Sandwich Sins

I spend so much time writing about the sorts of sandwiches that I like, and why I like them, that I was encouraged to write a post on things that I don’t like.  On popular sandwiches or sandwich constructs that I think are bad sandwich form. I have found the process of thinking about this quite difficult. There is very little that I don’t like to eat across the whole of food, let alone within specialised realm of sandwiches. Going beyond that to think about why some of these popular sandwiches are actually bad sandwiches, rather than just reflecting my personal disgust has also been hard. Here are my top four:

Baguette sandwiches

A Terrible Place

One of the things that makes a good sandwich is textural balance. Soft bread, some crunchy lettuce, a moist tomato and a thick slice of ham to provide something to get your teeth into makes a nice balance of soft, dry, wet, crunchy, chewy. Or take out the crunchy lettuce and toast the bread instead. This harmony of textures can make eating a sandwich a rich and varied experience and a joy to the consumer. Baguette sandwiches make this an impossibility.

In case you haven’t noticed, baguettes are all crust. When presented with a sliced bread sandwich, people will often leave the crusts on their plate (sometimes for fear of getting the curly hair that my mother promised me if I ate them). Other people will cut the crusts off, or you can now buy crust-free bread. I think that this is because the crust is generally accepted as the toughest and least flavoursome part of a sandwich.

Why then would you take that oft-discarded morsel and use it as the basis for a whole sandwich? Don’t get me wrong, I like a crusty ciabatta burger bun occasionally, I enjoy the odd dinner roll, and I love garlic baguettes, but there is something about baguette crust that is particularly un-suited to sandwiches. It tends to be very thick, sharp so it attacks the roof of your mouth, and then endlessly chewy. I have experienced the most intense jaw-ache whilst trying to eat a baguette sandwich. And it’s because it’s impossible to break up the crust-fest. Once presented with a baguette sandwich, there is no way to slice it or attack it that does not involve taking 360 degrees of crust with every bite. I would much rather take out all of the filling, slice the baguette, and make a little impromptu crostini. Unfortunately this is not acceptable behaviour in polite company.

Steak Sandwiches

Worst nightmare

I have a similar problem with steak sandwiches, particularly cold steak sandwiches. Steak is difficult to cut through cleanly in one bite, especially rare steak, and doubly so for cold, rare steak. Unless you only dine on prime cuts of fillet (or filet mignon in Canada) then you’re in for a toothsome time. My experience with cold steak sandwiches is of one big, hearty bite, fantastic flavours, and then a chewing conundrum. Do I keep trying to cut cleanly through this meat so that I can pull away from this sandwich with a cleanly captured bite? Or do I cut my losses and just try and rip it whilst I pull away? Invariably the former results in a long bout of fruitless chewing and attempts to isolate individual meat fibres to bite through and release my mouthful. The latter usually takes most of the sandwich filling with it, leading to all of the steak from the sandwich hanging down your face, rather than nestled comfortably between the slices of bread where it belongs. There is a reason that you get a special knife when you order a ribeye at your local restaurant, and I’m afraid my teeth just aren’t serrated. The cold steak sandwich is a bad way to use leftover steak.

Mushroom and asparagus on bread

Open-faced sandwiches.

Enough said.

No but really, the contradiction within the phrase says it all. It starts with a basic misunderstanding of what the sandwich is, and ends with a pretentious name is wildly inaccurate. 

When the term ‘sandwich’ came into popular use, it was because John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich wanted meat between two slices of bread. And there wasn’t a name for that at the time. It was the perfect food - he could eat it with one hand whilst playing cribbage and not get his cards dirty. None of these things are true of the open-faced sandwich. You can’t eat it with one hand unless you want to make a mess, it doesn’t involve two slices of bread and there is already a name for it – ‘on bread’ or ‘on toast’ or even ‘crostini’ or ‘bruschetta’ if you’re feeling continental.

Let me give you a little of the history of the open-faced sandwich (by history I mean “what Wikipedia says” so appropriate scepticism applies):

“During the Middle Ages, thick slabs of coarse and usually stale bread, called "trenchers", were used as plates. After a meal, the food-soaked trencher was fed to a dog, less fortunate beggars, or eaten by the diner. Trenchers were as much the harbingers of open-face sandwiches as they were of disposable dishware.”

Fed to the dogs and beggars – is that what you want for dinner? And it has the audacity to claim kinship with the 4^th Earl of Sandwich? Ridiculous.

Finally, something that I know will upset people:

Veal Parmesan Sandwiches. 

Or, more broadly, and breaded sandwich filling. By that I mean wienerschnitzel, breaded aubergine, even fish fingers.

