Tag Archives: Reviews by Pete

Kale Sandwiches Four Ways – Made At Home

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I happen to find kale to be delightful. I recognize that it’s not for everyone, but it suits me just fine, and my diet and sandwiches are so much the richer for it. It’s not just one of those good-for-you-might-as-well-eat-it foods, but an earthy, full flavor that works well with a great number of things. Three of the sandwiches here are built to star kale, but it goes just as well in a supporting role, working behind other ingredients. It’s versatile and delicious, and what more could you want from a sandwich ingredient?

To start with, my method for all of the following was to separate the leaves from the stems, discarding the latter. The kale is blanched in boiling water for 4 minutes or so, then run under cold water until cool. You can eat it right then and there, if you prefer, or you can put it in a pan with a bit of fat, some spices, and some liquid (broth, wine, water all work) then cover it until the liquid is absorbed. That gives you a batch of kale ready to be deployed in virtually any instance.

First up, kale with hash browns and a fried egg. This went on sourdough, and is a good example of the sum of the parts being enough. Kale, hash browns and fried eggs are all delicious, and putting them together simply makes for a delicious combination. It’s not more than what you would expect, but since what you would expect is pretty stellar, there’s not much to complain about. Some hot sauce or a good dose of black pepper would also go well here, and adding onions, garlic, peppers or whatever else you like to the hash browns couldn’t hurt.

This is kale with roasted garlic, sauteed red onion, and a mustard vinaigrette. This wasn’t bad by any stretch, but it’s the runt of the litter. It’s tasty, with a nice savory profile, but it doesn’t feel like anything special. The main advantage here might be that depending on what kind of pantry one keeps, this might be the easiest one to put together at a moment’s notice, especially if you just go with straight red onions and not ones that have been cooked down.

This is ricotta cheese and kale that’s been sauteed with butter and red pepper flakes. The idea for ricotta came not from the artichoke hearts sandwich, but was simply jacked whole from a Scanwiches post from some years back, which they credit to BKLYN Larder. Regardless of its providence, it is a fantastic concept. Simple, rich and creamy, this is the best way to highlight the kale. Ricotta is flavorful but not assertive, and it forms a spectacular background with which the greens can work.

Now, Kale not need be the exclusive providence of the healthy eating crowd. There’s no reason one can’t get some fresh chorizo, fry up a sausage patty, saute the kale in the sausage fat, and pile it all on some sourdough with some caramelized onions. There’s nothing preventing that at all, and I’m happy to report that if one does just that, one ends up with an incredibly tasty sandwich. The kale is as rich and earthy as ever, and the spicy sausage cuts through that just beautifully.

There it is. Ways to celebrate a delicious green in ways from fairly-healthy to not-so-much. It’s a delicious food in and of itself, and as is so often the case, that just means it’s capable of carrying some pretty tremendous sandwiches.

Wild at Heart – Kafe K, Main St, Santa Monica, CA

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I picked this up not at the cafe itself but their farmer’s market outpost, and I must say it’s exactly the sandwich that fits with that environment. Everything involved was fresh and bright, an intermingling of flavors that carried a brightness and a vibrancy a good number of sandwiches lack. A well-baked ciabatta roll held artichoke hearts, arugula, fresh ricotta cheese and pesto. That’s a fine lineup, particularly the ricotta. Ricotta is an underused sandwich ingredient, but that’s not without cause.

The roll was well baked, giving it a pretty substantial crust. That’s the mark of a baker who knows what they’re doing, but it also means I’m going to have to give it a pretty substantial bite, and sadly that sent quite a bit of the ricotta out at the edge. This isn’t enough to get me to dislike a sandwich, it’s just a regrettable part of some sandwiches. Consider what might have happened if this establishment had gone with sliced bread, rather than a crusty roll? The pesto soaks in, the cheese soaks in, and then you’ve got a much better contained sandwich, only one you have to hasten to eat. There’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t dynamic at play here, and Kafe K elected to go with the tricky but quality ingredient, a fine choice. Besides, what kind of enthusiast would I be if I let a little sloppiness keep me from enjoying a delicious sandwich?

