Between two buns and/or slices of bread
Wake up babe, it's sandwich season
I guess anytime is sandwich time, but something about the spring weather just screams “eat a handheld food outdoors” to me. For your reading pleasure: a quick kitchen shenanigans catch up, and then a trojan horse issue of copycat cooking, in which I will myself back to Brooklyn for a nostalgic little lunch. Some of my favorite sandwiches in Portland also make an appearance in yet another themed best bites round up.
What’s cooking
The focaccia train has left the station and is barreling out of control into the horizon. I’ve been making 1/4 sheet pans of focaccia every three or four days for the last two months. I’ve now promised at least two people I would do a proper focaccia deep dive, so I’ll be brief for now. Grapes, kimchi, shallots — name it and you’ll find it slathered in olive oil and pressed into dough. I’ve been double dipping on the Ken’s Artisan Pizza move I stole (fennel seed oil) to add flavor to a lot of these, as well as rosemary, sesame seeds, and a variety of hard cheese. Fresh out the oven we’ll eat a slice or two, but the next day, with staleness fast encroaching, a quick re-toast and sandwich assembly has been very handy.
Since I do the baking, I’m happy to outsource sandwich making to Cris, who perhaps overdoes it on the mustard but otherwise finds inventive ways to keep my rapidly deteriorating bakes palatable. Calabrian chili paste, olives, cheese, whatever cured meat is kicking around in the fridge — delicious.
I’m also reviving a Pav Bhaji obsession, which I recognize might not formally be a sandwich in the between-two-buns sense of the word, but it is delicious and involves buttered bread so I’m going to say it remains highly relevant to this needlessly narrow newsletter topic.
One can only eat so many carbs, so I’ve been counterbalancing breads and sandwiches with a lot of grapefruit salads — I think cutting citrus suprèmes has surpassed onion dicing as my favorite kitchen knife work activity.
While we’re on the off topic of not-sandwiches, I’d be remiss to not mention my attempt at cheung fun, a top tier food for me that has existed in my mind solely as a thing you cannot make at home. False! Definitely need to work on my rolling technique, but taste wise I could not be happier.
I’ve been catching up on viral NYT recipes, because I remain me. Especially love the adobo chocolate chip cookie — bay leaf infused brown butter? Genius. It has me thinking what else I could infuse… rosemary, perhaps? I have a bag of these portioned in the freezer and I’ve been baking them off two at a time for what seems like a very long while.
I guess that’s it? Shout out to a very successful KBBQ night in the the backyard that a friend led — I helped 😇! Very excited to have some perilla growing in the garden this year, although some sort of insect seems to really have a taste for it.
Now back to the main event…
🖨️🐈⬛👨🏾🍳: Vegitalian
À la Court Street Grocers
Falling in love with a cold vegetarian sandwich seems mildly out of character for me — not that I’m anti-vegetable in any capacity, but I’m historically a hot sandwich dude, and room temp vegetarian options skew overly pesto’d and humus-y, in my limited experience. Enter: The Vegitalian. I’m not even fully sure how this sandwich made it into my life, conceivably my then pescatarian roommate insisted I give it a try. As I started to scratch off other items on the iconic CSG menu, the Vegitalian only shone brighter and brighter. Beloved reader, I am not ashamed to tell you that I began to crave this sandwich like a feral dog, spending a small fortune shuttling hoagies from one corner of Brooklyn to another during stressful work from home days, a little treat for Creating Shareholder Value™. This was an obvious candidate for trying to replicate at home, especially because I’m looking for projects to improve my baking skills.
What - Vegitalian from Court Street Grocers
Menu description - roasted butternut squash1, swiss, mozzarella, pecorino, arugula, white onion, CSG hoagie spread, and mayo on a seeded hero
Home baking adjustments - using a muffuletta olive spread in lieu of CSG hoagie spread secret sauce
Attempt 1 - Some fairly mediocre looking rolls, but otherwise these were pretty good right out of the gate. I needed to space rolls a little further apart when I slid them in the oven, and of course do a better job scoring… I’m surprisingly bad at it? I ended up changing razor blades. A little bit too much cheese, not enough squash — easy enough to fix. Lastly, a little short on salt, will do a s&p sprinkle during assembly.
