As the days turn truly hot, millions of us around the United States set out on a quest for ephemeral bliss. We descend on supermarkets and farm stands for tomatoes so voluptuous and full-flavored that they elicit unbidden exclamation: “Now that’s a tomato!” We’ve been waiting for this moment all year — it’s time to make BLTs.
While the other components of the BLT are more or less perennial, the tomato is a seasonal luxury. The gap between summer beauties and supermarket facsimiles is tectonic, and our thinking goes, without the former, is a BLT even worth the bacon?
Recipe: BLTs
What we’re after is the pinnacle of BLT, the kind sold at Middle Child in Philadelphia. When summer hits, the owner Matt Cahn’s phone starts blowing up. “Everybody’s messaging me: ‘Where are the BLTs?’” Mr. Cahn said. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know. Ask Jack.’”
Jack Goldenberg grows the tomatoes — “the best in the world,” said Mr. Cahn — at Urban Roots Farm in Newton Square, Pa., and the Middle Child BLT is at their mercy.
The blessed day in mid-July when Jack sends word that his tomatoes are ready, Mr. Cahn starts selling sandwiches that teeter with “three fingers” of thick-cut heirlooms — salted in advance to both thoroughly season them and draw out juice, preventing the dreaded sog. The rye bread, buttered and griddled on one side, is just the container; the bacon, Duke’s mayo and the greenery, mere condiments.
The moment the tomatoes are no longer transcendent, usually around Labor Day, it’s bye-bye, BLT. And that’s part of the pleasure. In an Instagram message last year to customers frustrated by the sandwich’s vanishing act, Mr. Cahn implored them to embrace “the beautiful uncertainty of being,” noting that “without disappointment there can be no delight.”
I’ve long been seduced by this philosophy, but less so as I creep toward colonoscopy age. I have only so many summers left. Must I really consign the BLT to a hot-weather cameo in my sandwich life?
So recently, I’ve adopted Christian Petroni’s BLT philosophy. For Mr. Petroni, a chef and the author of the cookbook “Parm to Table,” the BLT is a bodega sandwich. He insists, for instance, on toasted white bread: “Take that ciabatta or brioche and take a walk with it,” he said, Bronx accent on full display. True to form, Mr. Petroni actually likes his BLTs made with “a tomato that’s praying for death in the back of the fridge.”
Don’t get him wrong, he loves a fine summer specimen. “The only time you’ll see me eating a raw tomato is out of a friend’s garden between August and September,” he said. A BLT is the lone year-round exception. “The crux of the BLT is that you can have the most basic commodity ingredients and you’re still unstoppable.” In other words, a good BLT with a bad tomato is proof of the sandwich’s alchemy, its ability to transcend its component parts.
After talking to Mr. Petroni, I felt buoyed, ready to throw off the shackles of my own snobbery and embrace the true spirit of the sandwich by eating it as I once did: all the time. My early BLT affection did not bloom in summer soil but in New Jersey diners, where the produce was not the point.
That sort of canonical lunch-counter BLT is on offer at Max and Helen’s, a diner in Los Angeles opened by Phil Rosenthal, host of the Netflix show “Somebody Feed Phil,” with the renowned Nancy Silverton as the executive chef. Theirs is a deliberate exercise in nostalgia.
“It should give you that ‘Ratatouille’ moment,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “It should be an idealized version of this thing you love from childhood.” So important is fidelity to the form that Ms. Silverton, the queen of sourdough, also serves it on toasted white.
To Mr. Rosenthal, the BLT is the pizza of sandwiches, a study in elemental balance where every component carries equal weight. You’ll get a couple leaves of iceberg, lots of thick-cut bacon, ample mayo and two slices of tomato (the best available, and cut a bit thicker when in season). Despite Ms. Silverton’s cheffy bona fides, this sandwich isn’t seasonal, but served year-round.
If the Rosenthal-Silverton duo could be reasonable about tomatoes, so could I. Yet just when I’d finally let go of one deal breaker, I took up another. Aside from my tomato fixation, I had always been agnostic on the BLT’s other doctrinal disputes — bacon and bread specs, lettuce type, mayo brand. I’ve happily eaten BLTs made with Oscar Mayer and Benton’s. I’ve enjoyed them on white, rye, even sourdough, as long as it isn’t so crusty that it lacerates the palate. Whether it’s slathered with Duke’s, Hellman’s or Kewpie, I don’t care, as long as there’s plenty of it. (I barely blinked, for instance, when Mr. Cahn told me that Middle Child’s BLT ditches lettuce for arugula.)
That is, until I spoke to Andy Kadin, owner of Bub and Grandma’s in Los Angeles, and my BLT worldview was recalibrated. His version is seasonal, a more reasonable proposition in California, where the window of tomato excellence stretches from late May to early October, than it is in the Northeast, where the season seems to run approximately from Aug. 10 to Aug. 11.
He pairs them with bacon that’s crisp but not fully rendered, so there’s still plenty of fat, a homemade aioli and butter-toasted challah (richer than white but not as baroque as brioche). The tomatoes, impeccable though they are, are deployed in a judicious pile. But here, the lettuce is prodigious, an iceberg of iceberg, a crosswise slab so thick one Instagrammer snarked that Mr. Kadin’s BLT looks like “a lettuce sandwich.”
Inspired by the hunk on the tuna sandwich at Palace Diner, in Biddeford, Maine, Mr. Kadin says the lettuce “coins” (in Bub and Grandma’s parlance) work on two fronts: textural and structural. “It gives you that huge crunch,” Mr. Kadin said.
The flat surface is also key. “It locks the other items on the sandwich,” he added. Combine creamy condiment with a curvy slice of lettuce, and the sandwich contents “have a tendency to shoot out the back.”
Intrigued, I tried the iceberg slab at home with every grade of tomato. Though I preferred mine a bit slimmer than Mr. Kadin’s, it elevated each sandwich. For one thing, the monumental crunch gave them a lightness that would feel summery even in winter. For another, the anchoring slab rendered them architecturally sound. After all, how much does the quality really matter if the tomatoes end up in your lap?
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: J. J. Goode
- Photo: Michael Persico
