Weirdo Alert Sandwich
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This sandwich started with a craving for larb, the national dish of Laos.
Larb is a heady combination of diced protein (fish, lamb, beef, pork), fresh chiles, fish sauce, mint, scallions, shallots, and toasted rice powder. Some writers describe it as “meat salad,” which to me is like calling Bolognese sauce an unbound meatball. Not quite it.
I had excellent larb recently at Zaab Zaab, where all the desired effects were felt: salivating, sweating, heavy breathing, crunching, and going back for more. Larb might be salad-y, but it is not even slightly a sandwich. Regardless, its existence and its flavor profile sparked the idea of putting tangy, spicy, dressed steak between two slices of bread. My first attempt was tasty, but troubling. I felt like I had diminished larb by putting its signature flavors into a sandwich, and now I was pondering something that felt like a bánh mì/larb mashup.
It’s possible that a prior version of myself would have thought this was okay—“fun,” even. That (flawed) thinking is based on the idea that culinary liberties are acceptable when the starting point is admiration and enjoyment of the original version of a dish. Today, though, it felt like a sloppy co-opting that made me uneasy as a recipe developer.
I took a step back and focused on the way larb lights up your taste buds, thanks to the balance of sour, spicy, sweet, tangy, bright, and herbal components. Lots of cuisines use ingredients that deliver on a similar mix, such as agrodolce, Italy’s malleable sweet-and-sour condiment. Rather than chasing larb, I was now chasing that flavor profile.
The next version of the sandwich was built on a dressing that paired white vinegar and colatura with sugar, scallions, crushed red pepper flakes, and garlic. I wanted this liquid to be super concentrated and pungent so that the meat would soak it all up and ultimately lose itself to those other ingredients. As I tossed the warm, browned ground meat into its acidic allium bath, I was reminded of escabeche, and how that vinegar-y, onion-y mixture is the final dunk for fish or meat that’s already been cooked, rather than a marinade for raw protein.
From here, I wanted to stay in Italy, so I chose focaccia for the bread, Genovese basil for the herb, and Calabrian chile paste for the schmear. The pickles were soffritto-informed: carrot and celery, mostly, but the decision to cut the carrot into julienne was no doubt planted by bánh mì’s beautiful cross-section.
In the end, I had a sandwich that didn’t look like anything I’d made before, but was very satisfying to eat. Slightly floppy from the thin bread, but very crunchy from the quickles; spicy, mostly from the Calabrian chile paste, and sour from the after-marinade. It didn’t remind me of larb, and it wasn’t supposed to; but the beauty of larb helped me arrive somewhere. Importantly, it tasted like something I wanted to eat again, a takeaway echoed by the people who I fed it to for feedback.
As for the name, you might find issue with me for calling this a short rib sandwich when it’s a ground meat sandwich. I’m sorry for this shameless marketing ploy. At one point I thought about using thin-cut slices of short rib for the filling, but it was too chewy. I chose a ground meat blend with short rib in it. I couldn’t call it “loose meat sandwich,” because (amazingly!) that name is already taken.