This is how the sandwich blog ends—with far too many words.
Clearly we lost our mo there in the dog days of Summer of Sandwich. The Mets … losing. The virus … spreading. The forests … burning. And yet we’re back at work, sweating ponds into our face masks, doing our best to pretend things are reasonable.
So many sandwiches! We ate, by our count, 70+ different sandwiches this summer. We made great progress on something we didn’t foresee emerging from this light-hearted project: the Unified Sandwich Theory©. We had grand plans in the final weeks of our project—to revisit some of our summer greatest hits and to hit up Europane, one of our all-time faves.
We did a little of the former, none of the latter. Whimper, whimper, nary a bang.
Revisit #1: Saturday August 21: Crème
Why go back to Crème? On Saturdays, Crème offers a sandwich they don’t offer any other day of the week: a BLAT … except, being too clever by half, they swap out the tomato for turkey, use sliced sourdough, and give it a swipe of mayonnaise or aioli though they don’t list this on the menu description. (Ahem: Your sandwich should match your menu description.) We also got their Saucisson Sec, served on a baguette. This was good … but why the hell don’t delis put cornichons on baguettes correctly? What is up with the mad center-piling?
Crème is good. Their baguettes are solid. The ingredients are fantastic (a quick way to tell sandwich quality: sneak a little taste of each part of the filling on its own. If it’s amazing, great. If it’s not, well, there you go). The salami is excellent, the turkey spot-on, the cheeses very well done.
- Overall Balance/Taste: +1 points
- Quality of Ingredients: +1
- Bread: +1
- Integrity:
- X-factor: so close!: +1
Overall: +4 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak
Revisit #2: Thursday August 26: Tortas Sinaloa
WTF?! They were out of avocado!
That’s cool, we can roll. We were excited to get back to Tortas Sinaloa, and we weren’t disappointed, at least not much. We got: the carnitas, frijoles, and queso panela. We also got: the carne asada, frijoles, and queso Oaxaca—with this we got the panela instead, unfortunately. Panela isn’t our favorite torta cheese (sorry, Guadalupe)—it has this squeaky thing going on and it doesn’t full melt-meld with the rest of the sandwich. Small complaint. The telera rolls at Tortas Sinaloa are fantastic—telera rolls might be our favorite sandwich roll. They have great flavor but sadly got a little steamed in the drive home, which cost a little texture, and leads to our newest addition to the Unified Sandwich Theory©: cold sandwiches are better than hot sandwiches because they travel well—hot sandwiches should generally eaten immediately.
That aside: Tortas Sinaloa is damn good. These are immense tortas. The meats are legit: the carnitas are fantastic, the carne asada is almost as good. Their bean-meat-cheese ratio is dead on and, impressively for tortas, these sandwiches hold together. Do we have a lingering unease regarding tortas—yes we do…because, well, we would rather eat these as burritos or tacos, as the latter two are so much more salsa-friendly.
For what is a torta but a too-thick taco with too little salsa?
- Overall Balance/Taste: +2 points
- Quality of Ingredients: +1
- Bread: +1
- Integrity:
- X-factor: no avocado!: -1
Overall: +3 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak
Revisits #3 & #4: Saturday August 28: Padua & Claro’s
We were thrilled to go back to Padua Pasta Makers—after all, it provided one of our favorite sandwiches of the summer, a simple mortadella and cheese. This time we thought we’d let them stretch their creative legs and ordered the Padua Special—basically their version of an Italian grinder.
Sadly, this was a little overwrought. The bread at Padua is as good a bread as we’ve had this summer—firm, crunchy outer texture; soft inner texture; the earthiness of the wheat. But the meats don’t hold up. Padua doesn’t use Boar’s Head, which is not an automatic sin—neither does Roma—but alone, the salami, capicola, and even the mortadella are all a little disappointing. The sandwich even lost a bit of integrity. See that meat-to-bread ratio? No go: a sandwich shouldn’t be screaming meat-meat-meat. A good sandwich is a reasonable blend, a fine balance. Not this guy.
- Overall Balance/Taste: +1 points
- Quality of Ingredients: +0
- Bread: +1
- Integrity:
- X-factor: second-time let-down: -1
Overall: +1 points, or a standard PB&J
Our first visit to Claro’s was great. Our second–also good, and, better, it brought about a new addition to the Unified Sandwich Theory—more on that in a moment.
First: holy shit: Claro’s is popular. We called at 11am on a Saturday morning to order a sandwich for pickup. Keep in mind: this is a sandwich shop/Italian market in Upland we’re talking about, San Bernardino County, Upland, the land where sandwich shoppes abound.
We were on hold five minutes.
