The ultimate sandwich

289 Pages·2015·15.88 MB·English

by  Cramby

Photography: Roland Persson
Contents
I HATE SANDWICHES…
LAYERS OF CURIOSITY
PAIN DE MIE
MARBLE RYE
SCONES AND MUFFINS
BAGUETTES
SICILIAN LOAF
STEAMED BUNS
BRIOCHE
ICE-CREAM SANDWICHES
THE SANDWICH LOVER’S NEW YORK
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘THEN CAME THE LOW CARB DIET, IN WHICH BREAD WAS THE
GREAT WHITE SATAN.’
I ALSO LOVE THEM. It happened like this. Growing up I had a
constantly ongoing conflict with my family, which in some way
might be the basis for my ambivalent attitude towards
sandwiches today. Every time my parents bought fresh bread,
they would hide it away in the cupboard, as we ‘must finish off
the old first’. Perhaps this sounded clever in theory, but the
consequence was that when the old bread was finally finished,
the new one had also turned dry and boring – resulting in us
never being able to eat fresh, tasty bread. It was a vicious circle
of bread (a croissant?) that eventually made me develop a
hatred of sandwiches. I thought they were dry and boring and
something that one would force oneself to get through, like the
culinary answer to a vocabulary test.
Of course, my prejudices towards sandwiches didn’t improve
when I moved away from home, when sandwiches became
loveless fast food that I’d scoff down in between two meetings.
I ate them from a plastic wrap, stuffed with a lump of mayo-
drenched filling and a wilted lettuce leaf that smelled like it
does in between your toes. At cafés it was almost worse; there
you’d get served tough and dry ciabatta bread with an ice-cold
lump of margarine (not even spread out), rolled-up slices of
pre-cut cheese and either a quarter of a standard tomato or a
whole small one – and then, just to make sure no one gets
offended, an inedible stalk of parsley on the top. If there’s just
one detail that really says something about our attitude towards
lunch sandwiches, it’s those quarters of vegetables that we put
on them – can we not even be bothered to slice our peppers
and tomatoes properly? Don’t we think it’s worth another thirty
seconds of preparation time to achieve a more even distribution
of vegetables? I can almost get offended when I am served a
sandwich like that. It’s like it’s saying: ‘I hate my job and
despise you for eating here.’
Then the low-carb diet came along, and bread was suddenly
Then the low-carb diet came along, and bread was suddenly
the great white Satan. TV dieticians dramatically threw
sandwiches in the bin and exclaimed: ‘I don’t call them slices of
bread, I call them slices of dead’. When we finally realised that
these people were actually raving mad, the next big blow hit
the sandwich culture: the sourdough trend.
Don’t get me wrong; I love sourdough bread. I think it’s
beautiful, tasty and a nice little hobby to have. But whereas
sandwiches are all about the whole, most of the rustic
sourdough breads are just ‘me, me, me’ all the time. It’s almost
impossible to eat them with anything else than a slice of cheese
or a dollop of marmalade. They have big holes in them so
you’re pretty much buttering the chopping board rather than
the bread; they tear your palate open and are so compact and
chewy that whichever filling you throw in them is quickly forced
into submission. The sourdough loaf is, simply put, a diva, an
individualist, while the bread required for a really good
sandwich has to be a team player.
Because, as I said, a sandwich is all about the whole – about
neither the bread nor the filling nor the condiment taking over.
They are a perfect example of solidarity. When you eat food
from a plate you can combine together a good mouthful
yourself, while in a sandwich you’ll need an absolutely perfect
balance between flavour and texture from the very beginning in
each individual bite. And this might be the reason for our
shabby sandwich culture: that we underrate the sandwich. We
think we can just throw one together with the fridge door still
open, when in fact, making a great sandwich is something of an
art form.
The first time I realised what a sandwich could really mean
was at the seafront in Nice on the French Riviera. I was
was at the seafront in Nice on the French Riviera. I was
probably six or seven years old and my parents had bought me
a caprese baguette from one of the small sandwich shops that
were everywhere. When I took the first crispy bite and felt how
the soft, freshly made mozzarella counterbalanced the acidity
and sweetness of the sun-blushed tomatoes and the bite of the
black pepper, it was as though a veil had lifted from my vision,
and at once I realised that the world was so much bigger and
more beautiful than just a dry flatbread with spreadable liver
pâté. It was as if that caprese sandwich said: ‘Hey, you, I’ve
made a sandwich that I’m very proud of – fancy a bite?’
Since then, I’ve mostly searched for, and found, my sandwich
highs when I’ve been away from my home in Sweden. Because
almost everywhere you end up in the world there are varieties
of the portable, cheap – but above all tasty – sandwich. To eat
smørrebrød and get daytime boozy in Copenhagen is one of the
finer things in life. So is eating a pastrami on rye at a deli in
New York, a croque at a café in Paris or a bao from a street stall
in Taiwan. And despite the fact we might not have much of a
lunch sandwich culture to speak of in Sweden, yet we are
excellent when it comes to good-quality ingredients and classic
food crafts like making sausage, cheese and pâtés. And perhaps
it’s from there we’ll have to move on if we want to get better at
making sandwiches. Because that’s what we want, right?
Now, I don’t want to overstate the importance of the
sandwich, but there is almost an existential dimension in a
really well composed sandwich. To dig your teeth into one of
those is what makes you start asking questions like: Why do we
so often neglect the things that actually feed us? Why can we
spend an enormous effort, and vast sums of money, on
Saturday dinner, but still accept plastic-wrapped mayonnaise
Saturday dinner, but still accept plastic-wrapped mayonnaise
bombs for weekday lunch? Why do we save the fresh bread in
order to finish off the old one first? When the answer really is,
as the musician Warren Zevon said on his deathbed: ‘Enjoy
every sandwich’.
– Jonas Cramby
LAYERS OF CURIOSITY

THIS COOKBOOK IS meant to be layered, meaning that you