Thanks Ali for pointing me in the direction of this important recipe…
These ingredients sound pretty spectacular.
I love Overthinking It. They truly raise the stakes of analysis to amazing levels. Take this post on sandwiches. It opens with a rather spectacular chart of the relationship between ingredients and preparatory skill.
They also get points for knowing about coffee.
Coffee is in the top middle. The ingredients do matter here, some, but not nearly as much as the preparation. It’s very easy to take some high-end small-batch free-trade shade-grown hand-roasted Ethiopia Harrar, and turn it into something that tastes like cat piss by messing up the brewing process. Its opposite number is breakfast cereal. This is all but impossible to screw up: your culinary experience is determined entirely by which brand of cereal you buy…
But it’s their take on sandwiches that really deserves to be considered.
The atrocity at left [above] is the “Bacon Whoopee,” available at the Carnegie Deli for a mere $22. As a bacon-delivery vector, this is superlative. As a sandwich, it is completely incompetent. A properly calibrated sandwich is all about balance. It is an exquisitely tuned chord. Allow any one element to overwhelm the others, and the sandwich is ruined. Ruined! You need to be able to taste every component. At the Carnegie Deli, this is not going to happen. This is also the problem with the sandwiches at Subway. It doesn’t really matter what you order at subway: they basically all taste like the bread, with a little crunchiness from the lettuce. (This is why when I have to eat at Subway, I just get the vegetarian sub. It tastes the same, and it’s cheaper.)
The solution… summarised.
Cheese: The slices should be very, very thin, and no more than two layers… If you want more cheese, don’t put the layers next to each other. I list cheese first because it’s the sandwich’s limiting factor.
Meat: About two to three times the size (by thickness) of your cheese layer. Thin slices are important here too: this is the one thing that the standard deli sandwich gets right. But it’s not so much because of the flavor. It’s because a thick slice of meat is hard to bite through…
Lettuce, Tomatoes, Pickles, Cucumbers, and the like: The combined [vegetable] layer, though, should be exactly the same size as the meat layer. Obviously if you’re using something very strongly flavored… you want to use less…
Condiments: Less than you think… Spread thin, using just enough to moisten the surface of both slices of bread, and let it go. Grinding a some fresh black pepper onto the bread after you apply the condiments is often a nice touch.
Bread: …firm enough to hold the sandwich together… not be so coarse as to scratch the roof of your mouth. The two slices, together, should be about the same thickness as the meat layer…
Here is Carl Sagan’s recipe for Apple Pie. Learn it, then call the guys running the Large Hadron Collider and make an order.
That title is not a typo. This is an open letter to any of you out there with a culinary bent.
Tonight I’m teaching a friend of mine to cook. He’s got fried rice and steak down pat but is looking to expand his recipe book. We’re also going to talk about the significance of the book of Acts.
Given my published (here) culinary repertoire features replica Sizzler’s Cheese Toast, toasted mars bar sandwiches, a little number I like to call “Baked Bean Ravioli Surprise”, and Butter Chicken, I need your help.
We’ll do home made pizzas next week (including dough), then a variation of my mum’s Satay recipe, then my world famous, yet to be published, Spaghetti Bolognese. After that I’m open to suggestions. We’ll have covered the major food groups – Indian, Italian and Thai. What’s left?
Tonight we’re doing Butter Chicken. Feel free to give me a list of “must haves” for any single guy’s recipe book.
Did you know that you can bake biscuits in your car? Me neither.
It’s summer in the US so the US Lifehacker is featuring great tips for "surviving the heat".
Here’s a car cookie recipe (if you don’t just want to buy pre-mixed cookie dough)… here’s the original source of this baked goodness.
Car-Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, soft
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg
2/3 cup mini chocolate chips
It’s winter. Winter in our house means soup. Soup needs bread. The best bread for soup is Sizzler’s Cheese Toast. The best cheese toast is the stuff you make at home. Here’s a handy guide to making Sizzler’s Cheese Toast at home.
I was a Sizzler employee for some 16 months and gleaned some little bits and pieces of information that will make emulating the trademark toast possible (though it’s never quite as good).
I took these photos with my iPhone so they’re a bit grainy.
Ingredients
Directions
I need to try this while it’s still summer. Frozen iced coffee. On a stick. I would think the Vietnamese filter is negotiable. Main ingredients – coffee and condensed milk. Sounds good.
I thought I had reached some sort of bad food nirvana when I posted my favourite bad recipes back in 2006 – Including the simultaneously much loved and much maligned “Toasted Mars Bar Sandwich”… seriously, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
But I’ve been outdone. With this. A hot dog covered in chips on a stick. deep fried.
Heart attack on a stick
Ingredients:
One hotdog
One large russet burbank potato
Plenty of oil for deep frying
For the batter:
100gms of plain flour
75gms of cornmeal
1 egg
2 teaspoons of sugar
half a cup of milk
Directions are on the aforementioned site. I guess the stick is essential for the guilt induced bulimia.