Braising takes forever and makes delicious tender meat. The hardest part was not devouring the braised short-ribs right out of the pot. I recommend never making this by yourself or you’ll have no one to hold you back. Also, I’d double or quadrupple the recipe: you’ll want 3rds and leftovers. They’re good enough, don’t worry!

Get shoppin and make some NOW, before winter ends!

Here’s the recipe:
Braised Short Rib Sandwiches with Pickled carmelized onions and argula

This didn’t last long:

The only thing you can’t see is the restraint:

marinated white anchovies, with soft-cooked egg, roasted onions, salsa verde and frisee
The recipe is straightforward: soft-cook an egg, toss lettuce with oil and vinegar, toast bread, roast onions and make some salsa verde. Assemble and eat! This ‘wich was easy took cook, easy to eat and if you like salty anchovies, delicious to eat (of course if you don’t like salty anchovies, what in the world are you doing making this sandwich?). This is the kind of sandwich I’d never order out but is perfect for a lazy Sunday or if you want to impress a date on a weekday. The egg gives it nice richness, while the frisee and (of course) anchovies give it salt and vinegar. Yum.

We quickly realized that we cut our bread way too thick and after toasting it became a bit challenging to eat without shredding the insides of our mouths (a la captain crunch). The bread should be about a quarter to half an inch thick. The picture quality on these isn’t very good, but don’t let that keep you from closing your eyes, visualizing the sandwich sitting there on the plate, no one’s around, go right ahead, take a little bite, one little bite won’t be noticed, you walk up and can already smell the vinegar and oil, a look over your shoulder, no one’s around, you raise it to your mouth and …

Open:

Constructed:

Constructed, again:

Short of baking the bread and smoking the ham, we cooked everything from scratch. Sure it took a while, but anything else might taint the beautiful potential of the axis of pork. We grabbed: challah rolls, fresh pork cutlets, black forest smoked ham, potatoes, gruyere and some eggs. In short: warm the oil, fry the potatos, pound and bread the pork, fry the pork, fry the french fries, melt the cheese, construct the sandwich and worship the swine. [Update, 8/2/09: Somehow in my porky-delusion I forgot to mention that we fried everything in a mixture of duck-fat and oil! Why not, right?]

Mr Bourdain wasn’t kidding. This sandwich is mind-blowing! The roll starts the taste off soft and slightly eggy, the smoked ham gives a nice cool texture and then the cutlet provides crunch and heft, the bacon more crunch and butter and the egg and gruyere give it a wonderful finish. I couldn’t talk much during the sandwich other than to mumble incoherently while my brain tried to unravel the explosion of flavors and the synapses untangled. Yes, it’s that good.

On the show, the chef said a bartender made it one night to sober a few people up. I had an extra sandwich from the night before and set out to see how well it works. After a few vodka tonics, I can report that there is no finer sobering-food than the three little pigs. Everything about this sandwich just soaks up the booze and leaves you ready to rub your eyes, scrub up and walk into the operating room with a clear head and a steady hand. Okay, maybe not THAT good, but it’s pretty incredible. (Plus it tastes like magic.)

I can’t (and won’t) say that it’s the best sandwich in America, but it’s definitly on the short-list! Go forth and celebrate the 3 little pigs!

Nearly Finished:

Awaiting an Egg:

In Process

Plated:

It sounds pretty good though I don’t really like fruit in my food. I didn’t win but I had a great time in the SANDWICHLab cooking up a few batches of grilled cheese. My entry was taleggio, sauteed crimini mushrooms and spicy russian dressing on thinly sliced ciabatta, paired with a Storm King stout. They were very tasty, but a touch too salty. Along the way I experimented with prosciutto, sauteed morels and sauteed black trumpet mushrooms. The crimini’s flavor came out the strongest against the cheese while the prosciutto was too salty.

They tasted about as good as they looked. If you aren’t hungry after looking at these, you must be very lactose-intolerant:

We made a handful of delicious meatball sandwiches and along the way we discovered a few things.

• Meatball Mystery 1: Meatballs are not very hard to make. These took about an hour, which is well worth it for this level of delicious (a lot).
• Meatball Mystery 2: Homemade meatballs taste much better than the deli variety. They are more tender inside, they are a little smaller (in this case) and most importantly, they haven’t been sitting around feeling lonely all day. When your meatballs feel good, you feel good. You can heat them up with the sauce and avoid the wild temperature fluctuation that sometimes happen at delis.
• Meatball Mystery 3: They are much easier to eat when you don’t have excess sauce. By serving just the right amount of sauce, you can avoid soaking the bread all the way through and worrying that it’ll fall apart in your hands. I know I’m not the only meatball sub eater who has day-nightmares about stuffing meatballs into my mouth with my hands becuase the bread has disintegrated under too much hot tomato sauce. It’s horrible! Serve some sauce in the sandwich and in a little bowl on the side in case you want more half-wich through.

