SANDWICH OF THE SUMMER
Introducing the Wedge Salad Sandwich
Come summer, I start making what I call appointment sandwiches. These are not slapdash cheese-and-whatever working lunches, but instead meals I shop for, dream of, fuss over. It’s the dawn of the tomato, of course: my favorite way to eat them is on toasted or fried bread. I begin the season with something minimal, a slice of olive oil-fried toast rubbed with garlic and layered with salted slices of tomato. The freshly fried bread warms and softens the tomato, which then bleeds into the bread, almost making a dressing with the garlicky oil. It requires so little of me, and offers so much—my ideal summer food.
Next I will move on to the BLT. Bentons bacon, romaine, salt and peppered Jersey tomatoes, Hellmann’s. Often I’ll only toast the inside edges of the bread, to keep its outside soft and easy on the roof of my mouth, and its insides from getting too soaked. Appointment sandwiches are all about proportions, all about understanding the exact level of work you’re willing to put into a dish you eat with your hands in 120 seconds max.
I recently received a copy of the Turkey and the Wolf cookbook (out next Tuesday!), written by chef Mason Hereford and friend of the pod JJ Goode.1 It’s groovy and silly and full of life, a restaurant cookbook with real pizzazz. There’s a whole spread of Hereford rollerblading through the Popeye’s drive-thru, and somehow it’s not annoying? This is cooking school-level stoner food, without the ironic self-seriousness that has historically defined the microgenre2. Top on my list of bookmarks are a burrito stuffed with freezer-aisle sweet potato waffle fries and a dish of slow-cooked lambs necks on freezer-aisle roti paratha.
The category, you might say, is 7-11 elegance. Hereford, whose New Orleans restaurant has become famous for its cranked-to-11 sandwiches, takes the genre seriously, approaches it with rigor. He asks you to slice your bread an egregious 1 1/2-inch thick for sandwiches that look like they require preparatory jaw exercises. Appointment sandwiches if I’ve ever seen one.
A few days after first flipping through the book, I had a lightbulb moment: I needed to eat a wedge salad inside a sandwich. Surely someone had thought of this already? I Googled, but all I found was a horrifying construction that used iceberg lettuce as “bread.”
The sandwich I dreamed of needed good, sturdy bread, thick bacon, homemade blue cheese dressing, a cross-section slab of iceberg (like a cauliflower steak!), and pickled shallots, which I always add to my wedge salads to offset their richness. What luck—the book had a chunky blue cheese dressing recipe with the brilliant addition of celery salt, an ingredient that’s been dear to my heart ever since the years I spent shaking it into my UNC-era pimento cheese. It adds ZIP! It adds VERVE! It adds CELERY!
I adapted the dressing recipe slightly, pulling out a few unnecessary-to-me bits, adding a heap of chives, and swapping in Kewpie for Hereford’s beloved Duke’s, because I figured this sandwich could use a little MSG.
I also fried my toast, in part because I don’t have a toaster, and in part because I like the way that fried toast makes for chrunchy edges and custardy insides. Hereford advises letting your fried toast rest like a steak, either on a cooling rack or leaned up against another piece of toast like an A-frame, to keep it from steaming and therefore sogging while laying on a plate. This sounds fussy, I know, but he’s got a point, and anyways, you need time to fry your bacon. (Here’s how I do mine.) I chose a pullman loaf, since it’s sturdy but soft at the same time, and small—this is a dense sandwich, it doesn’t need to be wide. Plus I wanted to be able to slice my own bread.
After a few attempts I learned the best strategy was this: spread a spoonful of dressing on both pieces of bread, just enough to coat them—much more, and it will overwhelm. (This dressing is not lite.) Bottom to top I like tomato, bacon, iceberg, shallots. It’s a big honker of a sandwich, and not for the faint of jaw, but it delivers exactly what it promises: the perfect wedge salad, tucked into a sandwich, salty and funky and crunchy and juicy.
