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no. 103: pressed
Jun. 22nd, 2025 03:09 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Homage to Brooks Headley. Braised chard, grated parm, and a lot of black pepper on whole wheat focaccia, made at home.
You should get yourself to Superiority Burger and order a collard green sandwich, and from this experience you should learn three things.
The first is that sandwiches are about structure. The collard greens get fished straight from their broth and dropped hot onto the focaccia. The focaccia is a sponge, and it will squish wetly when you pick it up, but it also has enough of a bottom crust to stand up to the soaking it gets. It’s chewy but tears easily, the collards are satin, and the whole thing just feels like a luxury even though what you’re eating is collard greens and bread because the way it’s assembled makes it substantial and juicy and giving even though neither of these things would feel so on its own.
The second is that anything will sandwich.
Tomato sandwich last summer. Brioche bun, tomato, basil, a dab of whitefish spread. Contrast equals interest, but it’s not the only way to be compelling.
And third, you should put more vegetables on your sandwiches.
Sauteéd broccolini, braised leeks, mustard, grated parm, soft boiled eggs, daily bread.
It’s incredibly hard to find a graceful combination of sandwich meats that also offers textural variation, unless that meat is bacon cooked to a splintering crunch. This is probably why people put bacon on everything, but bacon so rarely does what it was recruited to do. You might as well add leather for its mouthfeel.
Vegetables offer the universe. Leeks for sweetness, broccolini for crunch and salt, and we’re done. Sauteéd broccolini has more textural complexity than any sandwich meat I can name.
My other unpopular opinion of the day is that slices of sourdough are about the worst bread you can use for sandwiches. The crust is a struggle, the crumb is a wreck, far better to use a pita:
Avocado, cucumber, and daikon, seasoned with salt and urfa pepper and a lot of olive oil. Pita to enter a world cup with, if only there were a world cup of pita. Ingredient quality matters, but so does form. This is a sandwich of chunks. Foundation-thick slabs of avocado — this was some kind of type B avocado, the kind that actually taste like a fruit, rather than a stick of butter. Their flavors are shy and easily overwhelmed, a blush of fruity and vegetal notes. All they need is more crunch than slices of anything would provide, and good bread.
Form ennobles ingredients:
The baloney sandwich at Sailor Oyster Bar in Annapolis, MD. The absolute height of trash practice. Store bought everything, American cheese, potato bread from a bag, no real kitchen, just two guys with a conveyor toaster and some oyster knives. But someone looked at a block of mortadella and saw the David in the stone, the shape mortadella cries out to be, if only it were liberated from the ovoid straightjacket in which it was born.
For a more helpful (or at least more systematic) discussion of the ideas being discussed here, I recommend the best book ever written about sandwiches.
It’s unremittingly, radically funny, approaches vegetarianism as an opportunity rather than a sacrifice,1 and is the only cookbook I’m aware of that includes a section on the theory of sandwich construction.
The only problem is that the theory section is incomplete, because it doesn’t talk about structure.2 For that, I recommend the Serious Eats guide, which doesn’t try to distill sandwich making into a concise table, but what serious craft can be, really?
Both of these are useful introductions to cooking in general, because they talk about balance and harmony and contrast and seasoning and working with what you have.
Hold on to your sandwiches, it’s rough out there.
And finally, some recommended reading:
On some level I think the title of “best book ever written about sandwiches” actually belongs to the Superiority Burger cookbook too, but that one is, inarguably, mostly not about sandwiches.
It’s also more dogmatic than it should be, but dogma’s a useful learning tool as long as you eventually move past it.