Early September is peak tomato season in Michigan (usually), which puts us in mind of our favorite sandwich to fuss over: the BLT.
The ingredients are in the name and there is nowhere to hide. If you want to respect a great, simple sandwich like this, the best thing you can do is dial in its details, and luckily at The Southerner we have BLT greatness on hand year round.
We have gallons of Duke’s mayo, the South’s favorite (and ours too), in our pantry as a staple. In 1917, Eugenia Duke started selling sandwiches to the soldiers at Fort Sevier to make ends meet. They were slathered with her homemade mayonnaise, and she got a following quickly, mainly because that mayonnaise was so good. Not long after, she opened up a brick and mortar sandwich shop where the popularity of those sandwiches, and the heavy praise laid on that mayo, continued to grow. Eventually, they decided to bottle and sell the mayo on its own and the rest is history. For many Southern cooks, Duke’s is the only mayo you will ever find in their kitchen.
We crow about Benton’s bacon a lot.
For those of us who have become fans, there is no substitute. Modern grocery store bacon is not even bacon as we understand it. Benton’s holds fast to the traditional methods for salting and smoking pork that have been handed down for generations in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. It’s first cured simply in salt and red and black pepper, then heads to the smokehouse for three days. And when I say smokehouse, we’re not talking about some stainless steel chamber spraying liquid smoke. We mean a ramshackle, cinder block building divided in two with hams and slabs of bacon hanging on one side and a hickory fire burning in a small pot bellied stove on the other. Alan Benton is proud to brag that that fire has never gone out since they started making hams and bacon in 1973.
After smoking the bacon hangs in the rickhouse with Alan’s country hams to age for an additional ten days before being sliced, packed, and shipped to happy people like us.
Salty, smoky, a little funky, and as bold and boisterous as the South itself. There is no substitute.
Steve Karsten used to tend bar for us and now he’s a tomato farmer. Not sure what that says, if anything, about him or us, but here we are.
Steve is an obsessive.
He grows countless varieties of heirloom tomatoes on a small plot at his parent’s home which probably is better described as a garden than a farm. Heirlooms are varieties of vegetables that are being revived on small scale farms like Steve’s, which fell out of favor as our agricultural systems became more industrialized. We used to choose the varieties of tomatoes we grew for flavor and texture. Nowadays, tomatoes are chosen for the marketplace based on their ability to survive shipping rigors, have longer shelf lives, and for uniformity. Luckily, Steve, like Alan Benton, is here to relieve us of our grocery store failures by providing tomatoes that are complex and varied in flavor, texture, and color as fine wine.
If Steve is an obsessive, we’re not really sure what to call Joel.
Joel Wabeke does not own a bakery. He has a couple restaurants which are fantastic, one of which is a Detroit style pizza joint which is mind blowing. He takes time out of his insanely busy schedule to cram in trial after trial of breads and baked goods in search of the peak: the best you can do with flour, water, yeast, and salt (and some other close friends). His Japanese milk bread, which takes the form of buns, loaves, monkey bread, and god knows what else, is a visceral reminder of how complex so many simple foods really are. Soft, squishy deliciousness. A full throated shout of heart warming textures and flavors that makes us sad for what the white bread of our childhood could have been.
And sorry not sorry for the shredded iceberg. Crisp and clean and hiding just around the corner to help shoulder the heavy hitters.
Can’t skip technique here either. There’s not much to making any sandwich, including a BLT, but in this short window tomatoes provide us, some extra diligence is deserved.
Some rules to live by:
Watch your bacon like a hawk.
Begin rendering slowly and be ready for that perfect moment when the edges crisp and the fat becomes translucent, but don’t bring the desiccated horrors of the “extra crispy bacon” crowd to bear.
Salt your tomatoes.
A little. The bacon, especially Benton’s, is enough to season the sandwich, but tomatoes never suffer from a little pinch of salt to get juices flowing and boost that veggie umami. Make sure to cut thick, meaty slices and set them aside salted while the rest of the sandwich gets made to do their thing.
Use the hearts of your iceberg lettuce.
The crunchiest and most flavorful part of the lettuce is in the middle of a fully mature head, especially if you can get some of the tender, yellow leaves which bring a welcome, slight bit of bitterness.
Griddle, don’t toast.
At the restaurant, we begin cooking the bacon on our flat top griddle and lay the bread onto the rendering fat to cook. We leave it on that side for most of the cook, so it crisps nicely and picks up all that Benton’s goodness on the outside, and flip and cook it on the interior side just briefly, so the bacon, lettuce, and tomato facing side is a pillow of soft milk bread decadence.
Don’t be shy with the mayo.
Slather. Enough that some falls off the sandwich as you eat.
You’ll know you’ve done right by the BLT gods if your sandwich loses a good deal of its structural integrity toward the end as tomato juices, bacon fat, and mayo get soaked up by that glorious milk bread which gives its all before finally relenting.
