From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.

He judged the sandwiches based on best photo, best reinterpretation and best overall preparation. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to submit a recipe. Fortunately I have plenty of time to drool over the photos of mouth-watering BLTs.

In his commentary, Ruhlman hits the nail on the head. Most BLTs are too wimpy, the bacon is so slight that it feels more like a veggie sandwich topped with a little sprinkling of tasty pork. Instead he slightly refines the BLT as “[...] a pork belly sandwich, garnished with L, T and mayo.” Yes! It’s a bacon steak sandwich with some incidental accessories. I can’t wait for this bit of wisdom to percolate through the food industry and BLT’s arrive on plates heavy with pork-belly.

Did anyone here enter the contest? Have any other insights on the BLT?

Ladies: skinnyboysbigsandwiches is still available! Get it started!

Gender-unidentified: genderunidentiedpeoplebigsandwiches is also still available! Go go gadget sandwich-blog!

What do you think? Is this healthy competition or non-devotees trying to ride the wave while sandwiches are popular?

• sections: my “regional correspondent” is called “unbread your city”
• taglines: “Sandwich reviews, news, interviews and recipes” vs. “Reviews, theory, discussion and news”
• language: on their about page “Unbreaded is a site about that celebrates the sandwich. You’ll find sandwich reviews, news, interviews with chefs and recipes!” vs. mine “This is a blog celebrating sandwiches.” .

How flattering! Thank god they at least had the shallow decency to change cities (Philadelphia) and design.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Are they horrible, conceptual thieves or just more sandwich lovers trying to express themselves?

More importantly, they published the recipe! Now you don’t have to pay $17/wich to discover greatness. Naturally, there are no magic ingredients, they use the same ‘ol ham, cheese and bechemel sauce recipe as everyone else (though they use all home-made ingredients, other than milk).

Other Croque Monsieur sites:
- Wikipedia’s Entry: did you know it first appeared in 1910?
- The Paupered Chef: what would you do with 10 lbs of ham?
- MidtownLunch: Tuesday is Croque Monsieur Day!

Now repeat the words “crispy outside and gooey center” 10 times!

A new site has sprung up to collect and rate sandwich recipes, aptly named We Love Sandwiches (Who can say that and not smile?). It is basically the same idea behind the Sandwich Project (covered here). The site is new and has a charmingly simple design(logo above) that is much more intuitive than the sandwich project. It’s so new that it doesn’t yet have many sandwiches (add them here), an open ended search turned up about 30 sandwiches. It looks promising, though I have no idea how it’ll get around the problems found on the sandwich project:

1. Lots of bizarre and terrible sandwiches
2. Even terrible sandwiches get decent 3-star reviews, making it hard to tell what is worth trying and what is just voted up

I hope they find a way to cull out the terrible sandwiches and get to a really good catalog of sandwiches. Good luck!

Those clever rascals at someecards have captured the sentiment well:

Be strong, there are only a few more days until you can binge eat on sandwiches! In the mean time, bust out the nutella and make some sandwiches!

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.]

Look at this horrible slide into failure. The sandwich starts out perfect and with each bite ejects the filling out the back. Argh, it hurts even to think about!

The filling slides out because the bread (or wrapping) bends and at the bend, pushes the filling outward in both directions: into your mouth where it belongs and toward the plate, where it don’t. This is often noticed when people hold the sandwich only on the edges, making a little pocket of filling just going full throttle on the runway to the plate.

There is a solution! Don’t despair, CounterForce will save you (and your sandwiches)! The answer lies in a revolutionary new technique called CounterForce: using your fingers to counter the motion of the filling by pressing down just in front of the impact zone. This keeps the filling in place and prevents the loss of delicious sandwich parts. The only twist is that this requires enough friction between the bread and filling, and within the filling if there are multiple layers. Spreads, slippery lunch meats and leaves are all prime culprits for defeating the counterforce technique.

The lesson to be learned from these poorly constructed sandwiches is that the layering order of fillings is extremely important, and if overlooked can completely ruin the sandwich experience. Some things to keep in mind when layering and eating your sandwiches:

• Select ingredients carefully! Sure a sandwich with avocado, butter and yogurt sounds good, but it’s sure to shoot the avocado’s out the back with the lack of friction. Throw some sprouts around the avocado and you’ve got a perfectly edible sandwich, with a little crunchy texture to write home about!
• Leaves: Keep the lumpy main vein in peices of lettuce, it provides great friction to a major culprit of filling slip
• Spreads: If you must apply mountains of slippery spreads (mayo, I’m talkin’ to you!), put something with lots of grip (bacon, you delicious morsel) touching it to counter the sliding.
• Don’t be shy about CounterForcing: CounterForce in a line across the sandwich to really stop the fillings.
• Don’t CounterForce only on the sides: the fillings are likely to be missed entirely and make a big torpedo waiting to be launched. Instead, counterforce in the middle of the sandwich, directly on top of the fillings.
• Use the whole surface area of your thumbs: you will get a much better grip on the bottom of the sandwich and no one will notice.
• Toasting/Pannini-ing: Toasting the sandwich often lets the ingredients get to know eachother and meld. A prime example are paninis, they almost never leak!