Then someone from the deli came on and took our order.
Then he said it’d be ready.
In an hour.
?
??
???
We pouted about this—we had our revisit plan! Then we stopped pouting and sucked it up. We stopped at the aforementioned Padua (15 minutes!), picked up the Special, ate it on the very same downtown Upland bench upon which we had our first Padua sandwiches, and, by the time we’d finished and driven over to Claro’s, fifty minutes had passed. We parked, walked in, and … really: holy shit: Claro’s is popular. The place was packed with people waiting to order sandwiches, picking up sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches. Apparently the people of Upland love a Claro’s sandwich at noon on Saturday. Good to know.
Finally after waiting in line with quite a few anti-maskers, yay, we walked out, Grandpa Frank in hand. We took Grandpa Frank home. We sat Grandpa Frank in the fridge. Did Grandpa Frank complain? Hush, Grandpa Frank. We did weekend homework, read through potential prose manuscripts, applied for residencies, planning classes, picked up wine-club wine, almost got run over walking through downtown La Verne, and watched the Mets lose again. Normal Saturday stuff.
At 4:30pm, we turned on Angels & Demons because earlier this summer we watched The Da Vinci Code. Not a good reason. These movies are at best half-amusing if you’re half-paying attention and, you know, writing about sandwiches. Halfway through the film, we took Grandpa Frank out of the fridge and dug in.
Grandpa Frank features Claro’s baked ham, capocolla (regular, not hot), lean Toscano (a Tuscan salami known for being lean and heavily black-peppered), provolone, roasted red peppers, and Italian dressing. Two small criticisms: the roasted red pepper was a little on the thick side, making its slimy texture overly pronounced, and the provolone was especially provolone-y: a bit too much must and stink. That aside: this was a very, very good sandwich. The in-house baked bread was even better than Padua’s—a little more forgiving crust while retaining total integrity. The three proteins were a bit scaled back from the ample amounts found on the Padua grinder—closer to Roma Market’s magic ratio. The ham was especially good, and we had a heat coming from … somewhere. The dressing? It wasn’t the meats. But this sandwich had total meld, as did our previous Claro’s offering, the Angry Joe or whatever goofy family name it has (I mean, I know Claro’s has five locations…but we can get ten sandwiches with roads everyone knows? The Foothill? The Orange Grove?)
- Overall Balance/Taste: +2 points
- Quality of Ingredients: +1
- Bread: +1
- Integrity:
- X-factor: the wait: -1
Overall: +3 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak
… and thus ends our sandwich homily.
…
…
…
…almost.
Some final final thoughts:
Finishing the Grandpa Frank helped us arrive at another addition to the Unified Sandwich Theory©—not something deeply enlightening in the way of, say, the Illuminati stealing anti-matter from the Large Hadron Collider in order to immolate the Vatican (Angels & Demons is awful), but fairly logical: You want a sandwich you can’t easily make at home. If it’s easy to create a home-made sandwich comparable to your local shop’s offerings, why get a sandwich from your local shop?
Point being: while a good sandwich shouldn’t be fussy, it also shouldn’t be too simple (looking at you, jambon beurre from Crème).
And more: a sandwich should be local—it should feel of the place it was created. A small thing to ask.
Most important, maybe: a sandwich is meant to be simple. It is unfussy, undemanding, a convenience—a not-quite-elegant accompaniment, certainly not an occasion in and of itself. It is a sum of its parts, and those parts should meld—together they should taste of a piece. Apart? They should each still be, on their own, delicious. The bread should be good—fresh, somewhat crunchy exterior, soft interior. (A single roll is always better than slices.) The fillings should check those obvious taste boxes: a little bit of acid. A good salty-savory protein. A creaminess to match the salt and acidity. A little heat, if you want. Maybe a little veg earthiness, maybe a little crunch. That’s it.
And so, following the Unified Sandwich Theory, we give you the very best sandwich(es) we’ve had*: Roma Market’s The Sandwich and The Vegetarian Sandwich. Served on perfect Sicilian rolls, these each have less than five ingredients (not even shredded lettuce—raising their elegance). They aren’t easily replicated. The parts are delicious alone—together, they sing. They can travel. You can eat them in one hand. They are simple. They are delicious. They are perfect.
That’s it–that’s all we got. Now it’s your turn: go forth and find good sandwiches.
(*Well…Roma’s sandwiches are the very best…not counting the Terry Gross from Wax Paper Frogtown, which provided us by far our most complex and audacious sandwich we had all summer—and that proves the real final entry in the Unified Sandwich Theory©: there is no Unified Sandwich Theory©. There is just, in the end, good food. Be sure to eat it.)