Lucas: 3 - Sandwich Secrets

    The only Pokemon TCG topic that I have to discuss this week would be introducing a unique format I've just recently started playing -- called Gym Leader Challenge (GLC) -- that allows you to use a much larger pool of Pokemon cards (any card released since Black & White, ~2011), but limits you to only ONE copy of each card. This means you have a 60-card deck with no duplicates (besides basic energy). You are also required to use Pokemon of only ONE type (hence the Gym Leader). I recently played in my first GLC tournament and won with a Dragon deck! This week, however, I am going to be on a cruise on my blog day, so I've gotta pre-write this sucker and do it fast. We're gonna look at Sandwiches and how to make a good one.

The Bread

    The trick to sandwiches is: only the bread matters. Nothing else. You can put any cheese, whatever toppings, sauce or no sauce, greens or no greens. Don't care. None of that shit matters as much as getting good bread and toasting it well. Toasting your bread with correct technique will, in turn, warm your other sandwich components and step your sandwich game up. As far as choosing it-- get some sourdough from the store. If you think it looks fine, it probably is.

Butter BOTH sides of the bread

    This isn't the most critical step, and is one I often skip to make Katie's sandwiches (she likes them softer). But if you hate eating cold food, like I do, you're going to want to butter both sides of both bread slices to prepare for both sides being toasted.

Olive Oil in the pan

    Olive oil is good. If you want to level-up your standard toast game, butter one side of that sucker and throw it in a pan with some oil. Even with semi-stale bread, it'll be better than any toast you've ever had in a toaster (and worth the effort for bread-heads). I'm using a stainless steel pan here and you're gonna want to get it hot enough that water jumps around the pan, rather than vaporizing on contact. 

Throw that sucker in the pan

    Toast 'er up. Here, we could add one slice at a time to keep the toasting more consistent thru the end, but that slows down the process. The difference normally isn't big enough to matter.

Flip and toast the other side

    This is the second "optional" step. It directly ties back to the chef on duty's choice to butter both sides of the bread or not. The primary reason to toast both sides is to get a bit more crunch, and to get more heat to the meat/cheese added later. By putting them onto an already-toasted slice of bread, you can add  some direct heat.

Disclaimer: I didn't have any sauces on me at the time of making this sammy. If I had some Pesto or Gourmaise, I would take out one slice of the bread before these upcoming steps and quickly layer some up. For this particular sandwich, I had to compensate for the chicken's (spoiler) dryness by initially using extra butter and adding more cheese.

Stack up the cheese

Protein time

    It's worth noting that we want our cheese and our protein put on different slices from each other. This all comes back to letting the toast warm everything up. If we put the chicken on top of the cheese, the cheese will be blocking that hot air and the chicken at the core of our sandwich will likely be cold. 

Money shot

    You can already see the fruits of our labor with the cheese on the right side. A two-slice layer has been partially melted just in the time it took to place our Costco rotisserie chicken on it's sister bread slice.

Cheese-half onto meat-half

    The cheese is pretty bound onto the chicken by this point, so flipping the cheese-half of the sandwich will be a lot less messy for us. If we tried to flip the chicken-half that shit would go everywhere.

Press.

    I'm just smooshing the sandwich with a little wooden spoon thing, but if you had one of those Tik Tok metal sandwich pressing weights, now's the time to use it. That shit would be so tight to have, I like to get my sammies nice and pressed because it makes them Better To Me. For Katie's sandwiches, I skip this step (softer sandwich). 

Add a little water + cover

    It is very important during this step to NOT let the water touch the sandwich. That'll fuck this whole thing up. If you are a less confident cook, just skip this step. The risk of getting your bread wet is Not worth it. This step serves to help warm up the inside of the sandwich more and get your cheese super melty by giving it a little hot box to sit in. The added moisture from the hot water vapors in the air can also soften the bread a bit. If water touches the bread, you're actually fucked. Just reroll. The bread is ruined.

Result

Eating

    This day I was making a panini-type sandwich, so I didn't use any greens. If you're a green-head like Ked, you can pair the bread toasting lessons learned from this vlog with some already-warmed proteins and build your sandwich in a piecemeal style. That sandwich process can be translated nearly 1:1 to making a good bacon-egg-cheese sandwich (toast bread in one pan, make eggs in another, bacon in third, assemble at the end), a task I find myself doing often on Arnott vacations recently.
    Recently, I've found the true secret to a good sandwich is bothering to put the effort into making it.