Sandwiches Never Sleep
It’s been a slow November so far at Sandwich Tribunal. Our sandwiches this month are challenging, each of them a specialty of a far-off region, whether Chile’s delicious Barros Luco, or Brazil’s Bauru, or the Beef On Weck native to snowbound Buffalo. Given the sheer volume of lake effect snow that’s been dumped on Buffalo this week, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that their weck consumption has slowed down too. Additionally, I personally have been dealing with a computer issue that even my next-day, on-site warranty took a week and a half to correct. So we’ve gotten a slow start this month, as we often do, but I’m confident that even with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, we’ll accelerate in the next 10 days and get you a full round of List posts (not to mention a bunch of turkey sandwich posts, and I’m honestly really looking forward to those. None of us want to repeat ourselves I’m sure, but hey, it’s a seasonal thing and ’tis the season!)
I’ve got a couple of List posts coming yet myself, but to reassure you all that we’re still here, I thought I’d put a quickie post out there with a couple of good ones I’ve had this month. I don’t photograph and write about every sandwich I eat–I’d run out of time to eat sandwiches if I did, never mind that that’s inherently contradictory–but I’ve had a few good enough to post that I have been holding onto.
After my last List post on the Barros Luco, I heard back from the Chilean journalist who interviewed me about my piece on the Barros Jarpa. He wanted to do another article but needed photos. I made the sandwich several more times and sent him a few rounds of photos but interest seems to have fizzled. I haven’t heard back from him in almost a week. I was looking forward to my 2nd appearance in the Chilean press but I’ll have to settle for sharing one of these photos with you. I talked about perfecting this sandwich and I’m still not sure I did, but this was really good. I did have to share it with the photographer though.
a barros luco of beauty
Photo credit: Mikel Rosenthal
I’ve also been revisiting some favorites. The very first post on this site–3 months ago today actually!–was about a seasonal sandwich from J.P. Graziano called the Burrata. ‘Tis not the season for that sandwich, which features the best, ripest, freshest heirloom tomatoes along with basil and the namesake cheese, but my favorite sandwich in the city is a slightly-tweaked version of their Chicago-style Italian sub.
The Italian sub may not seem as iconic a Chicago specialty as, say, the Italian beef, or the dragged-through-the-garden style hot dog, or the Maxwell Street Polish sausage, but there is a specific style, even if it gets fudged a bit from place to place. It’s been nearly 5 years since these guys did their tour of Chicago-style Italian subs but much of the essential information there is useful. The basic Chicago-style Italian sub contains salami, mortadella, and capicola, provolone cheese, tomato/lettuce/oil/vinegar, and (optionally)(not really optional though) hot giardiniera, Chicago’s not-so-secret weapon in sandwich supremacy. The best ones come in a crusty baguette, preferably from d’Amato’s Bakery’s venerable coal-burning oven. Grease Freak, another site dedicated to Chicago-style foods, has a good gallery of Italian Sub images. It’s a Chicago thing every bit as much as, if not more than, those thick gutbomb pizzas you’ve heard about.
I often like to get my Italian subs tweaked just a bit, adding prosciutto and substituting a sharper imported provolone for the standard mild domestic usually included. And always with hot giardiniera of course. The first time I ordered one this way at J.P. Graziano, Jimmy Graziano said “That sounds awesome!” and has remembered my special order ever since. It’s a special place, full of class, and they make one hell of a sandwich. I stopped in and got one earlier this month, and I may go back today, despite the spaghetti I brought for lunch.
The Italian from J.P. Graziano, with a few tweaks
Last weekend was my son’s 17th birthday, and since he had recently expressed an interest in having spinach pie (spanakopita), something that used to be a fairly regular dish for our family but that I hadn’t cooked in some time, I tracked down my archive of a very old website of mine where I’d saved the recipe and I made it for his birthday. Since making spinach pie is a fairly involved and lengthy process, I also set out a Greek-style set of appetizers to tide people over, including cubes of feta, kalamata olives, dolmades, pita, pita chips, and a huge plate of homemade hummus. My standard thought for food on special occasions is anything worth doing is worth overdoing. As you can imagine, we had quite a bit left over.
“But none of those are sandwiches,” you might be saying to yourself, and you would be right about that. Hummus, though, makes a great ingredient for a sandwich, as most vegetarians could tell you. It’s delicious and healthy, a good source of protein and other nutrients, and its spreadability makes it a natural to swipe onto some bread. I myself am not a vegetarian, as evidenced by the delicious bacon egg and hummus sandwich I made myself for breakfast the other day.
Hummus, fried egg and bacon on toast
But even that sandwich was nothing next to this one. I scooped out some of the Spanakopita filling, scrambled it with an egg, and ate it on crisp hot ciabatta with a schmear of hummus.
Hummus and scrambled egg with spinach pie filling on ciabatta
It was a power-packed breakfast, a double-dose of protein along with the array of nutrients spinach brings. But more, it was delicious, the ciabatta’s crust oven-heated to a crisp, the soft crumb warming the hummus on contact; the spinach pie filling containing feta cheese, onion and dill, richly savory with pockets of creamy and briny flavors from the cheese. I ran out of spinach pie filling before I ran out of enthusiasm for this sandwich, and made several this week.
I hope you’re all still along for the ride. We have a lot more sandwiches to cover, so many that it’ll take us years to get through them all. The diminished number of our posts this month in no way indicates a diminished enthusiasm for our subject. You’ll be hearing from us again soon!
I like sandwiches.
I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great
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