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Here at the Sickos Committee, we’re big fans of weird ballpark and stadium food combinations. We love the gigantic portions or weird combinations of food and even things that seem really humanly impossible to eat while seated for a game. So in that spirit, our resident weird food connoisseur, the Corn Correspondent (Corn-espondent, as so many of you wish we called it, but damn it is too difficult to say out loud), Andy, will be doing a weekly food blog where he combines ingredients from two different teams randomly selected each week and gives you the recipe here each Friday during the season. Myself, Commish, will be adding in photo captions and other things to the blog. Here is the Week Ten Edition. Let’s see what’s on the menu.

Wisconsin at Indiana

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a Big Ten powerhouse taking on a struggling team that just wants to finish the season and move on. However, what makes this season so special is that Indiana is the unstoppable killing machine, while Wisconsin has been struggling and stumbling all year. But with the momentum of beating Washington, who was ranked at the time, the Badgers just might be able to find a spark they need to challenge the Hoosiers.

If there’s one food thing people talk about when discussing Indiana, it’s the giant pork tenderloin sandwiches. Just look up the Edinburgh Diner, and you’ll see what looks like pieces of parchment paper on top of a comically tiny bun. The meat extends so far beyond the bread that you wonder if the bun is even necessary. To “Wisconsin” this sandwich up, I looked to the German immigrants who brought us their heritage and delicious bratwursts. My local grocery store sells bratwurst patties, which are sausage meat shaped into disks that you can grill up like a hamburger, and I knew what I had to do. So let me present to you…

Pork Tenderloin-Style Breaded Bratwurst Sandwich

The first order of business was getting some buns for this Midwest feast. Sure, I could have easily grabbed a pack of hamburger buns from the store, but I wanted to go one step further and make my own from scratch. When I’m making bread, I either use Ken Forkish’s books or I see what King Arthur Baking has to offer. In this case, I went with King Arthur’s Burger Bun recipe. They came out deliciously soft and buttery, exactly what I wanted for this sandwich. With the buns baked and cooling, it was time to move on to the main event.

The first step was to prepare my breading station. I have one dish with flour, one with a mixture of beaten eggs and milk, and one final dish with crushed saltine crackers. I seasoned all three dishes with a combination of paprika, cayenne, MSG, and freshly cracked black pepper, and I was ready to go.

The next step was to work on the sausage patties. The patty by itself is perfectly fine for most uses; you can just toss it on a grill like a hamburger. But Indiana doesn’t deal with “regular-sized” sandwiches. You know what I needed to do? Take two patties and combine them into a larger mega-patty! I could have combined three and made something truly spectacular, but unlike Icarus and Daedalus, I feared flying too close to the sun.

Eight regular-sized patties, combined into four large patties, were breaded and ready to be fried. But I noticed that I had some extra breading. You know what this calls for? The true pride of Wisconsin, that’s what...fried cheese! While at the store, I grabbed some sliced mozzarella that is commonly used for caprese salads and decided to make some giant cheese curds. I’ve already got the oil hot; might as well deep-fry as much as I can, right?

I heated the oil to about 375°F and carefully fried the bratwurst patties one at a time, watching them sizzle and buzzle until they were a gorgeous golden-brown. Once those were fried up and resting on a wire rack, I gave the cheese the same treatment. 

Everything is all fried up and ready to become a sandwich. I took one of my homemade buns and carefully sliced it in half. The fried bratwurst patty goes on the bottom, and then it's topped with a couple pieces of fried cheese and then some sauerkraut and stone-ground mustard to cut through all the grease with some much-needed acid.

Overall, it was pretty good. The flavor was great, the execution was solid, and the homemade buns were a nice addition. But even with the acidic condiments, there was a little too much richness and grease in all the fried, fatty food. I’d still give this a solid 4 out of 5 corns in the Corn Correspondent Rating System.

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