Essentials of a Great Sandwich...Many Miss The Cut

Spicy Beef & Bacon...Not So Good & a Mess

Thinking about food, creating and producing salads, soups, baked treats,  pickles, jams, salsa and sandwiches was our focus for seven years. 

Customers can taste the difference and appreciate the quality, the balance of ingredients, the flavor and composition of the food, the textures from grilling bread and melting cheese and enhancing the food with  the best quality sauces. 

We take that experience, our yardstick of quality, with us as we visit other restaurants and sample sandwiches.

We reflected on our experience when we recently visited an unnamed, independent sandwich shop this week somewhere in the Twin Cities.  This is how we think they measured up.

• The factory bread (A.K.A. bread out of a bag) disintegrated part-way through eating the sandwich.  The quality of the ingredients affects its' texture as well as taste.   
• The sandwich was not sparse in the quantity of meat but it was cheap meat, low quality, stringy and salty.   
• The cheese here, like at the ubiquitous Subway, is not cheese.  The 'yellow' or 'white' processed cheese is actually only 50% cheese and 50% miscellaneous ingredients...that's why it's cheap.
• The remaining ingredients were piled partly in the bun, partly hanging out--generally making an unappealing mess on your hands.

We won't name the place.   They have consistently made this kind of sandwich for several years, and appropriately don't charge much.  You get what you pay for.

Here Are Our Sandwich Criteria

A Great Bruegger's Veggie Sandwich by Del

1.  Use 'the best' bread. 

We were fanatics about good bread.  Nothing is worse than quality ingredients between pieces of bad bread out of a bag.   Bread made with quality grains and ingredients is more compelling.  Bread should showcase and enhance what's on it.  Tailor the bread to the sandwich components.

 2.  The meat AND cheese AND/OR veggies define the contents.   A sandwich on good bread with high quality protein outplays a giant portion of poor salty meat on an 'air' bun made of nothing you want to eat.  We'd rather have the smaller portion of decent quality meat and cheese at Jimmy John's (even though their cheese is ultra thin see-thru) than a big helping of Grade C meat from the other big chain.  Similarly, fresh, tasty veggies can create a compelling sandwich.

3.  Condiments.  Don't use cheap condiments.  Consider the composition of the sandwich and what actually enhances the overall flavor.  A sandwich should not be a buffet line where you jam as many conflicting contents as possible together.  This is also the pitfall at 'point and pick' places like Subway or Chipotle where people add everything to get their money's worth (big glob of ?).


4.  Be tidy.  This 'open and falling out' approach is unappealing.  it's a mess.  If you're in your nice business casual wear this is not going to end well.  The jalapenos, spinach and meat were falling out of the sampled sandwich.  The idea of a sandwich is that you hold it with the bread.  You should not have to use your fingers to stuff  INgredients back betwixt.

It should be obvious but sauces and condiments should be in the sandwich, not on the outside of the bread.  Nutmeg Brewhouse puts out pretty good sandwiches but regularly makes the 'outside' condiment error.

Jersey Mike's slices their own meats and cheeses but by the time you get it 'Mike's way' it turns into 'Mike's mess'  even when the sandwich maker is trying.  It's not a sandwich you'd eat in the car.

5. Get all the ingredients in the sandwich that are supposed to be in the sandwich.  The pictured spicy beef and bacon sandwich had one bite of bacon at the far right end of the sandwich, pretty much at the consumption point where I'd lost interest. 

A 'secret sauce' should not mean 'cannot find.'  At Agra Culture, for example, the sauce is so skimpy you won't taste it.  Firehouse Subs puts the entire sandwich into a heating device and the cheese vanishes.

The biggest problem with chain restaurants is that you have different people making the sandwiches...trying to get a lot of people to do something exactly the same way is not easy.  We'll give props to Jimmy John's - they seem to have the most consistent sandwiches we've seen.   We wrote off Pot Belly after getting the same sandwich with/without any number of ingredients time after time.  


6.  Cost/Value.  The sandwich at the independent sub shop was $6.50.  We'd call that mid-priced and poor quality.  At the lowest end of sandwiches you get the lowest quality breads and meats and processed cheese food.  Poor quality food factors into America's unhealthiness through excessive salt, ingredients filled with artificial additives served on zero value bread.  


7.  Speed.   Quickly preparing a sandwich, neatly, attractively and in an order that enhances the flavor experience is the goal.  No one wants to wait for a bad sandwich, especially on your lunch break.  Quick is good when all the bases have been touched.


So...what's your yardstick for a good sandwich?
There are many options ranging from the Holiday, SA or Kwik Trip 'grab and go' to low-end chains of low quality and taste to the more consistent and slightly costlier (our favorite in this range is Jimmy John's) to he one-off places with a focus on quality and speed. When in doubt, remember the line 'you are what you eat.'