Andrew Rea's Bread Hack Will Forever Change The Way You Make BLTs
Everyone loves a good BLT sandwich. In fact, some may say it's the best sandwich in the world. Sandwich Magazine makes a pretty good argument for this, comparing taking a bite out of the stacked bacon, lettuce, and tomato food to hearing "Bohemian Rhapsody" for the first time (which apparently some consider a holy experience).
Some believe the origins of the BLT date back to as early as the Victorian times, and that it was served as a mini finger food that accompanied tea parties in England. Recipes for the sandwich first appeared in British cookbooks in the 1920s. It was then that the pairing of lettuce and tomato atop crispy and fatty bacon swept over the Americas due to its ease of making and tasty flavors, especially in South Carolina where the "best BLT" is made.
While making a BLT is pretty straightforward — you literally take bacon, lettuce, tomato, and maybe some mayonnaise and put it on some toasted bread — there are always upgrades to be had. Thanks to Andrew Rea — aka Babish — there's a great bread hack to incorporate on your next BLT.
Andrew Rea's tip for the best BLT bread
If there's anything that Andrew Rea knows when it comes to BLT sandwiches, it's the bread. In a WIRED YouTube video titled "Babish Answers Cooking Questions From Twitter," the cookbook author addresses a question probing his insights on what the "best sandwich" is.
"I love the BLT, it is one of the simplest sandwiches you could get. However, I can't say it's the best sandwich," Rea states in the video. While the BLT doesn't make the cut for Rea's "best" sandwich, he does offer up some pretty great advice when it comes to the bread.
"Toast the inside of your bread, not the outside. It will spare the roof of your mouth and you'll get all the crunch and flavor. And it will prevent your bread from getting soggy," he excitedly said. We can get on board with that — who likes a soggy grilled cheese?
How to upgrade the traditional BLT
Thanks to Rea, we can now save our tongues from burning by toasting the inside of our BLT bread while still enjoying a bit of a crunch. While this already reinvents the way we make a BLT, there are even more hacks to take the traditional sandwich up a notch.
In the Q&A video, Rea says that you can easily improve a BLT by throwing a "runny" over-easy egg on it or even adding a slice of flavorful cheese. Because c'mon, what's a sandwich without some cheese?
If you want to get fancy, try adding a little bit of caviar to your BLT to upgrade it on a workday afternoon. Maybe the bacon isn't enough for you. Perhaps consider swapping in some pork belly or adding some cooked and buttery lobster onto your BLT instead. Really, the options and ideas are endless here, so don't think you have to settle for only bacon, lettuce, and tomato.