, depending on the activity of your starter. But the flavor addition is worth it in my opinion.
Here are three jalapeno cheddar rolls ready for the next step.

Schlotzsky’s rolls are a bit crunchy on the exterior. Supposedly, they bake fresh rolls each day, which means your sandwich will likely be presented to you in a roll that was baked earlier, and it hasn’t been bagged up or stored for an extended period.

When we bake at home, we don’t always eat the rolls the same day, and if our rolls are stored in plastic bags or a sealed container, they will end up softening more than we might like. In this situation, I think slicing the roll and toasting it lightly before you start to build the sandwich is very helpful to get the roll to be more like Schlotzsky’s roll.

Get a little bit of cheese in every bite.

Here’s my sourdough roll calculator recipe. If you don’t want to make your own rolls, I would first suggest a sourdough roll, but if you can’t get something sourdough, you could use a Kaiser roll or even a hamburger roll or something similar.

Sourdough roll calculator

This tool will build an ingredient list to help you create a sourdough roll to fit the size of the round pan that you want to use. Enter the size and numbers of your pan or pans and the Sourdough roll Calculator will do the rest.

sourdough roll calculator
Sourdough Roll Calculator

Deli-style roast beef

Ok, I bought this roast beef, sliced at the deli department of a nearby grocery store. In the past, I probably would have roasted this beef myself, but sometimes, like all of us, I have to take some shortcuts. BUT I already have a deli-style roast beef recipe that I shared last year that you can use if you want to make almost everything in this sandwich from scratch.

Basically, this beef needs to be roasted and sliced fairly thinly. I shared a Schlotzsky’s video at the top of this page that showed how the sandwich was built. They did not warm the roast beef, but I think it helps, and it keeps the whole sandwich warm, instead of adding cold roast beef to a warm, melty cheese situation. So I broiled mine along with the cheese and bacon.

Here’s a big pile of roast beef that I had sliced at the grocery store.
You don’t have to do this, but I warmed the meat up under the broiler as I did with the Schlotzsky’s original sandwich last week.
Broiling the roast beef with the bacon on top just makes everything better.

As I said, I bought this roast beef, but if you wanted to make your own, here’s my recipe for that. It’s summer currently, and at this point, I’m usually looking for ways to keep my kitchen cooler, and baking a large hunk of meat isn’t at the top of my list for that.

Deli-style roast beef
Recipe
Deli-style roast beef
2 hours and 35 minutes
Deli-style roast beef

Need tender slices of roast beef for sandwiches? This is the way.

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Bacon

If you have read some of my blog content, it’s no surprise that I’m a fan of oven-baked bacon. It just works better. You can cook a whole pound at once, and the pieces turn out straight. But you can cook it in a pan if you want. I’m not your boss or your dad yet.

I shared an oven-baking recipe way back at the beginning of this website, but it’s not really much of a recipe. I place as much bacon as will fit on my aluminum foil-lined sheet pan and put it in a cold oven that I have set to 400 F (205 C) for at least 20 to 25 minutes. Pull it out and check on it at 20 minutes, and maybe rotate the pan, and then cook to your desired doneness. Depending on the brand and/or thickness of the bacon, you may have to cook longer than 25 minutes. Just keep an eye on it and pull it out when the bacon is the color and crispiness that you like.

This is a quarter sheet pan. I can get about 7 pieces of bacon here and almost a whole pack on a regular/half sheet.
For this batch of baked bacon, I baked it at the same time I was baking a batch of plain sourdough rolls.
Here’s that same set of seven slices right before I broke off the tip of one for a sneaky cook’s snack.

Feel free to make your bacon in any way you wish for this recipe. Just make sure it’s fully cooked!

Oven-baked bacon
Recipe
Oven-baked bacon
30 minutes
Oven-baked bacon

Want a super easy way to make a lot of bacon for sandwiches with very little effort or cleanup?

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Smoked cheddar cheese

I couldn’t find orange smoked cheddar at my grocery store, so I had to settle for white. I could have smoked the cheese myself, or I could have gone to another store, but instead I toned down the smokiness just a little by mixing the white smoked cheese with regular orange-colored cheddar.

I couldn’t find any orange colored smoked cheddar, which is what Schlotzsky’s would use.
But I just so happened to have some regular cheddar to blend with the smoky stuff.
Once this goes under the broiler, it gets really melty.