Attempt 2 - Bread turned out significantly prettier. Cheese : squash ratio is now perfect. With seasoning issues resolved, I also added a splash of red wine vinegar into the mix for a bit more acidity. Fantastic, I could eat this sandwich every day.
Vegitalian Hoagie
À la Court Street Grocers
This is less of a recipe and more of an assembly sketch to help my fellow ex-Brooklynite CSG lovers get by — I know you exist.
For the rolls
I followed Charlie Anderson’s recipe more or less verbatim, my Detroit-style pizza pan serving as a bread steaming lid. I used diastatic malt powder for the first time, which seems like an important baking milestone / will come in handy for my next batch of bagels. Outstanding results, for sure the most successful roll I’ve ever baked.
For two sandwiches
1 medium butternut squash
2 tsp Italian seasoning
Duke’s Mayonaise
Muffuletta olive spread (aka olive salad, ideally without black olives. Not to be confused with olive tapenade)
2 slices deli cut mozzarella cheese
2 slices deli cut swiss cheese
1/4 medium white onion, thinly sliced
A few handfuls of arugula
Pecorino cheese to finish
Directions
Preheat oven to 450°F. Peel and slice butternut squash into 1/4 inch planks. Toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning and roast for 20 minutes flipping once at the 10 minute mark, until tender but not crispy. Let cool to room temperature
Cut rolls in half lengthwise, spread mayo on both halves of bread and a tablespoon of olive spread2 on the bottom half.
Build the sandwich with two layers of butternut squash, one layer of each deli cut cheese, onions, arugula, salt and pepper to taste. Grate a generous amount of pecorino on top before closing the sandwich.
Cut in half and serve
Squash can be roasted in advance and stored in the fridge for a few days before assembling.
This turned out… shockingly well. I tend to lay more on the “here are all the things I need to do better next time” end of the spectrum, but for once I have virtually no notes. It is perhaps time that focaccia take a little rest, and not in the gluten forming way, to make room for a hoagie moment.
Best sandwich bites
I am far from the first to rave about the rock fish slider from Ruthie’s, but I am happy to be another voice in the chorus singing its praises. The wood fired rolls? Perfectly cooked fish? Some sort of cajun-adjacent seasoning? I was pescatarian for a few years so I know the proverbial fish sammie intimately, and this has got to be one of my all-time favorite renditions. Also, every variation of the potato dish I’ve had here has been 11/10. As my next wave of visitors is slowly starting to trickle in, this will be a mainstay on the 2024 PDX food tour.
If I was still living in Brooklyn enjoying CSG sandwiches, I would be trying to make a Papi Sal’s hoagie at home. These Puerto Rican x Philly sandwiches are gobsmackingly flavorful. The menu has evolved since our first time going (miss u, Tender Jawn) my favorite probably being the PDX Jawn. The sofrito mayo and guava bbq sauce slap, anything with plantains is an auto-order. I’ve been preaching about this place to everyone I know for a couple of years now. On a (seemingly less and less) rare design note, I also love their logo so much.
I’m also going to sneak Sorbu Paninoteca in here. Not only a fantastic sandwich — I had the salciccia, which featured an A+ salsa verde — but the torta de ceci with marinated eggplant is *exactly* the type of regional food that gets me out of bed. Chickpea flour at its finest, in my humble opinion.
Printed Matter
Lastly, a quick note from the cookbook library. I’ve only been to Turkey and the Wolf once, at the very height of it’s “greatest sandwich in America” arch, but it stuck with me enough to be enticed by their cookbook. I’m still working through it, but it captures a certain “do what tastes right” embracing of shortcuts and pre-mades that I think is relevant to what I have been harping on in a number of “home cooking can be both interesting and also not that serious!!!” rants.
So far I’ve made The Bellair — cranberry sauce on a sandwich makes oh so much sense to me — and am looking forward to the tomato sandwich and collard melt as we round the corner into summer.
Your favorite aspiring sandwich artist,
R
The current menu has sweet potatoes in lieu of butternut squash