Autumn Sky Sandwich from College Town Bagel in Syracuse, NY
I normally have a pretty good idea of what I’m about to eat when I order a sandwich. Bread, meat, cheese and maybe a few vegetables—nothing too complicated.
Then I visited Collegetown Bagels, better known as CTB, on Marshall Street in Syracuse and ordered a sandwich with apples on it.
Yes, apples.
The sandwich was called the Autumn Sky, and it came with smoked turkey, spinach, sliced apples, bacon, cheddar cheese and whole-grain mustard on sourdough bread. I had never eaten apples on a sandwich before, and I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect.
Fruit belongs in plenty of places. A sandwich was not one of the places I had considered.
The surprise
The first bite immediately changed my mind.
The apples added a sweet flavor and a fresh crunch that worked perfectly with the salty bacon, smoked turkey and cheddar. The whole-grain mustard gave it enough sharpness to keep the sandwich from becoming too sweet, while the sourdough held everything together.
It was one of those combinations that sounds questionable when you read it off a menu but makes complete sense once you try it.
I expected the apple to feel like a random ingredient added simply to make the sandwich different. Instead, it was probably the ingredient that made the entire thing work. Without it, the Autumn Sky would still have been a good turkey sandwich. With it, the sandwich became something I had never tried before and would actually order again.
That is what I enjoyed most about eating at CTB. The menu encourages you to move beyond the same bacon, egg and cheese or turkey sandwich you could order almost anywhere else. Sometimes you have to trust that the people who created the sandwich know something you don’t.
In this case, they were right. They have been wrong before!
Try the strange option
It is easy to order the safest thing on a menu, especially when you are hungry and don’t want to waste money experimenting. But every once in a while, the strange option pays off.
I still don’t believe fruit belongs everywhere. It was almost like pineapple on pizza, a cardinal sin in my mind. But sometimes you just have to give strange combinations a chance. Apples with turkey, bacon and cheddar.
I’ll allow it.
