Simply Sandwiches

In my constant quest for the bleeding edge of sandwich excellence and progress I found the Sandwich Project. (Yes, it’s from the UK, no it’s not a pun on the town Sandwich.) It’s a site dedicated to collecting and rating user-submitted sandwich recipes. According to the ‘about’ page it started in 2002 and has a few thousand recipes submitted. Like a lot of boom websites, it started smaller and is still growing into it’s bigger shoes ( evidenced by the coolsiteoftheday.com link and the strange email to submit photos to).

I can’t vouch for the quality of the sandwiches and a cursory glance shows a lot of really disgusting ones: The random sandwich that appeared on the homepage was ‘Cold Baked Beans and Mayonnaise’ served on white bread; 3 stars after 31 votes. The second random sandwich (“Jonny’s Ultimate”) was made with meatballs, salsa, bacon, Doritos, chili peppers, BBQ sauce, pepperoni, marinara sauce, and some garlic marinated chicken, on any type of bread. Does Jonny want to obliterate his heart and tastebuds?.

The ingredient search is useful for identifying complementary ingredients, though given the low quality of the sandwiches, I’d read through a lot of the recipes before making a good connection. For example, searching for avocado, yields 9 of 30 avocado sandwiches that include bacon and 11 of 30 that include tomatoes. Surprising? Not really. Try this one: Liver sandwiches.

This type of librarian cataloging pursuit is noble — if only there was a way to filter out duplicate recipes and find a better method of rating them than stars. Even nasty sandwiches seem to have 3 stars. [Aside: one of the reasons I've avoided the star scheme on this site is that it too quickly glosses over the subtleties of sandwiches. They are meant to be savored and not simply rated with stars.]