Anatomy of a Sandwich - The BLT

By Kevin Grzyb in Food on Sep 2, 2005 6:40PM

As we’re smack, right in the middle of the great harvest of 2005 and the stores and farmer’s markets are growing ripe with bushels of gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, we thought it only right to take a close up look at one of the great sandwiches of the world: the BLT. We’ve eaten BLT’s a couple of times over the past two weeks, partially to experiment with the recipe (all for you, dear readers!) and, well, because we could. Tomatoes are ripe and plentiful and nary a day has passed without some variety of tomato on our plates and palates.

Let’s look at the basics: a BLT = Bacon Lettuce and Tomato. For the bacon our choice is thick cut, smoked bacon oven roasted. We put the strips on our broiler pan and bake in a 325 degree over for 15-20 minutes or until crispy and browned. The reason that we like the baking process is that the grease cooks off and drips through the grill, thus cutting some of the fat. We hate really greasy, fatty bacon. With the lettuce, we allow leeway; we’ve tried boston, young romaine, bibb and baby spinach. We liked the baby spinach, had it last night as a matter of fact, sacrilege? Possibly, but true, none the less. Then there is the tomato. Whatever fresh picked from the garden or heirloom variety you can get your hands on is the best tomato for your BLT. It doesn’t even matter. We love fresh tomatoes so much that it just doesn’t matter, they are that much better than the hothouse grown, flavorless, mealy excuse for tomatoes we’ll be expected to choke down all winter and spring. Last night we had some heirloom hillbilly variety a coworker brought in for us, they were sublime. We cut them thick, about a half inch slice and pile them up, after a generous dash of salt and fresh cracked pepper.

For the bread, we’ve settled in on whole wheat lightly toasted. There were experiments, some others were good, close even, like sourdough, but we’re gonna stand behind whole wheat. We like it lightly toasted because it helps to add a bit of structure to the sandwich without loosing the elasticity of the bread.

Condiments are slight, but necessary. One side of the bread gets a healthy slather of mayonnaise. Real mayonnaise, not Miracle-Whip, not light mayonnaise. There is no real reason to put light mayonnaise on a sandwich that has bacon in its name. This is the bottom slice and the tomato goes right on top of the mayo-ed slice. The oil in the mayo acts as a moisture barrier preventing the juice from the tomato from soaking into the bread and making the entire sandwich fail. Finally, we take one avocado, and mash it to a lumpy, spreadable pulp, because we can and it’s good. That goes on the other slice of bread.

See diagram for recommended assembly.

Enjoy.
Graphic and photos by author.