Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Sandwich God Quite Definitely Intended

Today, I'm going to teach you how to make this:
This is a Bacon, Apple and Brie Sandwich, accompanied by some simple, oven baked potato chips and a mustard green salad. It tastes wonderful and works wonderfully for entertaining. Better yet, it's a great date meal to cook up because including apple on a sandwich makes you look totally edgy. It's also an incredibly easy meal. In fact, the hardest part about it is cutting everything to the correct widths.

The ingredients for the sandwich are:
3-4 slices tart green apple (Granny Smith's are perfect)
2-3 slices of bacon
1 long slice of Brie cheese (cut from the edge of a good sized wedge)
2 thin slices of crusty sourdough bread
1 pinch flaked sea salt (or other large grained salt)

The ingredients for the potato chips are:
2 small Yukon Gold potatoes
Salt
Pepper
Garlic Powder
Olive Oil

The assembly of this dish is as follows:
Believe it or not, the potato chips will occupy the majority of your time when it comes to preparation. You will need to preheat your oven to 450 degrees farenheit. You want to cook the chips this hot so that the edge will crisp well and quickly, but the center will be still relatively soft.

Slice the potatoes thin. Try and get the slices between 1 and 2 millimeters in width (1-2 pennies thick). It's actually good if some are thicker than others because it will create a variety of textures in the finished dish.

Lay the sliced potatoes out on a baking dish. Drizzle them with olive oil. Turn them around to get them coated well in the oil. Then sprinkle liberally, with garlic powder, liberally again with black pepper, and then less liberally with salt. Flip them over and repeat the process.

Try to drain off some, but not all of the excess oil before placing in the oven. Put them in the oven for about twenty minutes. You want the edges to brown, but you want the center to retain its golden color.

Once you have that in the oven, move on to the bacon. Put your bacon on a baking sheet and pop it into the same oven for about 4-6 minutes. You don't want the bacon to get super crispy, because when bacon tries to compete, crunch for crunch, with a good apple, well lets just say that bacon is usually lucky to even get bronze in such a contest. Instead, you want the bacon to assist the bread in providing some chew to the sandwich.

While you've got your oven working away, slice your apple. You shouldn't need more than 4 slices of apple to cover the sandwich. Slice the Brie at the same time, trying to get the longest slice you can. If you've bought a wedge of Brie, try and cut it from the point of the wedge in a straight line along the edge. (You definitely need to get the bacon out of the oven by now)

Cut your Brie slices in half and try to align it diagonally on the bread. Place your slices of apple along the alternate diagonal as shown in the picture.

Break or cut your slices of bacon in half and place them in a similar manner. The first layer should lay opposite the direction of the apples and the second layer should lay in the same direction as the apples.

This attention to the orientation of the pieces of the sandwich may seem a bit (read: very) OCD, but it actually has a fairly big impact on the texture of the sandwich, not to mention the fact it keeps you from accidentally ripping all the bacon out of the sandwich with a single bite.

Close your sandwich up and get it on a plate, put your chips on there with it, and you're ready to go. For the plate I showed in the picture I took some mustard greens, bunched them up and ran my knife through them. I then topped it with another slice of Brie and another slice of apple. This would also go wonderfully with a spinach salad. It would also accompany a broccoli-tomato-tortellini salad quite well, so well in fact that I might get you that recipe later.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your sandwich, and maybe even impress someone with it. You'd be surprised what the unexpected inclusion of fruit can accomplish.

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