Hoagie or hero, pastrami or panini...no matter which way you slice it, it's hard to dispute that everyone loves a great sandwich. Americans eat 45 billion sandwiches a year—that's about 193 sandwiches per person!

In fact, Oprah says her favorite meal is soup and a sandwich. "You know a few years ago when everybody was not doing carbs? It was very hard on me," Oprah says. "How do you do a sandwich without having some carbs?"

Still, there's only one person who loves sandwiches more than Oprah—her best friend and taste tester extraordinaire Gayle King. After Esquire magazine published its list of the best sandwiches in the country, Gayle says she knew she had to sink her teeth into as many of the winners as she could. "Honestly, when I got the magazine, words like braised, caramelized onions, buttery, stringy ... I was so excited," Gayle says. "Somebody said to me, 'Gosh, you're like a kid at Christmas.' And you know I can get that excited just reading words on a paper about food."

Gayle hit the road to taste these sandwiches for herself...and she even developed her own rating system for the occasion. Each sandwich gets a score on the sandwich scale of 1 to 5, 5 being perfection.