I love making something like this on a weekend afternoon or for a weeknight dinner—appointment sandwich!—but I also recommend trying it for a crowd. The dressing makes enough for at least 10 sandwiches, maybe 15?, and once you’ve mixed it and sliced the veg and fried the bacon and toasted your toast, your guests can assemble their own with little guidance. (If you’re making these for a crowd, I’d save yourself some labor and toast the bread in a toaster or on a baking sheet.) It’s the sort of food that’s so good it makes you laugh.
One note: if you don’t eat bacon, surely you could skip it and still enjoy yourself here, or you could do a little extra work and make Superiority Burger’s Hammered Mushrooms, a brilliant bacon stand-in if there ever was one.
Oh, and when you find yourself with extra dressing, buy some Ruffles—plain, or Cheddar & Sour Cream, or ideally both. It doubles as a dip.
Wedge Salad Sandwich
Serves 1, with extra dressing, though it’s easy to scale up
1 medium tomato
Salt and pepper
1 shallot
Red wine vinegar
2 slices of thick-cut, ideally smoked, bacon (I like Benton’s)
1 small head romaine lettuce
Olive oil
Two 1/2-inch thick slices of bread (e.g. pullman, sourdough, or a hearty sandwich loaf)
Blue Cheese Dressing
Slice your tomato into 1/4-inch thick slices. Lay on a plate and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Set aside.
Thinly slice the shallot, place it in a small bowl, and add just enough red wine vinegar to cover. Add a pinch of salt, and let it sort-of-pickle while you make the rest of your fillings.
In a large, heavy skillet, cook the bacon to your liking; I like to retain a bit of chew, so it doesn’t become shatteringly crisp. (I also cut my slices in half, for easier sandwich arrangement.) Set aside on a paper towel-lined plate. Drain off your bacon fat—I save mine in a little jar in the fridge—and wipe it out.
Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in your skillet over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the bread, and cook until it’s golden, then flip it, and cook until the other side is well-toasted too. Let the bread slices rest on a wire rack, or lean them against each other to cool slightly.
Cut a 1/2 inch-thick cross-section from the iceberg. (You want it to look like you’re removing the equator—it should hold together, if tenuously.) Sprinkle liberally on both sides with salt and pepper. Put the rest of the iceberg back in the fridge for tomorrow’s lunch.
Assemble your sandwich: on each slice of bread, spread a spoonful of dressing to create an even, thin layer that reaches the edges. To the bottom slice, add your tomatoes, then the bacon, snapping the strips in half if it makes more sense for the geometry of the sandwich. You want bacon in every bite. Top with the iceberg, then a handful of pickled shallots. Add the top slice of bread, and open wide.
Blue Cheese Dressing à la Turkey and the Wolf
Makes about 1 1/2 cups
5 ounces blue cheese, crumbled (about a heaping cup)
1/2 cup mayo (I prefer Kewpie)
1/4 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons buttermilk
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon celery salt
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
Lots of black pepper (I counted and I did FIFTY cranks)
1/3 cup chopped chives
1/2 teaspoon hot sauce (like Frank’s Red Hot or Tabasco)
Salt
In a medium bowl, mix together everything except the salt. Taste—it should be vibrant and funky and a little tart. If it tastes dull in any way, add a bit of salt and lemon juice, as Hereford says, “until you’re happy.”
Keeps in an airtight container in the fridge for a week.
Dressing adapted from the Turkey and the Wolf cookbook, written by Mason Hereford and JJ Goode, copyright TenSpeed Press 2022, etc etc xo
Hereford also bends over backwards throughout the book to give credit to the people who wrote or inspired most of the recipes—other chefs, cooks at his restaurant, etc. Attribution is such a sticky question in kitchens and cookbooks, but I’d like to see more chefs take this route. You’d almost think he hadn’t come up with half of this food, except his Cheeto dust fingerprints are all over it all.