On the BLT.

So I have a bit of an obsessive personality, as one might surmise from other articles on this blog. I listen to a song on repeat until I memorize the lyrics four times over. I play the same video game over and over to view all the permutations of plot. So it stands to reason that when I get the idea for a particular food, I'd make it over and over until I got it just right.

And last month, that's what I did with the BLT. See, the co-op near where I live makes a crazy good BLT, but a) they almost never have it because it sells out like a motherfucker and 2) I got tired of paying $5.75 for a sandwich I could damn well make myself. After all, it's a five-goddamn-ingredient sandwich; how hard could it be to make?

Pretty hard, as it turns out. Well, not hard to make, but hard to make well. I studied sandwich theory on the interwebs and in textbooks, I drew diagrams, I measured my jaw's maximum capacity. Two pounds of bacon, three clamshells of greens, and multiple pounds of tomatoes later, I finally made a BLT I was proud of.

Am I claiming that this is the ultimate BLT, the one that generations of the future will laud and forevermore consume? Mighty Odin, no. Sandwiches are as varied in structure and preference as oral sex. I'm just letting you guys know what I came up with, and some little fun factoids I picked up along the way.

The Bread

So let's start with the bread. Fact is, there's a ridiculously large amount of permutations you can make on a sandwich simply by modulating the bread you're serving it on. Split baguettes, sliced boules, the good old fashioned pullman loaf, cut thick or thin, toasted or not. The possibilities are endless, and infinitely important. After all, this is the frame of the sandwich, the parenthetical by which the damn thing will be consumed. Bread is fucking important, people - you can make a shitty sandwich out of the finest bread, but you can't make a good sandwich out of shitty bread.

The aforementioned coop sandwich was finished with one crucial touch that I was determined to incorporate in the final product - the multigrain bread was clearly fried in bacon fat before assembly, producing a satisfying crunch and an extra dimension of bacony goodness in the end game. Of course, it also left my fingers a little greasy, but I was willing to pay that price. So I grabbed a couple of slices of my go-to sandwich bread, a big fat long loaf of sourdough, fried them on both sides in bacon fat, and assembled my first BLT. And on the first goddamn bite, half the fillings went flying out the backside of the sandwich onto my lap.

So something wasn't right, besides the fact that I probably should have been holding the bloody thing over a plate on the first bite. I took another bite, more slowly this time, to see if I could determine what was wrong. As my teeth met the crisp outer shell of the bread, I could immediately feel the problem - a bite is a compression cut; not-so-sharp teeth pressing down on a hard surface meant the force of the bite was distributed horizontally over the entire top slice of bread. So rather than having my teeth cleave through the sandwich, it was pressing down on the whole damn thing until I applied enough force to crack the bacon-fried exterior.

So if I wanted all my fillings to stay in place, I could just use toothpicks, no? Yeah, I could ride my bike with the training wheels still on and play Rock Band on Easy, too, but I'm a grown-ass man, goddamn it. The solution, as it turned out, was pretty simple: only fry the interior of the bread. That way, I could still achieve the crispy, Maillard-reactiony goodness of a griddled bread while leaving the exterior pillowy and soft. My lower teeth could find purchase while my upper incisors could slice cleanly through without causing lateral force redistribution. Plus, no greasy fingers afterwards! My jeans were overjoyed.

The Spread

Any good sandwich maker knows that a spread can make or break a sandwich. It adds flavor and mouthfeel while simultaneously providing a moisture barrier between the fillings and the bread. When it comes to BLTs, tradition states mayo, and with good reason - the fatty, slightly tangy spread is the perfect foil to the acidic tomato and the smoky bacon.

But it's more than just that. Spreads are adhesives, too, adhesives desperately needed to hold a sandwich together bite after delicious bite. It's the glue that sticks the first filling to the bread, the initial tread that binds a sandwich together. Now, if you're not a fan of mayo (which I'm a little odded out by - it's the world's most innocuous condiment, but I respect your opinions), you could reach for all kinds of things here - hummus or tapenade, for example - so long as you're comfortable stretching the BLT out of its comfort zone. You could also just spread something suitably waterproof, like solidified bacon grease or butter, but even by my standards, that's getting a little gross.

