The humble beginnings of a Titan among sandwiches
The Cajun Finn is our most popular sandwich by far - we outsell our second most popular sandwich (The Cold Turkey) by nearly double the amount of Cajun Finns. Invented early on in our deli life - around 2004 - the sandwich began as many of recipes did - with the help of customers and the use of ingredients that happened to be around.
Regular customer, dream pop superstar, and all around cool guy Al Sparhawk happened to be in the shop to purchase his favorite at the time, Smoked Atlantic Cajun Salmon. Eric asked if Al wanted to try a sandwich, and Al and Eric basically improvised until they came up with a fairly cohesive mish-mash of the ingredients we had for the purpose of experimentation, including pepperoncini (Eric had a huge hot pepper faze), roasted red peppers (because ripe tomato season is too damn short in Northeast MN), and wild leek cream cheese (I wish we could still make this, but we'd have to hire a team of licensed foragers to bag up an airplane-hanger's worth every season to keep up with demand). A sprinkling of greens and a freshly-baked stirato later and before you could say "The Great Destroyer" a wonderful sandwich was born.
Variations on the sandwich have included double cream cheese, no cream cheese/add mustard, add bison pastrami (Affectionately called "The Big Diaper") and of course the celebrated jean jacket - adding Sriracha and cilantro. But the original recipe, invented on the fly to please a regular, is still a peppery, smoky, sweet, and spicy sandwich that is hard to beat.
