Rather than hijack the tuna melt thread, I thought I’d start a new one. I wanted to post the smoked salmon melt, but why not open it up to others?
Smoked Salmon Melt
Split a bagel, and toast it or not. Top with cream cheese, smoked salmon, sliced red onion, and a slice of Swiss cheese. Put it in the oven until it’s hot through, and the Swiss cheese is nice and melty.
I love turkey melts.
Slices of real turkey warmed in gravy, piled on to of a thick piece of white toast, and then topped with a generous pile of shredded aged cheddar and passed under the salamander.
Serve with mashed potatoes & gravy and buttered corn.
Ham-off-the-bone style deli meat, on pita with sweet hot mustard and mozzarella or american cheese. In the toaster oven until the cheese is golden brown. When done, top with sliced tomatoes, salt & pepper.
Do be careful with your [] melts… accidentally press them, and they become [] Panini. Get the cheese-to-[] ratio wrong and all of a sudden it’s a [] Grilled Cheese or Grilled Cheese with [____] !
I’d probably term the sandwich in the OP as “Bagel and Lox with Swiss-cheese-for-some-reason, and hold the Capers. Toast that sonofagun!”, for instance. “Smoked Salmon Melt”? I’d likely do that like a standard Tuna Melt if I were asked to make one with no further instructions. But either option sounds pretty good to me!
‘Melt’, as it pertains to sandwiches, covers a variety; and some melts are not called ‘melts’. For example, we call a cheese melt a ‘grilled cheese sandwich’. A melt may be any grilled sandwich as long as it has cheese. (Hey, you need to melt the cheese to call it a melt!) It could be closed faced like a patty melt, or open faced like the smoked salmon melt. It could be on sandwich bread, a bagel, or an English muffin. A panini is a variety of ‘melt’.
OK, so let’s say you have a nice pastrami-and-provalone on a roll. Not a melt, even though the cheese is melted. The cheese has to be melted by cooking the assembled sandwich.
Pulled pork melt. I do it without bread, but open-face would work.
Pulled pork in the slow cooker: combine pork with either apple sauce or sliced apples, a dash of cinnamon and some salt. Cook until done.
Pile in a bowl, or on on thick toast. Cover with sharp cheddar. Add a liberal splash of sriracha or hot sauce. Broil or nuke. The sweet-savoury pork is delicious with sharp cheese and hot sauce.
All of the lox I’ve encountered in my life has not been smoked. When I’ve seen cold smoked salmon, it has been called ‘cold smoked salmon’. Hot smoked salmon is just ‘smoked salmon’.
Now I want to make some gravlax. But smörgåsar aren’t melts, so I can’t talk about them here.
(I’ve encountered both smoked/Nova and unsmoked lox fairly commonly. Here’s a New York Times article stating “And by the way, when New Yorkers say bagels and lox, we don’t always strictly mean the salty pickled belly meat of the salmon, which is what traditional Jewish lox is. The word lox also colloquially means any kind of cold smoked salmon that you’d eat on a bagel (hot smoked salmon is a whole other thing). In general, true lox is saltier than most kinds of smoked salmon.” Now, I am not a New Yorker, nor Jewish, but that’s how I hear the word used myself in the Midwest. And cold-smoked salmon is usually just packaged as “smoked salmon” in my experience. See my link, for example. But this may be somewhat regional.)