> honest I always thought mortadella was overrated

> I'm more of a salame kind of guy.

two times wrong:

- mortadella is delicious, if you don't like it, fine, you're the rounding error, but nobody is over selling it, people just love it because what's not to love about it?

- salame is not an alternative to mortadella, it's a completely different product (mortadella is cooked, salame is air-dried), in the same way a steak is not an alternative to bresaola (same animal, different process).

um, they're both food, are they not?

and yeah salame definitely better.

> um, they're both food, are they not?

ice cream and broccoli are both food too...

> and yeah salame definitely better.

according to your taste maybe, and that's completely fine

but AFAIK people love them both.

Go to a sandwich shop that has them both, and you'll probably find two sandwiches on the menu that are identical up to substituting salami and mortadella.

I would be very surprised to find a menu anywhere, except for maybe in some high modernist bullshit cuisine, that substitutes ice cream and broccoli.

Ever been to Italy, where nortadella is from?

I can assure you it is the contrary.

Mortadella is also more popular because it is perceived as lighter and with a smoother flavour.

more specifically they're both what we'd call "lunch meats" in the US

That's because what is sold in America as bologna is mostly an American product and not actually descended from Italy. Like many things in the US, it was produced and sold by and for immigrants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZaOK0Cj3ug

>it isn't what Italians call bologna

Nitpicking, but Italians don't call it Bologna anyway. In Italy Bologna is just one very specific thing: a city (where I'm from :))

I'm from Piedmont, and I've heard it called bologna a couple times, though I know mortadella is the common name.

specifically, traditionally mortadella from Bologna is without pistaches, I prefer the variant we have in central Italy (the one from Rome), that always contains them.

Original mortadella was born in Latium, Bologna made it popular.

Yeah, and we have zero products called "Bologna" nor the awful "baloney". That food looks more like salame tipo Praga.

I've read that bologna was invented as a knock off mortadella. If true, it makes sense that there isn't really "artisanal" bologna.

The pictured mortadella with olives looks interesting. I'd wanna try that.

Those are pistachios, not olives.

The second image on the page depicts mortadela with pistachios.

But I am talking about the fourth image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Mortadel...

Mortadela_com_azeitonas.jpg

Auto translate tells me that "azeitonas" [Portuguese (Brazil) detected] translates to "olives" in english.

Yes, that's the correct translation of azeitonas.

Some have olives as well, I tried it myself years ago. Mortadella is delicious though in the US there are two versions for sale. I forgot which, is the one that is a bit too dry and not to my taste. In my 40s now I stay away from processed meats as much as I can.

I see this marketed all the time as olive loaf here in Appalachia. There's a lot of Italian influence here in the coal fields, but most of the Italian product names have died off.