5-Ingredient Pork Roll (AKA Taylor Ham)

I know everyone has a regional sandwich they are proud to lay claim to. I know everyone thinks their regional sandwich is the most infallible and superior combination of bread, protein, and cheese. I also know that New Jersey has the best combination of bread, protein, and cheese of them all, and it is the Taylor ham/pork roll sandwich. No others are really worth discussing. 

Wholly related: I was born and raised (and, therefore, have returned to spend my adulthood, as the fates demand) in North Jersey.

For those of you unfamiliar—i.e. for those of you reading this and continuing to think, “Lol OK, this lady’s never had an [insert lackluster regional sandwich here]”—a Taylor ham/pork roll is a simple and satisfying sandwich. All New Jerseyans agree it is made up of the same four ingredients: a bready vessel, fried egg, American cheese, and slices of fried pork roll made by one of two companies—Taylor Provisions or Case Pork Roll. When you order a Taylor ham/pork roll, you’re getting one of each of the aforementioned star ingredients unless you specify you’d like to adjust quantities and textures. You’ll most often hear, “Give me a pork roll extra crispy,” or “I want a double-egg Taylor ham,” or, practically 100% of the time, “Taylor ham/pork roll SPK.” That is “salt, pepper, ketchup,” for the uninitiated. 

Taylor Ham vs. Pork Roll

Whatever you call it (more on that in a sec), the process of ordering and consuming one of these sandwiches is involuntary and ritualistic. We eat them when we are hungover. We eat them on Sunday mornings. We eat them whenever we are stopping in at the deli real quick. We eat them so fast and we eat them straight out of the brown bag (but still in the wrapping) and whether we eat them alone or with the group responsible for the hangover, we eat them in content silence. 

And while New Jersey as a collective proudly claims the sandwich (I hear you can find versions of it in Delaware and Pennsylvania? Ew!), the star meat product has caused contention re: titling since it was first created nearly 170 years ago. Jenna Pizzi, author of The Pork Roll Cookbook, explained the origin of the product and the debate to The Sporkful a few years back: “A New Jersey state senator and businessman named John Taylor started selling Taylor ham around Trenton. A few years later, [in] 1870, a butcher in Trenton named George Washington Case…started selling something very similar that he called pork roll.” Both versions were (and remain) takes on salty, salty, salty hickory-smoked and sugar-cured ground meat. Taylor proceeded to home in on North Jersey sales, while Case headed to South Jersey—their products remain the primary two options available for purchase in the state. I sincerely don’t know if any others even exist. It would be sacrilegious for me to even attempt to find out! 

To this day, the way people ask for the sandwich is determined exclusively by where they were raised in the state (or, if they are elsewhere within it, how scared they are to fight on unfamiliar turf). The only reason I stand here before you, the proud author of a “pork roll" recipe, is because the rest of my family has always lived firmly in “pork roll” territory and I just don’t want to get into it with them. And while a comparable 27,100 people open Google and search for “pork roll” and “Taylor ham” each month, the makers of Taylor ham have even been calling it “pork roll” since 1906, because that’s when, per the Asbury Park Press, the product didn’t meet federal definitions for ham and got slapped with a “Taylor pork roll” label. It was just so already firmly cemented in its “Taylor ham” nomenclature by then that that’s what North Jersey kept with. 

Anyway, I was less terrified of publishing a recipe with an incendiary title than I was actually nailing it. How do you codify your take on something you’ve loved and consumed constantly (...and bought from NJ’s finest bagel places) your whole life? Daniel tells me you begin by defining it, so…yes, a pork roll is a simple and satisfying combination of a bready vessel, fried egg, American cheese, and Taylor ham (yeah, I said it. Taylor ham.). The eggs should have a yolk that's soft, but never overly runny. The meat should be seared and browned in spots, but never enough to call it crunchy. The cheese should be melted, but not so much that you can’t identify it visually or taste-wise. The whole thing should be salty, but not saltier than an accompanying diet Snapple couldn’t handle. And, dear god, it should not go on a bagel. (That was the easiest decision to make: I started with a Kaiser roll and tinkered with the rest from there.)

The whole point is that it’s the most compact, mess-free sandwich you’ve ever eaten that gives you the same satisfaction as an unlock-your-jaw, get-the-whole-stack-of-napkins-ready sandwich. You don’t walk away from a proper pork roll having (1) expended any energy or (2) needing anything more to eat for many, many hours.

The Non-Negotiables

First, the meat: As we’ve established, this sandwich is built around Taylor ham/pork roll, so your first order of business is to buy a pack  A lot of people asked if I planned to score my slices of Taylor ham with a knife before searing them to prevent it from curling; I tried three and four significant cuts around the perimeter of the pre-packaged slices and, sure enough, the cut slices only popped up slightly in the middle. However, I ultimately decided against the cuts because it turns out the meat curling is actually an advantage when making the sandwich: , When seared to perfection, the upside-down large pepperoni-shaped cups of pork roll nestled into each other and the top half of the Kaiser roll more cozily, kind of creating a top hat for the rest of the sandwich. Plus, once steamed, the un-cut slices flattened juuust enough that they retained that original curve but did not interfere with the architecture of the sandwich. Save yourself some time and skip the slicing!

After frying the pork roll slices, it's time to fry the eggs in the pork roll grease. As soon as the eggs are closing in on over-medium, they get lacquered in American-single yellowish orange. It's important to be able to taste a distinct layer of cheese in the sandwich, so putting one slice of cheese atop each egg doesn't work . The most impactful cheesing I attained was actually layering both slices on top of one of the fried eggs; once I understood that I needed a sturdy base for the rest of the sandwich (separating the cheese made things slippery!), it all kinda fell into place. The final order in the sandwich, from bottom to top is: egg, egg, cheese, cheese, pork, pork. 

As for the bread, my goal was to keep the Kaiser roll as solid as possible, but I also wanted you to experience Taylor ham juice~* in its purest form. Giving the bun a quick little slick of what remained in the frying pan not only gave the sandwich some rich saltiness, but it also really helped it all squish together.

Don't overlook the final step, it's a critical one: Wrapping the sandwich in foil for a few minutes allows it to steam, softening the bread and fusing the layers. The result is perfect for getting into prime dipping position. For ketchup. The truly correct way to eat a pork roll is to dip each bite in ketchup.

And if you don't do it correctly...bro, do you even lift?