The smokiness that’s lost here isn’t really a big deal, though, because the next sandwich component also brings smoky flavors.

Chipotle mayonnaise

Homemade chipotle mayonnaise is super simple. Dice up a chipotle from a can and then add it, plus a couple of teaspoons of the sauce in the can, to regular mayonnaise, and you’re done. Chipotles are not a pepper themselves; they’re actually a jalapeno that has been fully ripened and then smoked.

Chipotle mayonnaise takes on a bit of heat from the pepper, but it’s dulled by the creamy mayonnaise. There is a lot of smoky flavor that they contribute, which works well in a sandwich called beef bacon smokecheesy.

If you ever have to buy a can of chipotles for another recipe, it never calls for the whole can. You should use some to make some chipotle mayo to liven up your sandwich game for a few days.

Not sure if I’ve ever used a full can of chipotles before, so adding the extra sauce and peppers to mayo is a good use for it.
Chop up a pepper and add adobo sauce to regular mayo.
Stir it all together into a light pink, smoky, spreadable sandwich sauce.

Here’s my chipotle mayonnaise recipe. You can probably find something very similar in the deli section of your grocery store if you don’t want to make it.

Chipotle mayonnaise
Recipe
Chipotle mayonnaise
10 minutes
Chipotle mayonnaise

A slightly spicy and smoky addition to mayonnaise creates a sandwich sauce or dip that will bring a whole new component to a sandwich.

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Beef bacon smokecheesy photos, and recipe

Here are quite a few photos of the sandwiches I made this week while testing my version of the beef bacon smokecheesy copycat from Schlotzsky’s. I also shared a cleaned-up version of the digital illustration I made for the sandwich.

Scroll past the photos and try to keep the drool off of your phone. The full sandwich recipe is just below.

Here’s the illustration I digitally painted for this beef bacon smokecheesy sandwich.
This is a very meaty sandwich.
The chipotle sauce and smoked cheese really bring a lot of smoky flavor to the whole thing.
We’re not working with the prettiest cross-section
Melty cheese, beef, and bacon. Not a vegetable in sight.
Thinly sliced roast beef and crispy bacon are a great combo of meats.
If you want a great Schlotzsky’s-style sandwich this is my number two choice. The Original is obviously number one.
Beef bacon smokecheesy (Schlotzsky's Deli copycat)
Recipe
Beef bacon smokecheesy (Schlotzsky's Deli copycat)
Beef bacon smokecheesy (Schlotzsky's Deli copycat) view printable page for this recipe

This meaty sandwich is packed full of melted, smoky cheddar and a slightly spicy chipotle mayonnaise. This is my attempt at a copycat recipe from the fast casual sandwich chain known as Schlotzsky's Deli.

Ingredients:

Chipotle mayonnaise
  • 1⁄2 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 chipotle (from a can, finely minced)
  • 2 teaspoons adobo sauce (sauce from the chipotle can)
Sandwich toasting
  • 1 sourdough roll, sliced (recipe here)
  • 1⁄4 cup smoked cheddar cheese, shredded
  • 1⁄4 pound deli-style roast beef, sliced
  • 2 slices bacon, cooked
Sandwich assembly
  • cheese covered roll (from above)
  • roast beef and bacon (from above)
  • chipotle mayonnaise (from above)

Directions:

Chipotle mayonnaise: add all chipotle mayonnaise ingredients to a medium or small bowl and whisk to combine. 

Place in a sealed container in the refrigerator and use within a couple of weeks. 

Sandwich toasting: slice the roll and toast it lightly.

Set your oven or toaster oven to broil.

After the roll has been toasted, add half of the cheese to each side of the roll and place them on an aluminum foil-lined sheet pan. Add the roast beef and bacon in a sandwich-sized pile directly onto the foil. Place the sheet pan with both the cheese-topped roll and the meat under the broiler and cook for about 4 to 5 minutes until the cheese is very melty, the meat is warmed, and the bacon is crispy

Sandwich assembly: place the warmed meat onto the bottom roll and top with some of the chipotle mayonnaise. Close the sandwich and serve.

Check back in two weeks

It’s summer, and my kitchen is warm, and my brain is feeling just a bit cooked. I’m taking a week’s break from sandwiches and writing recipes. But I will be back with a new sourdough bread recipe and another recipe that my southern-born mom used to cook when I was a kid, turned into a sandwich.