THE BEST SANDWICH IN EVERY STATE

We teamed up with Taste of Home and our collective readers to find the 50 greatest ways to fill two slices of bread (or just one, or a bun, or a biscuit...)

- Emily Goodman

1 ALABAMA

Chicken and white sauce

We don’t know what prompted Decatur’s “Big Bob” Gibson to make a barbecue sauce with mayonnaise and vinegar, but we do know it’s great on hickory-smoked chicken. Nearly 100 years on, that sauce is sold in grocery stores throughout the state.

2 ALASKA

Salmon salad

The Last Frontier is also one of the last places where wild salmon thrive, and Alaskans turn their surplus into a sandwich spread by mixing it with mayo, celery, and onion and layering crunchy cucumber on top.

3 ARIZONA

Fry bread tacos

The toppings are far less important than the shell of Navajo fry bread, a cornerstone of Native American cuisine and culture but also a painful reminder of persecution. When the Navajo were forced out of Arizona about 150 years ago, they had to subsist on U.S. Army rations instead of their own crops and found that frying flour in lard created golden, pillowy bread.

4 ARKANSAS

Catfish po’boy

Though po’boys can come with any of a multitude of meats on fluffy French bread, fried catfish is fittingly the filling of choice in the birthplace of the commercial catfish industry.

5 CALIFORNIA

French dip