I know that veal parmesan sandwiches are very popular in Toronto. A guy that I work with has tried them all over the city and can rattle off his top 5 on demand, and tell you what is different about each one. And I agree to some extent. The combination of flavours is fantastic and there area wide variety of approaches to this Italian-Canadian staple.

However, they all start with breaded, deep fried veal and this is something that I have a problem with. In many ways this comes down to texture again. I don’t see what the breading adds to the sandwich. On a plate, breaded veal would be slightly crispy on the outside and soft in the centre. A perfect contrast of textures. But in a sandwich, with sauce on it, the breading becomes mushy breadcrumbs and adds this soggy, grainy texture to the sandwich. If anything, I think the breading takes away from the sandwich. I understand that it adds some flavour, in the form of seasoning or parmesan within the crumbing but you could add these flavours without the breading. The only way that the breading would serve its textural purpose (i.e. to add crunch) would be if the sandwich was completely dry. And that wouldn’t be nice either.

It also seems unnecessarily fatty. I’m not a person who shies away from fatty food, or eats low fat alternatives in general, but if there is NO TASTE DIFFERENCE between a higher fat and a lower fat option (example: baked salted tortilla chips) I will take the lower fat option. In this case, I think that pan frying the veal actually makes more sense texturally and it’s lower fat. Win-win.

Bread within bread

The other problem that I have is that it’s already in bread because it’s in a sandwich (unless it’s open faced obviously) – why do you need extra bread? And why can’t the bread of the sandwich serve the purpose of the veal breading? It can be crunchy, it can take on flavours, you can even deep fry it if you want to. Bread within bread seems like an odd redundancy.

Three out of four of these complaints are related to texture and I realise that texture is very important to me – perhaps more so than to others. As someone who has no strong dislikes of any food, I think it only natural that my dislikes point in a textural direction. A recent poll of my friends’ sandwich complaints yielded quite a mixed set of results, with some denouncing specific ingredients, some questioning textures, and one pointing to the ordering of the ingredients within the sandwich as the most important issue. Whilst there is no ultimate decree about what makes a sandwich good or bad, I would like to think that my complaints are something that you can identify with and might influence your sandwich choices in the future

JPD 

Sandwich Society

Now that I live in Canada, one thing that I really miss about England is the culture of ready-to-eat food. Ready-to-eat food is available at every turn and at every price point in England. It ranges from the £1 likely-to-give-you-stomach-problems prawn sandwich found at a petrol station, to the positively gourmet offerings available at specialised ready-to-eat vendors like Marks and Spencer's Simply Food or, the relatively new, Eat. There you can find sandwiches, salads, wraps, soups, pies, desserts and more, all packaged up and ready to pick off the shelf, pay for and enjoy immediately. Frequent visitors to London will quickly realise that the cheapest way to get a good meal is by visiting one of the many branches of Pret a Manger (which literally translates as "Ready to Eat") for a freshly made sandwich, some homemade soup, a packet of vegatable crisps and a sparkling grape and elderflower juice for less than £10. I have dreams about their all-day breakfast sandwich dipped in chorizo and butterbean soup.

Consider Greggs - purveyors of sweet and savoury pastries, and pre-packaged sandwiches. This bakery chain currently has 1400 outlets in the UK and plans to build 600 more. They had 2009 revenue of £658 million, whilst most items in the store sell for less than £2 (two sausage rolls for a £1 at some locations in the North-West). With twice as many outlets as Starbucks, and 200 more than McDonalds, Greggs has truly conquered the UK high street with its cheap ready-to-eat food (interesting BBC article with more information here).

That is not to say that ready-to-eat food is absent from Toronto. You can find a smattering of sandwiches at your local Second Cup, and the occasional Jamaican beef patty at the local 7Eleven. However, what little ready-to-eat food there is tends to be extremely overpriced, under-satisfying, and of quite a low standard. As a contrast - Starbucks in England devotes about as much space to ready-to-eat savoury food as Starbucks in Toronto does to pastries, muffins, and all of those sweet treats that everyone enjoys for breakfast. And, as for quality, Pret a Manger makes all of their sandwiches on-site every day, using fresh, natural ingredients with no preservatives. Anything that is not sold on the day that it's made is donated to a local shelter for the homeless.

It seems that there are no dedicated ready-to-eat vendors of the same ilk as Greggs or Eat in Toronto. The only thing that seems to come close, in terms of multiple/nationwide outlets and convenience of food, is fast-food. McDonalds, KFC, Wendy's; these are the places that people go to eat quickly and to order from a pre-set menu. And even then there are differences as food is ordered and received rather than picked from a shelf, and it can be personalised whilst ordering (e.g. no pickles) resulting in an order that is made just for you. The basis of ready-to-eat food in the UK is that you get whatever is in the packet and the only way to change that is by picking things out while you eat. Or choosing something different.

