Chasing the ideal BLT

I don’t eat enough BLTs. This is a weird thing for me to say, right now, when I’ve spent much of the past few weeks eating BLT after BLT, dozens in total. It’s true, though: the BLT is possibly the ultimate sandwich. It’s simple; it’s iconic; it’s delicious. For such a simple sandwich, though, it admits to a frustrating variability. What kind of bacon do you use? What kind of bread? The lettuce, the tomato? Condiments? Additional ingredients? The possibilities increase geometrically with each additional variable.

And as much as I’d like to spend the rest of my life eating every possible variant and comparing them for you, there are too many other great sandwiches out there. I had to set some boundaries for this. As soon as I’d posted the three sandwiches for this month, I looked up the closest BLT to my office that I could find and grabbed one for lunch to think about how to approach this. The closest I found was the BLTA from Pastoral in the French Market.

A Restaurant’s Take, Part 1: Pastoral

Pastoral’s BLTA consists of prosciutto bacon, avocado mash, arugula, tomato, and mayonnaise on a crusty baguette. It was delicious, but of course there were several problems here. Some of the problems are issues of definition. If the bacon isn’t bacon, is it a BLT? Is arugula really lettuce? (It’s not! I checked) If you add avocado, then don’t you also have to add an A to the name of the sandwich, and call it a BLTA, or a BALT, or a BLAT, or an ABLT? If not, then can’t you just add any old damn thing you want? There are people making a turkey and avocado club and calling it a BLT! I’m not in favor of that.

Add some onion (or oysters), it’s a BOLT, add an egg, it’s a BELT (this also makes it breakfasty). Whether the original name came from a newspaper columnist’s initials or not, a BLT is Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato on bread. Mayonnaise does tend to come standard but I think we can dispense with the additional initial for a simple condiment.

So in terms of this sandwich, the prosciutto is problematic, as are the arugula and avocado, just by definition. But how about flavor? Texture? The things that make a great sandwich great? Well, although I usually say that a great sandwich starts with great bread, I’m not sure that is actually the case here. This bread, though wonderful, would be far better with some cheese or butter spread on it than trying to contain these ingredients; it’s just too crusty and chewy. And though the prosciutto bacon is very tasty, it’s less fatty than the streaky bacon and thus harder, more difficult to bite through. The arugula doesn’t really bug me too much; it’s a salad green, and while it’s not technically lettuce, it’s got a lot of flavor and it’s close enough, right? The mayonnaise and tomato were fine, and frankly, I loved the avocado, whether it was canonical or not. This was a good sandwich and a decent stab at a BLT, but with problems.

A Little Help from My Friends, Part 1

So what would go into the ideal BLT? I don’t have a deep personal history with the sandwich. We had them occasionally when I was growing up but as I was well into adulthood before I learned to appreciate the value of a tomato on a sandwich, my childhood BLTs were simply bacon sandwiches.

Thus, I looked to others for some answers. I reached out to ask friends and family online about their ideal BLTs. I read newspaper articles and blog posts. The results were conflicting. Some said to use good, crusty bread. Some said the bread should be simple. Most people said the bread should be toasted, but that’s not universal either, and I have at least one chef friend who’s pretty vehemently against toasting the bread. Some people said to use nice, thick-cut bacon. Others said to use thinner bacon but more of it (I have a clear memory of reading this but cannot for the life of me find the reference anymore). Nobody seemed to have much of an opinion about the lettuce (though one person did recommend arugula), but there was one universal consensus: you needed great tomatoes (and trust me, I hate linking to John Kass more than anything–he even has to get a dig in at cyclists while he’s writing about BLTs!–but he’s got a point in this case).