The Thanksgiving Leftover Sandwich – General Sandwich Discussion

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I’ve had my fair share of thanksgiving sandwiches. Not that it’s a tremendously complicated matter requiring some strict recipe, but all the same I thought it might be beneficial to consider what important considerations are involved in taking thanksgiving leftovers to the perfect sandwich.

The issue informing the entire construction is filling creep. Between the stuffing, the gravy, and the cranberry sauce, you’re dealing with a number of ingredients that are all too happy to pitch from hand to plate. No one wants to eat a limp, half-full sandwich and then have to fetch a fork to finish the job, so take some early precautions to avoid mishaps.

Firstly, use soft bread. This is important. Filling creep results when the frictional hold of your ingredients can’t bear the pressure of your bite, and the easiest way to reduce the pressure of your bite is to make sure your bread yields easily. The turkey is the toughest thing on the sandwich and whether it’s sliced or shredded there’s unlikely to be much resistance to your tooth, so once the bread gives way the whole thing should come away in a clean bite. But if you’ve got a stale or well-crusted roll containing things, good luck finding any sandwich remaining after you pull the old clamp-and-tear. Toast if if you want some crunch to things, but avoid a sturdy crust.

Personally, I like sliced bread, as seen in the Nobadeer from Jetties, pictured above. Avoid rolls like the one seen in the Thanksgiving on a Bun from The Village Bakery.

Using soft bread introduces the risk of things turning soggy, so one must compensate. A thin (and I emphasize thin) layer of mayonnaise on each piece of bread will help keep things from getting sloppy. If you don’t like mayonnaise, a thin layer of butter would have the same effect. If you don’t like either, careful sandwich construction and a haste in consumption should steer you clear of any trouble.

The third factor in filling creep involves ingredient ratios and layering technique. I can’t rightly tell you how much stuffing or dressing or anything else to put into your sandwich, but I beg you to remain sensible. Have two sandwiches if you suffer from insatiable hunger, don’t build yourself a tower that will only topple to terrible disappointment. Keep your gravy on the lesser side, my advice is to toss shredded turkey in a few spoonfuls of gravy, don’t just pour it directly on to your sandwich.

As for the stuffing and the cranberry sauce, some schools of thought put the turkey between the two, others put the two together on one side of the meat. It’s a question of aiming for one shifting layer instead of two, or instead trying to keep them apart so as to not allow them to combine their mispositioning power. I happen to think both settle about equally, so just run with whichever seems more sure in hand.

Above all, allow your layers to come in slightly as you build up. This allows the top slice of bread to bend down slightly and form a cap, allowing your hands to seal if off at the seams, keeping everything tidy as you eat. It’s a delicate trick that makes all the difference in the finished sandwich.

I think that covers most of the groundwork, but this is something that tends to vary quite a bit from person to person. I hope that your thanksgiving sandwich game plan steers you to a fine result, and I hope that if you’ve got some strong ideas you’ll share them with me.

Cemita de Carnitas – Cemitas Poblano, Pico Blvd, Los Angeles

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Cousin to the torta, the Cemita is a style of sandwich built around its namesake roll. Where the torta generally comes on a bolillo or telera roll, the cemita is sweet, with an exterior softer than your typical bolillo but tougher than your average telera. It has some chew to it, some body. The sandwich itself is fairly straightforward: avocado, onions, meat, a mild cheese, and a chipotle adobo that makes its characteristic smoke one of the more prominent notes in the sandwich. This one comes from a lunch truck that’s always parked on Pico just east of Sepulveda, but I’ve seen trucks scattered around the city with the same name.

I don’t know how much there is to be said. As a style of sandwich, it’s as tried-and-true as any classic archetype, it’s well balanced, and provided it’s assembled with fresh avocados and quality ingredients, you’re pretty much guaranteed to finish with a delicious sandwich. It’s not as widely available as the torta, but a delicious sandwich with the added zest of scarcity? Hunt one down some time, you won’t regret it.