I also like mayo because its pale color makes it easy to see how much cracked black pepper I'm putting on the sandwich, since this is the layer in which I add my spices. And my only spice is just that - cracked black pepper. No, no salt. This is a bacon sandwich, people. Calm down.

The Lettuce

I'll admit, I'm not a fan of iceberg. It's flavorless and leaks moisture like damp sponge. Left in whole leaves, it's about as blatant a slip hazard as Astroglide on a kindergarten floor. No, for a proper sandwich green, I look for something drier, with small enough leaves to create textural friction so consequent fillings don't slide right the fuck off of it. Which is important, because the next ingredient is going to be slippery as fuck. Arugula, that ever-faithful peppery green, fit the bill just right. No, it's not technically a lettuce. Yes, if you have a problem with this, you can suck it.

The Tomato

Now, I happen to live in a region where I can actually acquire Jersey beefsteak tomatoes when they're in season, but unfortunately, they're really only available about two weeks out of the year, so I prefer to use plum tomatoes for the other fifty weeks. I advise you do the same; when they're properly ripe, they've got the right balance of sweetness and acidity to cut the baconosity of the sandwich. When it comes down to it, it's the tomato that provides half of the big flavors in this situation, so choose wisely.

You'd think that we could just slice these delicious fruits down and drop them in, yes? INCORRECT. Tomatoes have a notoriously tenacious cuticle surrounding it, leading to an incredibly high bite-and-slide risk. What's a bite-and-slide? Anyone who's eaten an onion ring can tell you - it's when you bite into something and the whole goddamn thing comes out as you pull away, ruining the filling ratio for the rest of the experience. Is no good. Is very sad.

Couldn't we just peel and seed the tomato to avoid any danger of this? Theoretically, yes, that's an option. But who the fuck concasses tomatoes to put in a sandwich? Besides which, we actually want the tomato's seeds and jelly, since that's where the acidity of a tomato actually lies.

Instead, just split the tomato in half (which you should be doing to get the white pith core out anyway, because really, the pith can go fuck itself) and cut down accordingly. The reason why I like plum tomatoes so much for sandwiching is that cutting them in half leads to perfectly bite-sized slices with the jelly evenly distributed across the sandwich. If you're using something bigger, consider quartering them before slicing them down, but exercise caution - pieces too small and you run the risk of edge fallout, which is clinically proven to cause indiscriminate swearing and bystander mockery.

The Bacon

Yes. The bacon.

When I first embarked on this journey, I bought myself a slab of thick-cut bacon, assuming that thick meaty slices of pork belly would be the way to go. But ironically, what I loved about thick-cut when I was just walking around my house in flannels eating chunks of it while playing video games proved detrimental in sandwichy format. Fried crisp, it was actually too hard, distractingly toothsome in the midst of my sandwich, especially only cut in half to accommodate the shape of my bread. Thinner, regular-cut slices proved to be the winner here, being easier to chomp straight through than thick-cut.

Now, I happen to like my bacon crispy, so cutting the slices in half proved to be sufficient so that I could create an even layer across the sandwich. If you prefer your bacon more on the floppy side, take a lesson from my speech on tomatoes and bite-and-slide and cut them into fourths.

So that's it, right? All ingredients accounted for. 

AND YET.

When I slapped the top slice of bread onto the bacon and took a bite, I felt... dissatisfied. Even using 1/2" thick bread, the single-layered flavors I instituted to eliminate slip risk were there, just not flourishing with the freshness and robustness I craved. What was I to do?

I decided to palindrome it. Double up from the inside out, multiplying the innards to bring it home. But this presented a new problem - bacon on bacon. After all my careful work layering frictional substances on each other, I had a dry-dry situation at the very core of my sandwich.

Enter that glorious addition to BLTs country-wide, avocado. Rich with lipidy flavor, thick slices of avocado would provide a spread-like glue to the center line, holding fast at the very heart of the structure.

One more time for emphasis, and I finally built my perfect BLT. And there you have it, guys. Enjoy.

Recap - building from the bottom up in single layers:

Sliced bread griddled in bacon fat (suggested: sourdough or seeded Italian)

Mayonnaise spread on the crisp side

Cracked black pepper

Arugula

Halved and sliced plum tomato

Crisp regular-cut bacon, slices cut in half

Sliced very ripe avocado

More bacon

Tomato again

Arugula

The other slice of bread with mayo and black pepper

Press gently down on the sandwich to moosh the layers together in a cohesive unit. Cut in half.