It is also worth noting that there are much fewer traditional fast-food chains in the UK. The big two of burgers are McDonalds and Burger King, and the only chicken option is KFC. Add to that to the Canadian list of A&W, Arby's, Harvey's, Popeye's, Taco Bell (to name but a few) and the difference in the convenience food landscape becomes clear. It seems that the ready-to-eat culture in the UK has supplanted the fast food culture and growth in many ways, offering an often healthier but less customisable option at every turn.

This fascinates me - how is it that two societies that are similar in so many ways have diverged completely when it comes to one area of food? And, more importantly, where can I get a good pre-packaged sandwich? Or a piping hot sausage and bean melt with cheese that burns the tastebuds off your tongue and falls apart in your hands?

I think that it comes down to a matter of choice and a difference in expectations over how much choice an individual should/would like to have. One thing that you may not realise about English people (as a generalisation) is that they are not used to being given an unlimited number of options and many people find too many options intimidating. I worked at Subway during university and it was just starting to take off in England. It has been through a remarkable growth since that time, opening roughly 1,000 stores in the UK and Ireland between October 2005 and August 2010. But, at the time that I worked there (early 2005), a lot of people could not buy into the concept of choosing from a wide range of vegetable toppings and sauces. It was an over-facing amount of choice and many would end up with just turkey and mayonnaise with lettuce - poor value for money as any experienced Subway-goer will agree. The expansion of Subway shows that the public has become educated to this type of choice since then but it is certainly not something that comes naturally.


My sister, a highly experience eater, had a similar problem when she visited me here in Toronto and we went to Hero Burger. The list of free toppings, sauces, toppings that you pay for and the different base-burger options was too much for her to handle without preparation. She ended up with a burger in a bun with no toppings at all, much to the dismay of the person serving us who was trying to promote the varied selection of sauces in an attempt to win over a new customer. This overload of information and choice is something that I have gotten used to over time but I still find myself having that hot-faced, flustered, overwhelmed feeling on occasion which results in me giving up on the idea of lunch altogether.


There is a stereotype of English people (or at least I think there is - tell me if I'm wrong) not complaining at restaurants when an order is incorrect because they don't want to cause a fuss. This is certainly something that I am unlikely to do - the embarrassment of complaining and the resulting apologies and wait for a new meal is a lot of bother. Similarly I am unlikely to request a change to a menu item or ask for a substitution at a restaurant for the same reason. I think that too much choice seems like the same sort of fuss at times and it is that which we Brits naturally shy away from

My experience of North Americans, on the other hand, leads me to believe that limited choice would be quite a puzzling and alien experience and would not be well received. Take freshii, for example. Once you have chosen whether you want a salad, a wrap, a bowl or a soup, and you've chosen the base salad/rice/wrap/broth you have 22 free toppings and 28 premium toppings to choose from as well as 17 sauces. Each of these toppings is separated out into its own little pot in a refrigerated counter with a glass front so that you, the customer, can watch as someone scoops a pre-determined amount of each ingredient you desire into your order. Freshii is perhaps an extreme example in terms of the number of options available but how familiar is that image of the glass fronted counter with refrigerated pots of toppings? Ordering a pita, a bagel, a Subway, souvlaki, Druxy's, a hot dog (unrefrigerated), even Harvey's - they all have the same setup. This variety of choice is ingrained in food ordering culture here and that extends beyond the sandwich to substitutions at restaurants, elaborate coffee orders at Starbucks, and the popularity of Korean Grill (which seems to me like paying to cook a meal for yourself but has the benefit of choice and control).

I am sure that the ready-to-eat culture of the UK is something that Canadians and Americans could enjoy in many ways. It is ridiculously convenient, the food can be very good and the price is hard to argue with. But I have the impression that it would be more of a novelty than anything else - something to be experienced occasionally when in a rush, rather than a cornerstone of regular dining. I think that going from a situation of unlimited choice to limited choice would be much harder to come to terms with than an increase in options.

So, ready-to-eat food is perhaps not meant for North American culture. It is limiting in a way that the food culture here has developed away from. And in many ways I think that is a good thing. I love being able to get extra pickled turnip with my souvlaki, cheddar cheese instead of white cheese on my meatball Sub, and a half-sweet tazo chai latte at Starbucks. But I do miss the simplicity of picking a chicken and avocado sandwich off the shelf, knowing that each one there will taste the same, and going to the counter to simply pay for my lunch without any further choices or conversation required. 