Steak & Tabbouleh Sandwich – Made at Home

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I happened to have a bit of tabbouleh left over last week, and as I do with so many odds and ends of food, my mind turned to a sandwich. It was quality stuff, fresh and vibrant, heavy on flavor and light on filler. It seemed to me that steak was a decent base for such a thing, and a bit of yogurt with some lemon zest would further round things out. I hoped to find a cheese that would play between the richness of the beef and the herbal notes of the tabbouleh, but in my fear of overpowering cheese I undershot the mark. I wanted a cheese with just enough tang to register, and so I stayed away from anything particularly pungent or bold. Mahón cheese was what I ended up with, and it didn’t quite do the trick. A Spanish cows-milk cheese, it comes in both a semi-soft young version and an older, harder, more flavorful form, and I went with the younger. That was to the detriment of my sandwich, a pity, but it was to the benefit of my knowledge so I can’t complain too much. Overall, the sandwich rated at tasty enough, and the next one should be even better.

 

Kurobuta Pork Belly Banh Mi – Mendocino Farms, Los Angeles, CA

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This is either a pretty good sandwich or it’s a poor imitation of a bánh mì. I don’t think that’s what Mendocino Farms was going for, but as near as I can tell, that’s what they got.

You could disqualify this as a bánh mì strictly based on the fact that it doesn’t come on a baguette. Some might see that as needlessly pedantic, but you can’t expect to run around swapping in ciabatta bread and not have someone call you to account. Even ignoring the bread, though, this comes up short.

The flavor profile is off. Bánh mì come lots of different ways, but they all have a particular savory/vegetable/cilantro/heat balance to them. This sandwich doesn’t have that. The pork is incredibly rich and very, very juicy, which ends up dominating the rest of the sandwich. The sandwich is billed as having a “chili aioli,” and while I’d like to weigh that against buttery Vietnamese mayo, I couldn’t really make it out to be considered. The vegetables suffer the same fate.

But all of that that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad sandwich. The bánh mì depends heavily on balance, but not all sandwiches are so. It is the difference between an ensemble performance and a solo act, a simple difference of vision. If you take this as a pork belly sandwich, it’s delicious. The pork is front and center, and everything else plays quietly in the background, rounding out some bites but being pleasantly absent in others. It’s really high quality pork, rich and savory, and well worth its own sandwich. This is a sandwich well worth eating, but don’t mistake it for a bánh mì.

Pork Loin & Bourbon Apple Sandwich – Made At Home

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If the world seems full of boring or stupid sandwiches, the only reasonable response is to head home and make your own. That’s exactly what I did, and the result was the number you see above. That’s a layer of black bean/garlic hummus, mustard/rosemary pork loin, and bourbon-spiced apples.

I more-or-less winged the recipes here, and I encourage you to do the same. I toasted up some garlic in a dry skillet and mashed it with some black beans, thinning with a little oil until I had a proper hummus. I mixed up some mustard, rosemary and black pepper until it seemed like I had something that was fit for a pork loin, and then I coated and roasted a loin. I sliced up half an apple, threw it in a skillet with a little butter and a little brown sugar, and I finished it with some bourbon. That’s about all there was to it, and I’m happy to say that’s all it needed. I put all that between some slices of hearty wheat and the result was delightful. Mustard pairs quite well with sweet, as anyone who has heaped pickle relish onto a hot dog can tell you. The bourbon brought woody, earthy flavors to temper that sweetness, and the black beans provided a rich background for the pork and the rest of it. This one was a winner, and I suspect it won’t be the long before some more bourbon-spiced apples end up on a sandwich of mine.

I wish I were as delighted with the other sandwich I made, and had I not made the apples number I probably would have been just fine with this. But I did, and so this one immediately became an also-ran, something I’d make if I were feeling a bit lazy or simply didn’t have something better on hand. Nothing fancy here, just the same slices of rosemary/mustard pork loin, some Gruyere cheese, and some marinated artichoke hearts. The artichokes were key here, bringing acidic notes that helped cut both the pork and the cheese. This sandwich wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t the delight the other one was. It’s also a bit less involved in putting together, and as we all know there’s many a day where convenience is at the top of what we look for in a sandwich.

Welcome to the Jungle – Cheviot Farms, National Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

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I don’t remember a tremendous amount about this sandwich. I frequently take notes, but this time I happened not to, and in any event the fact that I can’t remember much about it says more than I might have written down. That’s turkey in there, and I want to say it’s peppered in some way. There’s mustard and mayo, and lettuce and tomato and avocado and sprouts. It wasn’t a bad sandwich, but it was forgettable. A sandwich called “Welcome to the Jungle” really ought to have a hell of an attitude, shouldn’t it? I mean, at the very least, shouldn’t it be interesting?

