The 'Price Is Right' Theory of Sandwich Construction
Plus: a horrible cocktail mistake, great music, geographic gripes and much more in another jam-packed Friday edition of The Action Cookbook Newsletter
Some foods thrive in minimalism.
A well-seared steak seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper. A plate of perfectly-creamy cacio e pepe spaghetti. A tomato, fresh off the vine in late August, served on white bread with mayonnaise.
For those things, less is most certainly more.
A sandwich, though? A sandwich calls for maximalism, for pulling out all the stops and piling on an embarrassment of ingredients. You’ve got one mouth, two slices of bread, and a challenge to fit as many flavors as you can in between while still maintaining some sense of cohesion. In my belief, building a sandwich is like bidding on a showcase on The Price Is Right. You need to aim as high as you possibly can, with the knowledge that going just over can be ruin the whole thing.
Friends, it’s Friday on The Action Cookbook Newsletter.
It’s been a fun October here, and I’m ready to monster-mash my way into the last weekend of Spooky Season. Today, I’ve got delightful grab-bag of ACBN-Certified Good Things for your enjoyment and edification.
I make a sandwich that turns every knob to 11, a terrible mistake in cocktail-craft, and share some great music, cozy murders, geographic gripes and more!
There’s a full moon this weekend. Let’s howl at it together.
7) Don’t you know pump it up / you’ve got to pump it up
Last week, my wife left on a business trip. My reputation precedes me in times like these; I had to indulge in my basest instincts, and that often manifests as a Big Dumb Sandwich.
This can take many forms, but this one? In the middle of October? It was going to be a Fall Classic.
I swung into the fancy food hall and bought a loaf of good sourdough. That’s a start.
I went to the deli counter at the grocery store and requested turkey “as thick as you can slice it”, and some smoked cheddar.
I like to play hero when I’m solo-parenting, so I grabbed some bacon. (There’s no dinner that hits better for the kids than a previously-unannounced Breakfast Dinner.)
We’d gone to the Fancy Farm the weekend prior, so I was freshly loaded with farm-store preserves, including apple butter and onion jam, and I grabbed some fresh honeycrisp apples to compliment them.
Time to start button-mashing.
The Fall Classic
Sourdough bread
apple butter spread on the bottom slice
thin slices of honeycrisp apple (use a mandoline with caution!)
thick slices of deli roasted turkey
cooked bacon
smoked cheddar cheese
onion jam across the top slice
I assembled it all, threw it under the broiler, and whooo. Yes. We’re on to something here. Let’s see that cross-section.
Beautiful.
Now, if you’re sharp-eyed, you might see one ingredient I didn’t list—and that’s sauerkraut. I love fermented foods, and I reasoned it might play well off the other ingredients. It sort of did? But, going back to my Price Is Right bit, it might’ve taken me a couple dollars over my target. I still think something pickled or fermented is a good play here, but perhaps a pickled jalapeno pepper might’ve been the way to go?
Who’s to say? I still ate it with gusto.
What’s your ideal maximalist sandwich?
Whether it’s one you’ve made or one you had ten years ago that still haunts you, I want to know what you want to see jammed between slices of bread.
While you think about that, I want to tell you a story about how I went wildly astray trying to make a seasonal cocktail.