Louisville’s Hot Brown

The Hot Brown is a pretty well known sandwich by now. Originating from the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky (hence the unappetizing name), it’s been featured in various media: TV shows such as Man Vs. Food, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, The Mind of a Chef, and the PBS Documentary Sandwiches That You Will Like (the Hot Brown segment is about 30 minutes in) took this hyper-local sandwich and spread its fame across the country, though I still think you’d be hard-pressed to find one outside Kentucky.

My wife and I had our first Hot Brown at the Brown Hotel in Louisville many years ago when we attended her friend’s wedding there. To be honest, at the time I wasn’t terribly impressed with it, but I’ve been looking forward to this chance to try one again. In fact, I jumped the gun a bit and had one back in April when I stopped and had lunch with Sandwich Tribunal contributor (and internet celebrity) Greg at the Highlands Tap Room. It’s a great little bar, though it was tough to get to that day with the roads around it closed for the Derby Festival Marathon.

It looks a little jumbled, but the Hot Brown is actually pretty well designed to do one thing: deliver umami. Back when the Hot Brown was invented in 1926, the word “umami” probably wasn’t being thrown around too much in a hotel kitchen in Louisville, Kentucky–they’d have called it “savory”–and the true aim of this dish was to soak up alcohol for the people who’d been drinking and dancing all night in the hotel ballroom. Regardless, the pieces are (mostly) all there. Turkey may not be particularly high in umami (though it’s present in all meat to one degree or another), but the pecorino-based cheese sauce, the bacon, and the tomatoes all deliver plenty of it. If you added some mushrooms and fish sauce, the dish would be a high-yield umami bomb.

Notice that I said “the dish,” though, not “the sandwich.” This is, as you can see, a saucy open-faced mess, which is usually controversial among sandwich thinkers. We’re “not particularly critical” here at the Tribunal, though; we just like eating delicious things, and this one is on our list, so I’ll forge ahead.

The first thing to do if you’re making this sandwich is to get yourself a couple of plates that can take some time under a broiler. You don’t want to be following along, get to that part, and have to rethink your strategy. You don’t want to microwave this sandwich, and you really don’t want to burn a couple of layers off the edges of your supposedly oven-safe Corelle plates. The heat from the broiler is more intense than standard oven use and you should have some serious ceramic or even metal plates handy that can take the extra heat. Get that straight now.

The second thing you want to do if you’re making this sandwich is basically everything else. You’ve got a lot of elements coming together and you need to have it all ready right around the same time. I started by roasting a turkey breast. I could have waited until the end of November and had all the turkey I wanted to make this with, but I have other plans for that leftover turkey. You can get a boneless turkey breast that’s still real meat, not cobbled-together bits of meat, and roast it up beautifully in a bit over an hour.

While it’s roasting, fry up some nice thick-cut bacon, whatever your favorite kind is, and get started on that sauce! I found this recipe for an authentic Brown Hotel-style Hot Brown (which, strangely, differs slightly from this recipe published on the Brown Hotel’s actual website, but not enough to make much of a difference). I wasn’t too sure on the use of pecorino Romano though–I’m a sharp Cheddar kind of guy–and the aforementioned Bobby Flay uses a combination of white cheddar and Parmesan in his version of the sauce, so I decided to try it both ways. I made a double batch of the base béchamel from the recipe above, added pecorino Romano to one half and white cheddar/Parmesan to the other half.

If you’re going to make yourself eat two Hot Brown sandwiches, I do recommend having a family around you to help out. Either to help you eat it, or to dial 911 for you afterwards.

The basic construction of the sandwich goes like this: toast some bread. Some people say cut off the crusts–I am not a fan of cutting crusts off bread. Some people say don’t toast it, as the time under the broiler will toast it for you. If that bread is covered in meat, cheese, and tomatoes, it’s not going to get very crisp under the broiler. I say toast it.

Now slice up some of that turkey and put it on the bread. Many of the preparations I’ve seen have the bread kind of around the periphery and the turkey in the middle (see my Highlands Tap Room photo above, or any of the videos I linked in the first paragraph). I’m pretty sure that if I’m going to call this thing a sandwich then the meat should be touching the bread. I put it on top. Many people will pan-fry the turkey to heat it up, and the additional character the browning gives it would be delicious, but this breast meat was still hot from the oven and didn’t need it.

Now pour some of that mornay sauce over. Oooooooh yeah.

Surround that mound with sliced tomatoes (I like to salt them a little, I find it helps draw out their flavor) and sprinkle some of your cheese of choice on top.

Now put that plate under the broiler for a few minutes, long enough to get it a little brown and bubbly.

Place 2 slices of bacon across the top

Then sprinkle some paprika and chopped fresh parsley over the dish to garnish. Voila!

Now, that’s the version with the pecorino Romano. Let’s take a look at white cheddar and Parmesan.

Look. Both these sandwiches are delicious. But that old boy at the Brown Hotel back in the day knew what he was doing. The cheddar just seems so ordinary compared to the funky, salty pecorino. That is a high-powered cheese and no mistake. A cheddar, even a very sharp cheddar aged long enough to start developing that crystalline thing that older cheddars get, seems to lack character next to such a distinctive cheese (though I’ve had some older cheddars that would have stood their ground. I don’t think I’d use them in a sauce though).

While it’s under the broiler, the tomatoes will express some moisture, and some oil may separate from the cheese in the mornay sauce, causing some pooling around the plate. All the more reason then to pre-toast your bread. The toasted bakery bread I used held up very well to all the moisture, retaining texture and creating a great platform for scooping up sauce.

So look, this ought to go without saying, but you just pulled this plate out of a hot oven, right? You are going to want to use a fork and knife here simply because of the mess factor–this is not a pick-up-and-eat type of sandwich–but watch those forearms. Delicious isn’t worth the burns.

I know I turn into a cheerleader of damn near every sandwich we try on this site, but look at that beautiful bastard. It’s got so much that’s delicious packed into it, every bite is a sensation (though that mushroom and fish sauce idea I had earlier might take this thing through the roof). Turkey may not be your favorite meat (or mine for that matter, when it comes to deli turkey) but freshly roasted and carved turkey is another matter. Bacon didn’t become the meme it is by being boring or undelicious, and tomatoes are a natural accompaniment to it. As for covering everything in a delicious homemade cheese sauce, that may be my second-favorite food maneuver (after dousing fried things in hot sauce).

I don’t recall why I didn’t care for the Hot Brown the first time I tried it–maybe it had been hyped too much? Mindy and I were going through as many of the sandwiches from the Sandwiches That You Will Like documentary as we could get our hands on at the time, and we’d had a similar disappointing experience with St. Louis’ St. Paul sandwich. Maybe it was the discomfort of the situation, far from home, stuffed into an uncomfortable suit, the newlywed husband of the groom’s ex, knowing nobody and unwilling to change that. Who knows, maybe the chef just had an off day. But Louisville is a cool town, and it’s very possible we’ll be stopping through at least once a year from now on. I will definitely take every opportunity to get to know this sandwich better.