Meatball Sandwich Recipe (adapted from Cooks Illustrated “Classic Spaghetti and Meatballs “, published Jan 1 1998):

Meatballs
2 slices white sandwich bread (crusts discarded), torn into small cubes
1/2 cup buttermilk or 6 tablespoons plain yogurt thinned with 2 tablespoons sweet milk
3/4 pound ground beef chuck ( or 1 pound if omitting ground pork below)
1/4 pound ground pork (to be mixed with ground chuck)
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley leaves
1 large egg yolk
1 small clove garlic , minced (1 teaspoon)
3/4 teaspoon table salt
Ground black pepper
vegetable oil for pan-frying (about 1 1/4 cups)
Instructions:
1) Mix bread parts and buttermilk in a bowl and mix with a fork until pasty.
2) Mix all ingredients in another bowl (including the result of step 1). Mix lightly with your hands. Use a spoon to grab the mixture and roll 1.5″ diameter balls in your hands.
3) In a large saucepan, add vegetable oil until it’s about 1/4″ deep. Heat until it sizzles when meatballs are added. Brown meatballs on all sides. When finished, set them aside on paper towels. Don’t let the oil smoke or it’s too hot.

Simple Tomato Sauce
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 can (28 ounces) crushed tomatoes
1 tablespoon minced fresh basil leaves
Table salt and ground black pepper
Instructions:
1) Throw out the oil in the meatball pan, saving the bits on the bottom.
2) Brown the garlic in new olive oil, in the same pan.
3) Add all other ingredients. Simmer until sauce thickens, about 12 minutes.

Sandwiches:
1 loaf soft italian bread
Parmesan cheese, sliced and grated
basil, chopped

1) Add the cold meatballs back to the sauce to warm up.
2) Cut the bread into 8-9″ sections and add small slices of Parmesan cheese.
3) Toast the bread to melt the cheese.
4) Add 3-4 meatballs per sandwich and spoon a light portion of sauce ontop. Sprinkle on top with basil and grated Parmesan cheese.
5) Enjoy!

Raw, delicious meatballs:

Sizzle:

Heating with sauce:

The completed sub:

Laid open:

It looks bigger from this angle:

The SANDWICHLab set out to build a bridge to these sandwich refugees and bring them home safe and sound: a sandwich that didn’t offend their meat-less sensibilities, but was good enough to get excited about. Also, it couldn’t be a salad dumped into a roll/bun/wrap. Those sandwiches are lame (yes, I’m talking to you “chicken cesear wrap”, your days in this town are numbered). What we arrived at was a fresh, tasty, filling little number called the “Balsamic GASP” (Goat cheese, Arugula, Shallots and Portobellos). It’s delicious.

A few post-lab tips:
- Scoop some of the inside of the roll out. It’ll help keep the bread in check and let the other ingredients shine.
- Don’t burn the shallots. If they are cooking too fast, take them off and add them to the mushrooms when they’re nearly done.
- This sandwich is more filling that it sounds.

Balsamic GASP:

Ingredients

• 2 shallots
• Fresh arugula
• Goat cheese
• 2 Portobello caps, cleaned
• 1 roll of fresh French bread
• Balsamic vinaigrette (red vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, tarragon)

Directions

1. Peel and dice the shallots. Sautee on medium heat in an olive oil-ed pan.
2. Before they brown all the way, add the portobello caps. Drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Cover.
3. While the mushrooms cook, slice the bread into two sandwich-sized portions, about 8 inches long. Slice lengthwise, almost to the opposite crust.
4. When the mushrooms are tender throughout, remove from head and cut into half inch slices. Spread these evenly inside the sandwich. Cover with browned shallots.
5. Spread a generous amount of goat cheese to the top inside surface. The cheese will crumble and melt into the ingredients, doubling the delicious.
6. Add a friendly helping of arugula on top of the portobello slices and drizzle the entire sandwich with a little balsamic dressing. Don’t use too much!
7. Eat your sandwiches immediately! Notice the cheese melting and dancing with the portobello! The balsamic and the arugula sing together!