And that right there is a big problem. The alphabet and the calendar have conspired against me making the best possible BLT for this post. Here in the upper midwest, we grow amazing tomatoes. Fantastic. You can be a black-thumbed knucklehead like me and grow beautiful tomatoes that would be the pride of a farmer’s market almost on accident. You’ll get crazy amounts of them too, so many that when you’re coming out the ears with salsa and sandwiches you’ll need to freeze the rest. But the catch is that your window of time for these unbelievable tomatoes is about 6 weeks in late summer. August, September. In October, they, well they don’t literally turn into pumpkins but come to think of it, that is about the time you start seeing pumpkins in stores. Regardless, December tomatoes are a joke. But December is when the BLT came up on The List so December is when I’m writing about them.

I have had some decent luck with a couple varieties of hot house tomatoes though, and not having a broad variety of heirloom tomatoes to work with does cut down on the number of variables I’ll have to deal with. For most of these sandwiches I’m using Campari tomatoes, which are small and sweet, generally firm of flesh and juicy when they’re at their best, though if you let them sit around too long they’ll turn to mush. They make a decent sandwich tomato, though larger tomatoes would be better.

I decided to start by testing the bread theory. Which would be better, a really good, crusty, chewy Italian bread that I like in just about every application? Or the standard oat bran bread that always sits next to the toaster in my kitchen waiting to become breakfast or a PB&J? I made BLTs of both, using a thick-cut, applewood-smoked bacon, romaine lettuce (my favorite), salted and peppered Campari tomatoes, and avocado mayonnaise.

Wait a minute, avocado mayonnaise?

Intermission: Cheating, A Condiment’s Story

OK, let’s back up a second. I really decided to start by seeing if I could cheat and add avocado to the sandwich without needing to add the extra A (because really, BLAT doesn’t sound very appetizing). I cut up an avocado

and whipped it up in a blender with a small bowl of my homemade mayonnaise, resulting in a thicker, greener condiment that was, um, condimenty enough not to be acronymed.

Making BLTs, Part 1: Italian bread vs. sandwich bread

I made sandwiches out of Italian bread

and out of cheap oat bran sandwich bread

I shared both of these sandwiches with my wife Mindy, who in addition to being beautiful and sweet and the light of my life is also (usually) patient enough to put up with my random obsessions, or at least likes sandwiches enough to live with this one. We were in complete agreement that the sandwich on oat bran bread was better.

A Preliminary Insight

Good bread wants your attention, see? The bread is the first thing you encounter in a sandwich, and you have to get past it to get at what’s inside. And the BLT isn’t a sandwich that features one or two strong flavors–it’s about the interplay between the bacon and the tomato and the lettuce and yes, even the avocado mayonnaise. Or regular mayonnaise. Whatever. The good bread is distracting in this sandwich.

A Little Help From My Friends, Part 2

Another distraction was the mess. Something about the way this sandwich was put together wasn’t working. The tomatoes were falling out; the lettuce was sliding around. Sometimes there’s more to a sandwich than just what you put into it; how you put it together is also important. I felt strongly that the bacon and tomato should be adjacent, perhaps irrationally, but this was based on the observation that these 2 ingredients are both the stars of this show (yes, lettuce, you’re pretty too) and are perfect complements to each other. But I wanted to make the best possible BLT so I went back to my friends and asked them about their preferred stacking order.

If anything, there was less consensus here than with the previous question. But one comment stood out very strongly as practical and helpful.

@JimTheBeerGuy Mayo is used as adhesive, so it should hold the item most likely to slide about, that is, tomatoes

— Michael Gebert (@skyfullofbacon) December 7, 2014

A Restaurant’s Take, Part 2: The Old Oak Tap

While chasing down these ideas, I didn’t want to ignore potential BLT insights from any source, so in the course of my research I also tried a BLT that Chicago Magazine named the best sandwich in Chicago in 2012. The Old Oak Tap‘s version consisted of a pile of bacon with pimiento cheese, arugula, and a fried green tomato on ciabatta bread. I wish I’d been able to like it better, but it was not well executed. The fried green tomato was a neutral lump, and the pimiento cheese turned out to be a thin orange grease that leaked from the sandwich when I picked it up. There was nothing about this sandwich that I recognized as being a BLT. It was some pretty good bread with some interesting things inside it, but basically a hot mess and a failure as a sandwich, much less a BLT. I did like the Co-Op Smokey Mole sauce on the table though; I used it with my fries. Tangentially, I also tried the #2 sandwich from that list in another recent post and let’s just say that so far, Chicago Magazine, you bat worse than a pitcher.