Eat the fuck out of it.

On a few things I've learned over the years.

I feel like babbling today. So I'm going to just rattle off a couple of tricks that I've picked up cooking and hope that some of them will be useful to you.

1. Wash your damn hands.

2. While you're at it, use your hands more. There is no tool in the kitchen as versatile as the ones at the end of your arms. They can smash, scrape, stir, fold, peel, and form. Get in there and play with your food.

3. Sure, you could put a towel under a bowl, pull out a whisk, blend vinegar with mustard and seasoning and spices and carefully drizzle oil while whisking constantly to build a properly emulsified salad dressing, or you could just put all that shit into something with a screw-top and shake it like a British nanny.

4. Just use a bigger cutting board, man. C'mon.

5. Why buy tupperware when you can just order too much soup from a Chinese place?

6. Onions make you cry because the sulfur you release into the air when you break their cell walls is mixing with the moisture in your eyes to make sulfuric acid. If you have four onions to chop and you do them one at a time, you're going to be sobbing uncontrollably by Onion #3. Halve and peel all the onions. Then score all the onions. Then chop all the onions.

7. Get a bunch of very, very large bowls. Nothing's sadder than trying to mix something in a bowl too small for the job. You wind up being too gentle to mix properly and shit winds up spilling over the edges anyway. At most, the material inside the bowl should be around half the carrying capacity of said bowl.

8. Get a tablespoon, a teaspoon, and a half-teaspoon. Measure out salt in each, then dump it in the palm of your hand. See how it looks, how it feels. Do that every time you measure spices. After a while, you'll be able to freehand measurements.

9. If you have two cast iron skillets, you have a panini press. You also might have one too many cast iron skillets.

10. Save the waxy butter wrappers in a zip-top bag in the freezer. They're shockingly useful when it comes to greasing pans.

11. If you keep your cooking oil in a squeeze bottle, you'll save yourself the trouble of brushing oil onto crostini or glopping too much into a frying pan. What's that? You don't have a squeeze bottle? How about one of those fifty thousand water bottles you picked up from all the 5Ks you've run and expos you've gone to for work?

12. Do you have a food processor or a blender? Then stop buying hummus, you dumbass.

13. Mise en place, motherfucker. Learn it. Love it.

14. Bacon makes everything better because it drowns out all other flavors and replaces them with bacon. Take it easy there, cowboy.

15. Everything is more flavorful than water.

16. Taste as you go. Don't just wait until you get to the finish line to discover you've created a hot steaming bowl of shit.

17. Use thermal mugs for soup. Or hollandaise. You get the extra bonus of surprising the fuck out of whoever tries to steal a sip of your coffee.

18. If you drop something in the kitchen, don't try to ninja-catch it. Either it's really sharp or really hot (or both!) and you're only going to severely wound yourself, or you'll fumble it and make the mess that much worse. Just step back. Caveat: kicksaves are acceptable when it's glassware.

19. Don't try to grab anything hot with a wet towel.

20. If you fill a jar halfway with milk and shake it until it doubles in volume, then drop it in the microwave until it hits around 155F, you can mimic steamed milk. Think about that the next time you're thinking of springing $3 for a cafe au lait.

21. Acidic things like vinegar and tomatoes will dissolve aluminum over time. It is less dramatic than it sounds, but it is exactly as gross.

22. The more moving parts a kitchen tool has, the less useful it will be in terms of multitasking. Also, the more pain in the dick it will be to clean.

23. Be aware of what the stuff around your kitchen actually is. Your salad spinner is a colander and a bowl. Your 8oz. coffee mug is a measuring cup. Your shot glass is two tablespoons. Your high-end rotary foamer is a weak paperweight. Your dog is a mop.

24. If you double-wrap your sheet pans in foil, you'll never have to clean them again.

25. Macerated fruit and sweetened whipped cream in a martini glass is an easy dessert for a dinner party that is also classy as fuck. Don't forget to put a sprig of mint on that shit. 'Cause garnish is real, son.

26. Store leftover guacamole in zip-top bags. It's crazy easy to keep properly deoxygenated.

27. Just toss your stale bread into the freezer. You can toast it off and make bread crumbs out of it later. And then you can look back on how much you've spent on bread crumbs in the past and weep.

