sandwich

A Most Excellent BLT

You never know where you’ll learn a life-altering cooking technique. Longtime readers will know that I glean most of my food knowledge from Saturday afternoon PBS cooking shows (hat-tips to Lidia, Bridget & Julia, and Mary Ann Esposito), but today’s post is a result of following pastry chef extraordinaire Nicole Rucker on Instagram.

Nicole wears many hats: proprietor of Fat & Flour in the Grand Central Market, author of the delightful cookbook Dappled (you’ll be seeing some recipes here from it soon), and inaugural guest on my podcast, Lunch Therapy. She’s also, it turns out, a bacon whisperer.

Anatomy of a Superior Sandwich: The Captain’s Daughter at Saltie

One of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had is the Captain’s Daughter at Saltie in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s described minimally on the menu: “sardines, pickled egg, salsa verde” and yet tastes like so much more. The bread, focaccia, is fluffy and rich with olive oil. The flavors are as bold as flavors can be: fishy, bright, acidic, briny. The texture, unlike the criminally soft-on-soft sandwich I wrote about last week, is chewy (from the bread), soft (from the sardines) and crunchy (from all the vegetables). Let’s lift up the hood and see what else we can discover so maybe, just maybe, we can recreate this sandwich back in L.A.

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