Making BLTs, Part 2: Getting the stacking order right

Using Mike Gebert‘s logic, my problem with the previous BLTs was having the lettuce between the tomatoes and the mayonnaise. I could solve that by putting the lettuce on bottom. Crit rightly suggested that having hot bacon in contact with the lettuce could cause wilty lettuce, but streaky bacon, even thick streaky bacon, cools off fairly rapidly so I didn’t think that would be a huge problem. Others suggested mayo on both the top and bottom slices of bread, and with the lettuce on bottom that makes sense. Avocado mayo spreads thick, though, so I stuck with using it on only one side.

One friend notably suggested an arrangement that would make this sandwich technically a BLBTBBB. I hope to live to see the new year, so I have thus far neglected to try stacking it mayo-bacon-lettuce-bacon-tomato-bacon-mayo-bacon-bacon. (Slap some fried chickens on the outside and call it the Quintuple Down) I decided on toast-lettuce-bacon-tomato-mayo-toast.

Success! This arrangement made for a sandwich that was delicious and held together long enough to be eaten. The bacon did not observably wilt the lettuce; the bacon and tomato did their magic bacon-and-tomato thing; the mayo not only held the tomatoes in place but dressed them, like oil and vinegar dresses a salad.

Another Insight

Heretical perhaps, but consider. A BLT is, maybe, a kind of a salad but in sandwich form?

Making BLTs, part 3: Different bread, lettuce options

What about other kinds of cheap bread? And what about this arugula? I made some more sandwiches, not all of them photogenic, comparing the oat bran bread I like with plain white bread and with cheap whole wheat bread. I liked the oat bran bread the best, but that’s not surprising since it’s the one of those breads that I like best in the first place. I think that maybe everybody should use whatever cheapo bread they like the best, as long as it’s simple enough to not get in the way of the chemistry going on inside.

By this time I had run out of avocado mayonnaise and had started putting regular mayo on both the top and bottom slices of bread, and damned if it wasn’t even tastier that way, giving the lettuce a bit of the salad dressing love it was missing otherwise.

Shut up about salads, the BLT is a sandwich

Alright

Making BLTs, Part 4: Is cheap bacon feasible?

Up to this time, I had been using a nice, thick-cut, applewood-smoked bacon for every sandwich. I had no complaints about the bacon, but I wondered how cheaper bacon would fare head-to-head against the fancy stuff I’d been using. Since the cheaper bacon was going to be sliced thinner, I used twice as much of it. I made and consumed these two otherwise identical sandwiches side by side.

I used arugula, with mayo on both top and bottom. I stacked the layers like usual, lettuce, then bacon, then tomato. I discovered quickly that the cheap bacon wasn’t that much thinner than the thick stuff, and since it came from a less regular part of the belly, it didn’t cook up as nice and flat either.

The cheap bacon looked to be in danger of overwhelming the sandwich, since otherwise I was using equal amounts of each ingredient. But a lot of that appearance was based on the fact that it didn’t lie as neatly in the sandwich. There was more of it, sure, but not as much more as the photos suggest. I finished assembling the sandwiches and took a bite of the thick-cut.

This was a good sandwich, but not substantially different from what I had been eating up until that point. I was still using arugula (but wishing it was romaine–I like arugula’s flavor but romaine lettuce, to me, is the perfect combination of the kind of crispness you get from iceberg lettuce but with a better, more interesting flavor), Campari tomatoes, plain homemade mayo. Then I tried the cheap bacon.

I was afraid that the bacon would overwhelm but this wasn’t bad. There was more bacon, and the texture was much more dominated by the bacon, but the bacon was thinner with a less pronounced flavor than the thick-cut. On those terms, it sort of evened out. This was recognizably a bacon sandwich, not as salad-like, and yet still a BLT.