I feel like I should apologize for picking on Cheviot Farms here, because they’re hardly the only people serving forgettable sandwiches. That’s kind of the point, actually, that I’e had this sandwich 100 times at 100 different establishments, all of them more or less the same. Long-time readers will know how much I hate the mediocre; aim high and fail, aim high and succeed, aim low and succeed. All of those things are fine with me. But to just sort of aim at the middle and hey, that’s where you end up so that’s good enough, there’s no saving that. You’ve got sprouts, pile them on! Give me some earthy flavor. Give me a mustard of some color that doesn’t appear in an eight pack of crayons. You want to pepper the turkey, pepper it! Do something to make your sandwich stand out from every other sandwich.  And here I compound the sin by bothering to tell other people about it! I have pictures of 100 sandwiched about which I have absolutely nothing to say, and I try to spare the reader the tedium, but sometimes I cannot help myself. Enough. There is always another sandwich, a better one, and I hope to bring word of it soon.

Slummin’ It — Big Jack Daddy Burger, Buffalo Wild Wings

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It’s been more than six months since the last installment of Slummin’ It, and that’s because I generally don’t go out of my way to eat terrible sandwiches. Sometimes I find myself in an establishment that promises 1600 calories full of burger (and fries?), a giant stupid pile of the usual lettuce/tomato/beef, plus a helping of pulled pork and some onion rings. I like big, stupid sandwiches in an abstract sense, and occasionally in real life. Buffalo Wild Wings is the kind of crap-on-the-walls establishment that should really excel at big, stupid sandwiches, so I was genuinely looking forward to what they could muster up.

This wasn’t the worst hamburger I’ve ever eaten in my entire life, but it does join a very short list of sandwiches I wasn’t willing to finish. It was dry and bland, the patty too thin to be anything other than well done, a meager offering of two onion rings, the whole thing just a sad display, like some manner of firework spinning in sad circles on the ground, putting out clouds of smoke.

I want to be clear that I did not expect this burger to be good. I expected gusto, not quality. I wasn’t expected pulled pork that had been lovingly smoked, I was expecting something that came out of a bucket and was reheated before being drenched in sauce. I was expecting sub-TGI Friday’s food, and I was still incredibly disappointed. It was just a bad sandwich, and that’s a bottom line that’s hard to escape. Modest or grandiose, at family-run landmark establishments or the Funnest Feedbag in all Fifty States, a bad sandwich is just a bad sandwich.

The Oinkster – Colorado Blvd, Eagle Rock

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My initial experience with Eagle Rock standout The Oinkster was something of a disappointment, but also something of a fluke. My esteemed associate Bill has since returned more than once, highlighting some of the things on offer at what is, by nearly all accounts, an outstanding sandwich shop. I found myself there recently and was able to sample some of those things, and I came away as delighted as anyone. I’m not breaking any new ground in praising the Oinkster, but I do believe the sandwich shop is a special thing and it deserves to be recognized as such. I’ve discussed this before, how many places sell sandwiches but the Sandwich Shop is a different thing entirely, and a good one is to be treasured.

The above sandwich was their special of the moment, a pork patty grilled and put between bread with provolone, peppers and onions, and marinara. There’s not much to complain about there, the pork was moist and tasty, the flavor combination tried-and-true.

The Oinkster sells a burger called The Royale, and it’s piled high with chili, bacon and pastrami. So I’m not sure if I can call the above Oinkster Pastrami the intended ne plus ultra of the menu, it shares the shop’s name and is built to highlight the pastrami upon which they pride themselves, but it isn’t listed first on the menu and it doesn’t carry the same mien that featured sandwiches from other establishments do. None of that has any bearing on its quality, I suppose, and it’s quite good. It’s pastrami, cabbage, grilled onions and Gruyere cheese. That’s tasty, and it’s presented in reasonable proportion, but I think the cheese gets a bit lost. Regardless, it’s tasty as heck and a reasonable contender in a town where “best pastrami” is no small contest.