Salad Sandwich

A recipe development story, recipe included

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Yes.

Hello Comrades!

If we want to track back to this recipe’s origin story, salad sandwich probably started the first time I used a torn piece of bread to sop up vinaigrette from a big salad bowl. Eating bread to the side of a salad feels pretty normal, after all. As long as you’re there, salad bruschetta is just two hand movements away. I survived my college cafeteria era by making an unknown quantity of chickpea salads with romaine and feta from the cold buffet, dressing it with red wine vinegar and olive oil, and shoving it into a pita. Salad sandwich. In the many years since, I’ve piled lots of lettuce leaves between two slices of buttered bread and gone about my business, and I really love the experience of biting through a thick layer of greens.

For Book Three (which is due in … 11 days), Salad Sandwich is in the chapter dedicated to memory, childhood, and the recipes I’ve made and eaten dozens of time and will never tire of. You’d think I’d nail development straight out of the gates. But I did not.

Instead, I embarked on the rollercoaster ride we call the Four Stages of Recipe Development: Excitement; Confusion; Despair, Breakthrough.

Let’s assume Excitement took place many moons ago when I put this recipe title into my book outline. Confusion started as soon as I started working on it.

Totally underwhelming.

My first attempt was a deconstructed arugula salad with olive oil and Parm on a toasted sesame baguette. Instead of just dressing the greens, I made a paste out of grated parm, raw garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice and used that as my schmear. I tossed some arugula with lemon juice and seasoned it with salt and piled that on top. It was fine? But it felt pointless: I couldn’t justify why you should make that paste. Too much work for too little payoff.

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Between rounds one and two, I dreamed up an anchovy butter, loaded with scallions, lemon zest, and chile flakes, that could dress the sandwich bread. This combined a bunch of references that made sense to me intellectually: my mom always buttered our sandwiches; anchovy and butter on a cracker, is one of the great snacks of all time; all of those flavors are great with bright lettuces and vinegar. I thought I had something going.

Cute idea, wrong application.

Making the butter required a mini chopper, which is annoying, but it did taste great, which was encouraging. In order to get flavor payoff in the sandwich, though, I realized I’d have to call for a quantity of butter that would be unpleasant to eat. The butter would be great added to a pan sauce for fish or scallops, but I’d overcomplicated and underdelivered with this whole detour.

Visually harmonious.

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Next, I ruminated on a mustard butter that would go onto the bread—like Dijonnaise, but with butter instead of mayo. I had a stick of butter out at room temp in the kitchen, taunting me, for days. I kept looking at it, waiting to be compelled to action. Nothing but despair, motivation in the gutter.

Then I realized I’d been focusing on the bread and butter part when I needed to spotlight on what was in the middle. My mantra going into round three was “it’s not about the butter, stupid.” The key part is the salad. Salad sandwich. Breakthrough.

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Let’s call this next experiment Round 3.5. Three interventions were made: Butter and Dijon on both sides of the bread, and cheddar came on the scene. The sandwich needed the texture, the heft, the fat, the sharp nuttiness. Salads have cheese in them for all the same reasons. I happen to be working with Cabot right now on some different recipes, but their Seriously Sharp would have been an ideal choice regardless. I also craved some sweetness to play off the vinegary mustard and bright salad dressing, and to deliver a little cheese board energy. Before layering the lettuces, I put them in a bowl and tossed them with some chopped dates, a little white distilled vinegar and salt.

I don’t have a picture of this, but my taster and I felt reallllly good about the way the little bites of sweet dates and the cheese were working together. The lettuce element though? It felt a little restrained, a little ascetic, a bit too tidy for my sandwich tastes. Time to rearrange and amplify.

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There she is!

The answer was in front of me the whole time. MAKE A SALAD, YOU DINGBAT. The lettuces in the final draft are generously dressed with a super-mustardy vinaigrette, piled on lightly toasted, thin-crusted, shamelessly buttered bread, with sharp cheddar securing the foundation. The dates were 86’d, replaced by honey in the vinaigrette. It delivers a similar flavor-balance payoff without calling for an ingredient that not everyone has all the time. I mean, I always have dates in the house, but I’m trying to be inclusive here!

The butter helps the bread from sogging out, but some drippage is good, no? With the vinaigrette pre-made, I assembled and happily ate this sandwich for lunch, dinner, and then dinner again the next day. Huge fan.

I had been working my way through a head of red leaf lettuce during development; anything with a bit of texture will work. Avoid things like baby spinach, ultra-tender butter lettuce, or baby arugula. You want crunchy ribs, lots of height! Throw some sliced radishes or slivered raw onion into the lettuces if you want. Someone DM’d me on Instagram and suggested thinly sliced apples. Totally, sure, yes!

Sandwiches are special to me, and so is salad. Hope you’ll agree that Salad Sandwich was worthy of all this careful consideration.

xoCLM

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Here’s Exactly How to Make It