Definitely not a salad then

Yes, OK, but that was still a valuable insight. The flavor should be balanced to incorporate the tomatoes and lettuce as equal partners with the bacon. The vegetables should be lightly dressed, like a salad. We’re getting close..

A Restaurant’s Take, Part 3: Steve’s Place

As fancy as some places get with their BLTs, at bottom it’s diner food, so I thought I’d better try the basic greasy spoon take on the sandwich before I was done. I don’t really have a “go to” greasy spoon anymore but I used to. It’s not destination dining, but a few years ago, Steve’s Place in River North was my salvation on many a hungover morning when I’d stop in for a quick breakfast burrito or a bacon egg & cheese sandwich on the way in to my nearby office. Cheap for the neighborhood, not fancy–the opposite of fancy–still, the joint had had a competent grillman and, since I’d be grabbing this BLT on the way to work, I knew they’d be open and I could probably talk them into making me a BLT during breakfast.

Sometimes things change–the girl who used to run the register every time I came in was gone, and the place apparently takes credit cards now–but thankfully, some things don’t: the same grillman was working that I remembered from three years ago when I came in regularly. I asked for a BLT and they didn’t raise an eyebrow, just asked white or wheat? I chose wheat.

This was not a great BLT. It featured a huge mass of iceberg lettuce, tiny scraps of wintery tomato and a relatively small amount of thin industrial bacon, but at least it was a BLT. Maybe even a decent one. Certainly edible, and honestly as good as I’d expected to get from Steve’s. It pushed the buttons in my brain that said BLT and if I wanted this or that aspect of it changed–more/better tomato, less/better lettuce, etc.–it was not disappointing, overall. And it came with a pickle!

Making BLTs, Part 5: No, giardiniera doesn’t make everything better

I had a couple more things I wanted to try. First off, though I had concluded that a person’s simple squishy bread of choice was the best BLT bread, I’d liked the ciabatta bread on the Old Oak Tap sandwich and I still wanted to try doing a regular BLT on one. Also, thanks to a silly conversation on Twitter, I’d developed an absurd desire to try giardiniera on a BLT. Since ciabatta was going to contain the giardiniera better than sliced bread would, it made sense to combine the two ideas.

Also, against my better judgement, I decided to try a different tomato. The tomatoes looked OK and they were bigger than the ones I’d been using, more like what you’d want on a BLT during the summer. Unfortunately, they were not as nice looking on the inside as they had been on the outside. They weren’t bad, but they were not very good either.

I made one BLT with giardiniera on the bottom bread, and one with mayonnaise there instead.

I stacked the sandwiches in the normal way. They certainly looked nice.

Mindy and our 17-year-old son and I tried these sandwiches. Mindy said, “This is not the right bread! A BLT needs squishy white bread.” I think she’s right; ciabatta is pretty good in general but not for this sandwich. And as perfect a condiment as I think giardiniera is, it is way too aggressive for a BLT. The initial bite into the sandwich started the way I expected of a BLT, with the tomato/lettuce/mayo/bacon combination, but as I chewed, the giardiniera took over, remaining in the forefront even through subsequent bites, overwhelming the balance a BLT should have.

Full disclosure: the 17 year old thought both sandwiches were great.

A Restaurant’s Take, Part 4: Johnny K’s Patio

After trying the ciabatta BLTs, I spent an afternoon brewery-hopping with a couple of friends of mine. We visited 350 Brewing and Hailstorm Brewing, both in Tinley Park; then on our way to One Trick Pony in Lansing, IL, we stopped for a bite at Johnny K’s Patio. Johnny K’s is a typical Chicago-style fast food place, with Italian Beef, Polish sausage, Gyros, sub sandwiches, etc., and the additional distinction of serving cheap beer and BBQ. Cheap beer was not our mission that day, and while my friends partook of the typical Chicago fare, I checked the menu for a BLT. I didn’t see one, but I asked at the counter if they made them anyway.