28. Every time you open your oven door, you're losing like 100 degrees. Turn on the goddamn light and look in the window like a civilized human being, you ass.

29. Cutting a whole lot of shit over an extended period of time is like driving. It feels monotonous, and you want to distract yourself by having a conversation or letting your eyes wander. But the instant you stop concentrating, boom, there's blood everywhere and everybody's screaming. Pay attention to what you're doing.

30. When you love what you do and take pride in your work, it shows in the final product. Don't just treat cooking as something you have to do because you'll die if you don't eat. Treat it with love and respect, and it'll pay you back every day of your life.

All right, guys. This seems like a good place for me to stop for now. Take it easy.


Oh, hey. Bonus tip: When in doubt, put an egg on it.

On knifery.

Let's talk about knives. They're an essential part of any cook's arsenal - you don't get far in a kitchen without having to cut something. Or smash something. Or slice something or dice something or whatever the fuck. But it's surprising how little the average home cook knows about this sort of thing, how many people cut the shit out of themselves using the wrong tools for the job. So let's see if I can't save a couple of fingers here, huh?

What do I need?
There's an old saying bandied about in culinary school that all a good cook needs is a chef's knife and a paring knife. And you know what? They're pretty much right.

A chef's knife is a straight-backed, curved-edged blade ranging in size from 8" to 12". This is your workhorse, the knife you'll do most of your slicing, chopping, dicing, watermelon peeling, and chicken disassembling with. You want something that fits comfortably in your hand, first and foremost. Something you can grip the shit out of with confidence. Some people use santokus for this kind of work, and those work just fine. Hell, my daily knives are santokus. But I bust out my chef's for when I'm being serious about something I need to rock-chop or when I need to take a bird's spine out.

A paring knife, somewhere around 4" long, is for your detail work. Your scoring of onions to get a fine dice, your deboning of meats, your carving Tony Danza into a squash. I don't know about you guys, but nine times out of ten I'm using a paring knife, I'm holding it like a pen. The other one time I'm peeling something because someone else is using my peeler.

At this point, I'd like to point out the importance of using the right-sized knife for the job. If you're using a paring knife to slice down a bunch of celery or dice garlic, you're doing it wrong. Alternately, if you're using a chef's knife to cut the strings off a roast or peel an apple, put the goddamn thing down and grab something more manageable.

The one addition I'd like to add to the list is a good bread knife. The longer the better. You can't really get good slices from a 10" boule when you're using an 8" bread knife, yeah? Plus the serrated teeth situation really comes in handy with particularly cut-resistant surfaces, like the outsides of tomatoes or the skin of a pork belly. If your chef's knife is meeting resistance, don't force it, just grab something toothy.

How do I take care of them?
Get a honing steel. Seriously.

Next, learn the difference between honing and sharpening. Honing, which you do by alternating strokes along the ridged steel at a steep angle, is realigning the edge. Every time you use your knife, you're making little bends and dents along the edge that increase drag and generally fuck up your cutting power. Using a steel before and after you cut things brings everything back in line. You wouldn't bike on a bent wheel, would you?

In general, wash your knives by hand. Use a sponge. The edge of a knife is a very, very delicate thing, so you probably don't want to be tossing it into the dishwasher, where high-pressure water jets have the poor thing banging around like an airplane passenger in the bathroom during turbulence. Now here, I say in general because if you don't give that much of a shit about the knife, knock yourself out. My daily-use knife is a banger with chips out of the handle that I got for free. 90% of the work I do in my kitchen is slicing cooked meats, chopping aromatics, and other sundry stuff that doesn't actually require a razor-sharp edge, so I just use my beater to carry the brunt of the abuse. Of course, that being said, the INSTANT it can't cut through an onion without me applying a moderate amount of pressure, it's headed off to Valhalla. A dull knife is an extremely dangerous thing to have around.

Keep your clean, honed knives somewhere where the edge won't get banged about, like a knife block or a... well, a knife block.

Now, in order to keep your edge healthy, pay attention to how you cut. Sure, it's fun to use it like a cleaver and just chop the shit out of things, but a) that's incredibly dangerous to start with, and b) you're literally slamming your edge into a flat surface at a high velocity. What part of that seems like a good idea? Take it easy, cowboy. Don't just go up and down. Work it back and forth in long strokes and you'll go a long way in keeping your edge. That's what she said. Sorry. Couldn't help myself.

