Death by sandwich
What Oregon's #1 sandwich lacks in vegetables, it makes up in delicious, delicious calories.
I’m here to inform you that the afterlife looks and feels a lot like your normal pre-dead life. Not much is different, TBH. You still wake-up wondering how it’s possibly time to get up when the sun isn’t even fool enough to be up that early. You still force yourself to work out because even though you really don’t want to, you know you’ll be mad with yourself if you don’t go, so it’s better to be annoyed with yourself now than angry with yourself later (you remind yourself repeatedly). You still stare into the fridge wondering what you should have for lunch and make a mental note to buy better lunch food the next time you’re at the store.
It’s all very much the same mundaneness that was life on Earth. The only real difference between life among the living and the afterlife is that you’re dead.
How do I know that? Because there is no possible way that my body survived the delicious, but completely, totally, and utterly artery-clogging calorie bomb that was the sandwich that we made (and happily ate) last night. I most clearly am dead and just haven’t admitted it to myself yet.
(Fun fact: you can still write newsletters about sandwiches from the Great Beyond, I guess!)
This week, the list veered over to the Pacific Northwest into Oregon whose representative sandwich should be called “the last meal you’ll ever eat” but instead is called “the fried chicken biscuit sandwich.” It’s not as catchy, but I guess you sell more sandwiches when you don’t announce imminent death in its initial description.
The sandwich is a buttermilk biscuit bottom topped with fried chicken, two half-slices of bacon, smothered in sausage gravy, topped with an over-easy egg and a slice of cheddar cheese, and crowned with the top half of the buttermilk biscuit.
There’s a cardiologist out there whose knees just buckled at the thought of anyone putting that much fat into their body.
I won’t go into great detail about any of the recipes (all of the recipes for the original fried chicken biscuit sandwich — including the sausage gravy — can be found here), but suffice it to say there was a lot of butter, flour, buttermilk, cream, and oil in this recipe.
On top of being mildly unhealthy, this sandwich was one of the most involved sandwiches we’ve made thus far. There were a lot of working parts that couldn’t be made ahead of time. Each individual recipe ended with the note, “serve immediately.” Something that would never have happened if I hadn’t looked over the recipes and done mise-en-place ahead of time. This is one sandwich that takes plenty of planning, lists, and sticky notes all over the kitchen in order to get it done right. Towards meal time, I had a pot or pan on every cooktop and biscuits finishing in the oven. It was more involved than our Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s dinners combined. But was it worth it?
Hell (*here’s hoping that’s not where I ended up?*) yes.
This is a sandwich that was never intended to be eaten with your hands. It is a knife and fork sandwich if I’ve ever met one. You don’t — by the recipe’s own description — “smother” sausage gravy on something and think your finger forks are going to be your utensils of choice. Plus, while the biscuit was delicious, it was comically outmanned by the number of heavy toppings on top of it. So it qualifies as a sandwich in the loosest sense of the cuisine. However, any misgivings I have about whether or not it qualifies to be on this list were quelled by how sinfully delicious this sandwich was.
Every component was singularly tasty. The chicken was moist, tender, and crispy. The biscuit was flaky and buttery (I mean, c’mon, it’s literally baked in a bath of melted butter). The sausage gravy was decadent and creamy. The bacon was crisp perfection. The egg — which I poached instead of fried — provided that ooey-gooey yolkiness that can’t be duplicated with any other sauce or topping.
Every single one of my tastebuds were here. For. It. My heart, on the other hand — to steal from the recipe description one final time — was being smothered in so much fat and calories that I couldn’t hear its screams until every last part of the sandwich was eaten and it was too late to hear its objections.
There’s no way to survive a sandwich that is that bad for you and tastes that good. I must be dead. It’s the only reasonable answer. I guess I’ll keep putzing about this very similar-looking afterlife like it’s the real world, though. May as well. At least this sandwich can only kill you once, right?
What sandwich would you choose for your last meal?
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