The debris po' boy is the one that is supposed to fall apart in your hands, and is built to. Debris is the scrap of roast beef that breaks off into the gravy during a long braise: the frayed ends, the bits that slid off the slicer, the meat that dissolved at the edges. Instead of being skimmed away, it is left in the pot, simmered until it is more sauce than solid, and spooned into the loaf with enough of its own gravy to soak the bread through. This is the wettest sandwich in the po' boy family by design. It sits at the line between a sandwich and a plate, and the saturation is the point, not a failure.
The craft is in the braise and in the bread holding just long enough. The beef is cooked low until the connective tissue and the loosest meat collapse into a dark, gelatin-thick gravy, which is what gives debris its near-paste texture and deep savor without any added thickener. The amount of gravy in the loaf is the whole calibration: too little and it is just a wet roast-beef po' boy, too much and there is no sandwich left to lift. The thin-crusted, glass-crackly New Orleans loaf earns its place here precisely because its airy crumb drinks the gravy fast and still, for a few minutes, gives the hand something to grip. Dressed means shredded lettuce, tomato, pickle, and mayonnaise, set against the richness so each bite has a cold, acidic edge cutting the soaked meat. It is eaten fast and usually over the paper it came in, because the structure is on a clock from the moment the gravy hits the crumb.
The variations are mostly a matter of how far the gravy goes. A lighter ladle pulls it back toward the sliced roast-beef build; an extra-gravy order pushes it fully onto a fork. A version that mixes debris into sliced beef splits the difference. Those readings, along with the rest of the po' boy family of shrimp, oyster, hot sausage, and cochon de lait, are their own sandwiches and deserve their own articles rather than being crowded in here.