And while we're on the subject, use a goddamn cutting board. And use something with give, like wood or plastic! I don't know who the fuck came up with glass cutting boards, but what the shit. You may as well be banging your knife into a granite counter or steel tabletop. Save your glass cutting boards for serving canapes, or better yet, hang it up on your wall as a dry erase board.

Well, this knife is fucked. How do I sharpen it?
Sharpening is the act of actually grinding away the steel to create a new edge, as this mildly racist video explains. Sure, you could do it yourself (I like to do this annually with my regularly-used knives), but if you've got a knife store near you, get them professionally done. Face it, no matter how often you practice doing this, you're not going to beat a professionally machine-sharpened edge.

This does bring me to an interesting little trick I've picked up. Say you're traveling, and your unit's kitchenette has, as is typical, a set of ridiculously shitty knives for you to maim yourself with. Being a creature of dignity, you'd like to sharpen the knives at your disposal so you don't lobster yourself trying to take apart a tomato. What do you do? Grab a coffee mug from the cabinet and flip it over. See that coarse ceramic ring on the bottom? Works surprisingly well as a grindstone. Just soak it in water for a bit, then put the mug on a towel so it doesn't slide, and grind away.

So there you go. Take care of your knives, people, and they'll take care of you. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go cut slices off a meatloaf for sandwiching purposes.

On eating something new.

I want to talk to you guys about a sandwich. Lillie's Q in Chicago has a particular item on the menu - the CLT. It's not the sort of thing you walk into Lillie's for the first time and order, because let's face it, when you walk into a BBQ joint of this particular reputation, you want to slather ribs in any one of their amazeballs sauces or cram a tri-tip sandwich into your facehole. And you would be correct to do so.

But on your second go-round, check out the CLT. The description alone was enough to catch my eye: "Chicken Skin Bacon, blah blah, blah blah blah." Chicken skin bacon, you say? My mind flicked immediately to the simple delight skin brings me. From chicharrones to sneaking the skin off a Thanksgiving turkey, that crispy, fat-laced savory burst holds a special place in my cholesterol-choked heart. So when I came back to Lillie's for the second day in a row, naturally I had to order it.

And it was fantastic. Smoked chicken skin fried crispy with a toothsome snap with fresh tomatoes, crisp Bibb lettuce, and a smear of mayo on white bread. It was everything I wanted it to be. And as I chomped my way through bite after bite of this painstakingly simple, yet delicious sandwich, I realized a few simple truths that drove home just how well-run the kitchen here was.

1) Total utilization of product. This is something that's beaten into us from Day 1 in culinary school. Restaurants operate on thin margins, and you never really realize how much it costs to throw shit out until you're shopping for dumpster contracts. Basically, the more you use, the better the situation. Vegetable peels and onion roots go in the stockpot, zested lemons get juiced to make a house vin or a homemade lemonade.

I had the smoked fried chicken the day before (which was a brilliant plate in its own right - you could see how deep the smoke took by the pink in the meat, which had that pillowy texture that only buttermilk can get you BUT I DIGRESS), and I noticed it had been skinned. A fairly common practice, actually - the skin is a well-known slip zone, as anyone who's taken a bite out of a thigh and come away with half the fried knows. So what do you do with all that excess skin? Most places would chuck it, but it turns out you can also smoke it, flattop it, and sell it as a sandwich. Brilliant. Speaking of...

2) Fry it flat. Skin's freakishly delicious, but also notoriously difficult to work with because of all the proteins in it that REALLY want to curl up and ruin your plans for even cooking. Sure, you could work your way around it by dropping it in the deep-fryer, but if you're trying to emulate bacon, you need flat, layered protein to build a sandwich the customer can actually get their mouth around. The chicken skin bacon here was paper-level flat, which implies a big ol' griddle and a weight to ensure the skin was cooked consistently. Food isn't just about what you cook - more often than not, it's how it's cooked that separates the champs from the chumps.

