The rapid shift from Halloween to Thanksgiving tends to catch us a bit off guard. It feels like Halloween happened just last Saturday, yet suddenly we must acknowledge and map out the myriad of upcoming celebrations. In busy seasons like this, it’s all too easy for certain priorities to slip from the list. We hope that food is never one of them. No hectic period justifies subpar dinners becoming the norm, and that won’t be the case with this latest pub sub on the Publix Deli menu.
The Turkey Cranberry Holiday Sub just made its way to the menu, and now a festive, satisfying meal has never been so easy to enjoy… or has it? If the sub is anything less than fabulous with the word holiday in its name we run a real risk of getting down in the dumps about the upcoming seasonal activities.
Our Official Thoughts
Pros — The sandwich is made with a mix of both Boar’s Head ingredients and Publix ingredients, so there’s a certain guarantee that the quality of the sandwich itself, as is with most pub subs, will be pretty elite. That is certainly what we found to be true in this sub as well. Not only is the 5-Grain Italian Sub Bread and Boar’s Head Ovengold Turkey Breast an elite combo on any day, but it gave with sandwich an excellent foundation to build more nuanced and interesting flavors off of. If only it were executed better…
Cons — I think the main pitfall of the sandwich is that it feels like it was designed with certain ingredients in mind rather than how well everything would actually interact with each other in one bite. Instead of having something that feels balanced between the meats, cheeses, and tangy cranberry sauce it is just very flat tasting. The cranberry sauce was far from strong enough to really have been a defining flavor in the sandwich, and when we expected it to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting and fell short it was just disappointing.
All of this to say, the sandwich was far from bad. With a good bit of doctoring up it could even have the potential to be great. But it needs a good deal more acidity from things like mustard and vinegar, perhaps a double portion of cranberry relish, and maybe a sharper cheese like a cheddar to give each bite a more defined flavor.
