Sometimes it's what's outside that counts
Sandwiches aren't all inner beauty.
I don’t care what carb-counters say or what KFC tried to pull-over on society in 2010 — a sandwich isn’t a sandwich unless bread is involved. Bread is a very important element of a sandwich. Dare I say, the most important element of the sandwich?
I did. I dared said it. So it is said and there we go.
Fair warning, if your eyes have gluten allergies, you may want to avert them from this newsletter now. We’re about to get yea high in bread opinions.
Bread is where a sandwich begins and ends. Without it, you have no foundation on which to build your hand-held meal. It gives condiments something to adhere to and provides structure to otherwise structureless ingredients.
But bread is also so much more than that. It can be light or dense, chewy or crusty, thin or thick, sweet or sour. It can — and should — add to the experience of the sandwich, not detract from it.
And just like there are tons of sandwiches out there, there are tons of bread choices too.
Some sandwiches — like the Reuben — have a very specific bread associated with them. If you get corned beef and sauerkraut with Russian dressing on whole wheat, it’s just that — corned beef and sauerkraut with Russian dressing on whole wheat. It’s not a Reuben anymore. You’ve merely disemboweled the Rye bread and transplanted its innards into another bread. Is it still delicious? I don’t know, haven’t tried it. I’m sure it’s fine, but it’s not a Reuben.
Other sandwiches don’t require a specific bread, just that bread be the vessel in which you transport the fillings to your mouth. Just walk into any deli and you’ll have a laundry list of bread options to choose from: white, wheat, stoneground wheat, rye, sourdough, french roll, pretzel roll, ciabatta, etc, etc, etc. Even if you walk into a Subway you get at least half a dozen options of similar-tasting but differently-named bread-like material.
The point is when it comes to making a sandwich, you have a lot of bread choices. Lots of ways to go right. Lots of ways to go wrong.
We’ve been doing this for six months now and have reaped the tasty benefits of choosing the right type of bread and have deeply rued not being able to find and utilize the right type of bread (here’s looking at you, Italian Beef.) I’m not necessarily a bread expert, but at this point, I’ve awarded myself the title of “sandwich expert in training” and can definitively say that bread can do a ton to make or break a sandwich.
This brings me to this week’s sandwich: Mississippi’s The Grilled Shrimp Po’ Boy.
The maybe-less-than-definitive list describes the sandwich as “battered shrimp tossed in a spicy buttery garlic sauce and topped with lettuce, tomato, mayo, and pickles.” A seemingly innocuous description but, quick query, how can shrimp be both battered and grilled?
Trick question. ‘Tis not a thing. An Internet search confirmed that. It also wanted to allocate the Po’ boy to Louisiana. That doesn’t surprise me. When we had Louisiana’s Muffuletta sandwich a few weeks ago, the Internet forums all insisted that a Po’ Boy is more Louisiana than Mississippi. So far I haven’t been one to contend the veracity of the list, but we found nary a recipe or search result that gave us any info that made the shrimp Po’ Boy feel more Mississippi than Louisiana. Sorry, Mississippi. You need to get your state’s IT guy to improve your sandwiches’ SEO.
But, geographic sandwich ownership aside, the one thing we did find over and over was how important the bread is for a Po’ boy sandwich.
Apparently, there is french bread, and Louisiana French Bread (again, sorry Mississippi). But when you live in California, finding an authentic bread for a different region of the United States is like trying to get “baby shark” out of your head once you read the words “baby shark”: nearly impossible.
So, we settled on regular old french bread. We found some take-and-bake french bread from our bakery where you finish the final stage of cooking in your oven at home. That way it would be as fresh as we could get it (short of making it from scratch at home), and also we would feel fancy, and Sandwich Sunday is nothing if not fancy.
We used this recipe as our base recipe and made a few adjustments to our taste. And, since we don’t have a grill, we cooked them in our cast iron skillet. All in all, this was a very easy sandwich to make and assemble, which is nice. Some of the more complicated sandwiches have been well worth it, but it’s nice to have some that are bing-bang-boom done.
The shrimp was great. The vegetables were nice and fresh. The condiments worked perfectly. But the star was the bread. We couldn’t stop talking about how good the bread was. We thought about going back for a second sandwich, but instead just skipped the filling and ate the bread.
When it came down to it, this sandwich was nice, but shrimp isn’t the easiest sandwich ingredient. Its size makes it prone to fall out of the bread with each bite and quite frankly, I don’t think its texture shines in a sandwich. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it didn’t make you want to go back for more. If we saw a grilled shrimp po boy on a menu somewhere, I think I’d skip it and go for another shrimp dish instead — but I’d be sure to ask for some of that bread on the side.
Have bread or sandwich opinions? Don’t we all. Leave a comment below!
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I agree!