3) Context. When you really want to feature something unique, there's a temptation to pull out all the stops, to serve it with herb-pickled tomatillos, fern greens, and a chipotle aioli on rosemary brioche. Resist that urge. You don't do a side-by-side comparison of a Ford Focus on its way to the supermarket and a Lamborghini Countach driving through a ring of fire while a castle explodes in the background and girls in bikinis applaud underneath. You don't show off your new jeans by wearing them with a ruffled shirt and an LED-laced broadsword on your back. Lose your frame of reference and you lose what makes your idea special. Proper context is exactly what this sandwich does. A ripe, flavorful tomato, some easy-going tender-leafed lettuce, a glob of mayonnaise and good old sliced bread was all the chicken skin bacon needed as backup. And it sang.

Whoever came up with this sandwich was a genius. It's a magnificent idea with a flawless execution, turning an iconic sandwich on its ear with one simple substitution. Well done, Lillie's Q; and to the rest of the eating world, I hope we all learn something from it.

On a dream about hamburgers.

So I had a dream last night that I was attending some kind rambling beach/cliff party. I found myself engaged in conversation with one Jewel Staite about hamburgers.

I can't remember the majority of it, of course, as I'm terrible at remembering my dreams. But I do remember her arguing for the presence of avocado on certain burgers, calling the lipid-rich fruit 'nature's mayonnaise'.

I can't really argue that, can I?

That being said, I could really go for a havarti burger with an asiago frico, avocado, and a thick, fatty slice of applewood-smoked bacon right now.

On a plea to those that deliver fries.

It is with a heavy heart that I write these words. For I know how they will not be heard by those who need to hear it most. That this impotent cry will echo into the internet but once, then forever be lost to the silence of the years.

But say it I must.

Delivery places. Please. Please stop putting fries in clamshells.

Do you not realize what crunch is? That all it really comes down to is dehydration? Do you not know that moisture of any kind is crunch's bane?

So what, you're just going to cram those beautiful, crisp fingers of potato into an airtight motherfucking container? So that they can release steam that escapes through fucking nothing and therefore just soaks right back into the fucking fries? Don't you know that you may as well have just dumped them into a wet fucking rag soaked in your own fetid fucking urine? Can't you see that every time, every fucking time you hand that off to your customer, two fucking kittens die somewhere?

Would it fucking kill you to put them into a fucking bag? I mean, fuck.

On buttered toast.

So a while ago, Tyler asked me to write an article on why buttering bread before it was toasted made it so much more delicious. So I ventured out into the internet, trying to find the scientific reasoning for what's always been pretty common knowledge in the kitchen: A smudge of fat on bread leads to a more even, darker browning in the oven. And you know what I came up with? Jack shit.

"Well, fuck," I said as I closed my textbooks. "Looks like I'll have to think this one out." We talked about the Maillard reaction not too long ago - we know that browning leads to the development of all those delicious compounds that makes toast toasty. Crunch is, at its core, dehydration. So logically, the awesomeness of buttered toast has something to do with driving out water content on the bread's surface.

And that makes sense, really. Trying to sear a moist steak on a dry surface leads to a splotchy, inconsistent crust rather than the beautiful golden brown a little oil generates. Oil acts as a direct surface-to-surface heat application, like a liquid pan you can coat your food in (incidentally, this is why oven-fried chicken is a sham). While water has a boiling point of 212F, keeping any wet surface from getting any hotter than that so long as there's moisture to vaporize, oil can go well beyond that temperature without breaking a sweat. So to speak.

So here's my theory. When you fattify the porous surface of bread, that oil swarms the molecular structure, its naturally hydrophobic properties encasing or otherwise driving away the moisture from the surface. It obviously doesn't push the water out, or a puddle of water would form every time you smear bacon fat on your toast, but it takes up space that water vapor would otherwise trap itself in as the piece of bread heats.

Exposed to high temperatures in the absence of water, the bread essentially fries in the oven, free to develop color and crunch unfettered by the thermal shackles of the boiling point. Butter in particular is a great candidate for this, despite its ~15% water content, since the milk solids that give it its characteristic buttery flavor stand up to the short blast of high heat involved in toasting when it's buffered by the bulk of the bread.

So there you have it, buddy. Buttering bread before toasting it is delicious because butter is delicious, the Maillard reaction is delicious, and water can go suck it.


I feel like I should add a note here about buttering bread before putting it into a vertical slot toaster. Don't do it. Those heating coils are way too close, and the fat's just going to drip off the sides rather than soak into the bread. Use a little common sense here, people.