Johnny K’s BLT followed the same basic blueprint as the one I got from Steve’s Place earlier, but they were a little more generous with the tomato. They didn’t ask what kind of bread I wanted, defaulting to simple, lightly-toasted white bread. They served the sandwich with fat crinkle-cut fries and a soft drink. It was fine, nothing special, but that’s OK. It’s starting to seem like the more special you try to make a BLT, the less like a BLT it is.

Making BLTs, Part 6: Mindy’s ideal BLT

Mindy, who’d been following along with my BLTs at home, said she wanted to show me her ideal BLT. I cooked 4 pieces of thick cut bacon for her but she only used 2. She lightly toasted some white bread, spread mayo on both sides, then stacked bacon, iceberg lettuce, and a single slice of tomato, to which she added a touch of salt and pepper.

Mindy told me that she didn’t really eat any BLTs growing up but that the testing we’d done in the past few weeks had led her to believe this was how she would like one best. I told her that if she used about three to four times as much iceberg lettuce, she’d have a sandwich just like Steve’s or Johnny K’s, and showed her the pictures. “You know, I probably could use a bit more lettuce,” she said, and added some. I need to start taking Mindy to more cheap restaurants I guess.

Making BLTs, Part 6: My “ideal” BLT

I couldn’t get any more of the “good” tomatoes at this point, so I was stuck with the big Tasti-Lees. I used the paper bag trick to get one to ripen up a bit, but it was still fairly wintery. I made some more homemade mayonnaise, adding just a touch of roasted garlic. I took some of the homemade mayonnaise and made avocado mayonnaise of it. I cooked up 4 slices of thick cut bacon, toasted some oat bran bread. With my mise en place in place, I used regular mayonnaise on the bottom slice of bread, then stacked romaine lettuce, 4 slices of bacon in a single layer, 2 generous slices of tomato, which I salted and peppered liberally, and used the avocado mayonnaise on the top slice of bread. Here’s how it looked.

I’m not going to try and tell you that I had any sudden epiphanies eating this sandwich. It was a very good BLT, better than the vast majority of the dozens I’ve eaten in the past few weeks.

It was a bit on the sloppy side and the tomatoes could have been better but I think this probably is about as good a BLT as I could have made in December. Which brings us back to the beginning. BLTs are a summer sandwich, best eaten when great tomatoes are practically falling out of the sky around you. But if you can manage to find a halfway decent tomato in December, a little taste of summer is nice.

The More You Know…

So for the tl;dr crowd, here are my basic thoughts about the ideal BLT:

• Use your soft squishy bread of choice. Fancy bread will only distract.
  • Lightly toast the bread. Or don’t! I like a bit of a toast on mine.
• If you’re using good, thick bacon, you don’t need to use a whole lot, just enough for a single layer.
  • You can use cheap thin bacon and make up for it by using a bit more. You’ll be happier with the good bacon though
• I like romaine lettuce the best for its balance of texture and flavor. YMMV. Tell me what kind of lettuce you like in the comments!
• Use the absolute best, ripest tomato you possibly can without switching hemispheres.
  • Salt and pepper the tomato
• Homemade mayonnaise is about 100 times better than store bought.
  • This is more in the realm of a general observation but it is relevant to the BLT
  • Avocado mayonnaise is an extra tasty thing you can do, even though it’s kind of cheating. Shh, I won’t tell if you don’t.
• Use mayo on both the top and bottom slice of bread, and have your vegetables adjacent to the mayo.
  • Henceforth to be known as the salad dressing effect.
  • Also this means the bacon will be adjacent to the tomato, which I think is important for no discernible reason

That’s about it! When it’s done right, the BLT strikes an amazing balance between the salty, fatty bacon, the rich sweetness and acidity of a fresh tomato, and the crisp and slightly bitter lettuce, dressed with good mayonnaise and with just enough nondescript bread to hold it all together. Simplicity is key. When it just misses the mark, it’s still pretty good. When it’s too fancy, it becomes something else.