Welcome

back

vegetarians!

Ingredients:
two (2) Kit-Kat Bunny Ears Bars
Six (6) Candy Corn
Three (3) Starburst Brand fruit chews
Two (2) Twizzler Brand Strawberry Licorice Ropes
Two (2) Peeps Brand Marshmallows
One (1) Cadbury Brand Creme Easter Egg

Open up one of the Kit-Kat bars and lay it down on a clean surface space smooth side up. Immediately top it with a Peep, preferably either a lily, bunny, or other flat shaped Peep. Warm up the Peeps in a microwave to make them more pliable and to act as an adhesive.

Lay candy corns next to each other, inverting each alternate candy corn.

After halving the Cadbury creme egg, place one half face down and work as flat as possible.

Top with three Starbursts. I prefer Baja California Starbursts.

Add the other half of the the Cadbury Creme egg face down to secure the Starbursts.

Add on the other Peep after being heated.

Halve the twizzlers.

Top with Twizzlers and the other Kit-Kat.

Revel in it’s glory, for he is risen.

CANDY!

This sandwich is delicious. It has a great balance of crusty bread
in the form of Kit-Kats, gooey ingredients, Peeps and Cadbury Creme
Eggs, and a wonderful fruity surprise from the Starbursts and
Twizzlers. Of course this sandwich is open to personal
interpretation and tastes. Enjoy.

This recipe comes from the incredibly in-depth book, Beautiful Breads and Fabulous Fillings: The Best Sandwiches in America (Amazon link), by Margaux Sky. The book has great recipes and great photos, but horrible cooking instructions. It’s one of the few sandwich books I’ve read that the writer’s love for sandwiches seeps through each and every page, like the way marinara sauce leaks through the bread of a meatball sub, even though you ate as fast as you could. Each sandwich recipe in the book starts with a reference to the correct bread to use and includes directions to make your own mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup. That’s what I call thorough! Simply Sandwiches wants to make air-sandwiches (“high-five”) with you, Margaux Sky!

Sky scopes open-faced eggplant parm as:

• butter
• sliced eggplant, peeled
• flour
• shredded Parmesan cheese
• marinara sauce (home made, with book recipe)
• French bread (home made, with book recipe)

Making the sandwiches themselves was relatively simple: pat the flour on the eggplant and fry in boiling butter. Cover in cheese, melt and put on buttered bread topped with marinara sauce. The long haul was making the bread, as always. The bread is sweet, delicious and chewy. The marina sauce was a bit too sweet (I forgot to add the red wine), but the sandwiches turned out tasty.

Naturally, you can substitute a soft Italian hero and canned marinara sauce, if you’re LAZY.

Sweet, lumpy ‘wich foundation:

Eggplant Parm 1: Like an incredible robot-person sent from the future to save you

Eggplant Parm 2: I’ll be back (for leftovers)

To welcome in the new laboratory, I’ve decided to start with the basics: grilled cheese.

I looked in the sandwichbooks on my shelf and none of them even bother to include this staple! I was horrified, so I googled “ultimate grilled cheese” and found this thorough recipe for grilled cheese with sour cream bread. What was supposed to be a quick bread-making session turned into a half-day long I’m-hungry-and-can’t-wait-for-the-bread-to-rise journey. The net effect was that my taste buds were primed and ready for crunchy, cheesy action. Everyone says cheddar is the best for grilled cheese. I say, “perhaps, but let’s find out!” And with that set out to test 3 cheeses: Baby Swiss, NY Sharp Cheddar and Chile Pepper Jack (and a blend of all 3). All delicious, but do they fit the grilled cheese mold?

No.

The swiss tasted too tangy, the jack too peppery and the cheddar absolutely delicious. Turns out cheddar is the best. And testing new grilled cheeses is fun, tasty and filling.

Clockwise from the top: Chile Pepper Jack, NY Sharp Cheddar, Baby Swiss

The Bread: The sour cream bread came out a little short, and very crumbly. It needs to be cooled completely and cut into THIN slices. The cheese and bread join forces as the cheese seeps into the crumbly structure.

The Sandwiches: Pan fried in plenty of butter until golden brown and crispy. Be sure to keep the heat low enough, or cover the pan, so the cheese melts.

Tasting Bites: Each type of cheese sandwich was sliced up for everyone to taste. Why don’t people serve these slices alongside pigs-in-blankets?

The Vanishing Act: The final three slices. I miss you, grilled cheese!