JPD

Review: Urban Herbivore

Review: Urban Herbivore
64 Oxford Street (in Kensington Market)
Cuisine: Vegetarian lunch fare - sandwiches, salads, rice bowls.
Sandwiches: Avocado ($8.50 + tax) and celery root ($8.50 + tax)


My girlfriend and I have recently embarked upon a vegetarian Lent - self-flagellation it may be but it's certainly inspiring me to try new things. Rather than sitting in the apartment, thinking about bacon, I decided to seize this opportunity to try out Urban Herbivore. Having read a number of favourable reviews, I rushed through Kensington Market, sending be-dreadlocked health food shoppers, and cheese enthusiasts flying in a meat-deprived frenzy of excitement. 

Urban Herbivore has had a bit of a facelift since the above review was published and so the 'house-turned-eatery' feel is gone. Instead, window-walls and a few tables with bar stools make it bright and airy, but this transformation may have removed some character from the establishment as it is closer you would expect from any high street sandwich retailer than I imagined. There is a glass-fronted salad station to the right where the sandwiches are prepared, and a kitchen behind that you can peek in to to see the vegetarian magic at work. The prices have also increased from $6.49 in June 2007, to $8.50 now. This is quite a substantial price increase and, whilst I would say that the sandwiches were good value for the quality and amount received, I would be interested to know what prompted such an increase and if the sandwiches have changed at all in that time.

The menu is printed on big white boards hanging above the counter, and it makes for quite interesting reading. There are only a small number of sandwich options - perhaps 5 or 6, ranging from grilled vegetable to tofu or tempeh. Below the sandwich options there is a little passage about what they put on their sandwiches which amounts to 'this is how we make our sandwiches because we think this is the best combination of flavours. If you want it made differently, you have to let us know.' I always think that, when trying something new, you should order straight off the menu with no changes. That way you get their idea of what it should be like - not your idea - and so you have the experience that was intended when the menu was written. So, in this our philosophies are aligned, though I imagine that some people might find it a bit limiting when ordering a sandwich to be presented with something to have to alter, rather than being presented with a blank slate.

I ordered the avocado sandwich, and the celery root sandwich intending to have half of each and to save the other (obviously smaller) halves for my girlfriend. The sandwiches are assembled, dressed, squashed on a panini press, sliced diagonally and then packaged in an environmentally-friendly cardboard box - a touch that I enjoyed.

I began with the celery root sandwich. The bread was perfect. A sturdy pita, crisp from toasting, tasty and crunchy with whole grains, wholesome and the perfect vessel for a sandwich. It was coated inside with a herbed, olive tapenade which only added to the nutty flavour of the bread itself. I would really have been very happy just eating the bread - I think that much is clear. It was a large sandwich, packed with a filling of sprouted greens, spinach leaves, tomato and a generous helping of subtle and delicious celery root.  A restrained dash of salad dressing added a necessary tang to the sandwich, without overwhelming any of the other flavours, and that is quite a feat. This was a sandwich comprised of delicate flavours in equal balance so that with each bite you tasted every flavour together, and yet could pick out each one individually. Ratio of ingredients is such an important component of a good sandwich and this was just right. If I had to say something negative about this sandwich, I would say that the celery root was a bit slimy, but I think that this different texture was necessary to stop it being just another crunchy salad sandwich, and make it into something more substantial.

After ten minutes of typing notes furiously at my computer, making inappropriate noises of pleasure, and struggling against the impulse to gorge it all down in one big bite, I managed to regroup for the avocado half of my brace of vegetarian sandwiches.

I expected to enjoy the avocado sandwich more as I really love avocado but it was somewhat disappointing after the surprising triumph of the celery root. The avocado itself was perfectly ripe, rich and delicious and really starred in the sandwich (which contained a whole avocado!). However, the result of this was that it lacked balanced ratio of ingredients of earlier. The rest of the sandwich took a backseat to the avocado and so functioned more as a textural component. Also, the richness of the avocado became quickly overwhelming - I don't think I could have managed the whole sandwich simply because it was so rich and I think I would have struggled to taste the celery root sandwich had I eaten them in reverse order. There was a small amount of tangy, bruschetta-style diced tomato on the sandwich which,when encountered, really lifted the whole taste experience and cut through the richness. A more generous helping of this tomato might have transformed the whole sandwich.

These misgivings are more by comparison to the celery root sandwich than anything else. They were both excellent quality, filling, wholesome sandwiches that I would, and will, happily eat again and they illustrated the potential of meat-free sandwiches to be balanced, nutritious and delicious.


Celery root - 9/10
Avocado - 7.5/10