Today’s Sandwich: Roasted Turkey (Weaver’s Bakery)

Today’s sandwich is the “Roasted Turkey” from Weaver’s Bakery in Belfast. Ours combined fresh roasted turkey breast, lettuce, and mayonnaise on sliced white bread.

Location: 101 Main Street, Belfast
Price:$5.95
Notes: Growing up in a house full of kids, dinner was sometimes a self-service affair. My mom would set up all of the things she had cooked for dinner in the kitchen, and we would march through with our plates, serving ourselves the portions of what we wanted, buffet-style. This worked fine most of the time; often, though, I would get roadblocked by my mother on the way to the kitchen table. Inevitably, she would notice that I had piled my plate with only the least nutritious options, picking the chicken out of a stir fry and leaving the vegetables, or covering mashed potatoes in gravy but skipping the spinach, or assembling a plate covered only with stuffing and pork. We didn’t have a Cracker Barrel restaurant near us, so my mom had no way of knowing that there was an entire restaurant chain who had designed a menu around this very concept. “No white dinners,” she would say, insisting that I add something green to my plate. In fact, I can still hear her saying it.

My eating habits have (marginally) improved since then, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for so-called “White Dinners,” those that pile starch upon starch upon fat with nary a sympathetic glance at your cholesterol level. I have not seen this concept so finely exemplified in sandwich form until today’s roast turkey sandwich from Weaver’s Bakery in Belfast.

There are few sandwiches that mean as much to me as a fresh roasted turkey, and it’s a sandwich that Weaver’s Bakery does very, very well. They roast whole turkeys in-house each morning, carving the white breast meat into quarter-inch slices for the day’s sandwich. Though the region’s perplexingly popular “Thanksgiving Sandwich” features prominently on the menu, with its combination of fresh roasted turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce, I kept things a little more traditional. At under six bucks, the fresh roasted turkey sandwich is a bargain, served on freshly baked, super soft white sliced bread with a few leaves of iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise. My sandwich had three big slices of moist, flavorful turkey breast, with the lettuce ending a nice crunch to the unbelievably soft white bread. I also appreciated the healthy pour of mayonnaise, though if I have one criticism, it lies in the second-tier mayo that seems to be in use at Weaver’s; this is a sandwich that deserves Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon, and lots of it.

Minor mayonnaise quibbles aside, the roast turkey sandwich at Weaver’s Bakery is exactly the kind of sandwich that the fourth grade version of myself would have loved. Turkey sandwiches made with real carved turkey breast are hard to come by, and it’s a detail that I really appreciate. Combined with the bakery’s ultrasoft white bread, that still manages a chewy, brown crust, it’s the ultimate in gentle comfort food, and a great example of how a simple sandwich can be truly great, when someone is paying attention to the details.

Weaver’s Bakery: 101 Main Street, Belfast, ME 04915; (207) 338-3540

Tagged as: turkey

About the Author: Malcolm Bedell

My first memories of cooking start in Maine at six years old, when I wore a yellow rainslicker to avoid getting spattered by the bacon I was frying in a skillet. My interest in both Mexican cooking and recreating classic New England dishes from scratch developed while living in Mexico, on a steady diet of pork and habanero peppers. You can see more of my writing and photography online on Serious Eats, the Huffington Post, BlogHer, and Foodista, as well as in print for Downeast, Indulge, and Cigar Snob magazines.