I ate a bad sandwich

Today’s advertiser is AG1. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $2.25.

The other day I ate a bad sandwich. This was at JFK airport, terminal 8, an outpost of Alidoro, an Italianate panini shop with multiple outlets around New York City. I guess some people like it. I’ve probably eaten at an Alidoro before, likely at Penn Station, and I don’t remember being so filled with hatred and disgust as I was today. I had that sense going into it that this was going to be a bad decision — that’s pretty common at airports, of course — and I was not disappointed.

The sandwich’s name, by the way, was Matthew.

Matthew, however, didn’t have to be bad. His ingredients were promising, if basic: prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, arugula, and a balsamic dressing on relatively inoffensive ciabatta¹. Matthew’s bar would be low. I wasn’t expecting well-aged San Daniele prosciutto, or mozzarella jetted in from Campania, but come on. Ham, cheese, a bit of greens. It shouldn’t be hard.

But the Alidoro paninisti made two mistakes, one minor, the other critical. First, the ciabatta was unpleasantly cold; and refrigerating bread actually pushes it toward staleness faster than keeping it at room temperature. Fine, whatever. The bigger mistake was the meat: at least 10 slices of prosciutto laid flat, one on the other, with no space between them, to form a dense, unchewable mound of salty protein.

Look, sandwiches are all about architecture, and the meat, especially a powerfully flavored one like prosciutto, needs air. Each slice, thick or thin, should be separated from its brethren, folded gently and laid haphazardly (within reason) upon the bread. You want to feel the texture of the slices, the regular irregularity of the bite as your teeth pass through the layers. That sandwich needs to breathe. If it can’t breathe, it’s dead on the plate, limp and heavy, boring.

R.I.P. Matthew.

The great thing about this approach is that you can actually use less prosciutto per sandwich and at the same time make the sandwich taste better. Any restaurant with its eye on the cost of (imported) ingredients should be aware of this. And Alidoro, to its credit, responded appropriately when I posted on Instagram about this:

“Totally valid!” they DM’d me. “Nothing worse than a brick of prosciutto. I have escalated this up the necessary Channels to avoid this in the future.”

More after the ad…

Layering is one of the most overlooked and underrated techniques in cooking. And we’re not just talking about sandwiches, which are themselves exercises in layering. We layer cakes and pastries. We layer parfaits and dips. We layer lasagne and döner trumpets. Layering is surprisingly key to making all food appealing. You can see layering even in single-ingredient dishes, like the crisp, salty crust of a well-seared steak surrounding the juicy pink interior.

There’s even research around how we respond to layers in food. In 2023, a group of scientists at the University of Copenhagen served two sets of lemon mousses to test subjects, one with a uniform level of acidity, the other with alternating layers of higher and lower acidity. The bilayer mousse, they discovered, “showed consistently higher liking and desire scores than their corresponding counterparts with identical acid levels equally distributed in a monolayer.”

I don’t want to make this sound too revolutionary, but what’s going on here is a human preference for variety and contrast. We want — or maybe even need — a mix, in each bite of food, of not only flavors but textures. Mouthfeel matters. Our teeth and gums and tongues can sense the slightest changes — say, from the gentlest bounce of a paper-thin pancake to the light matcha cream in a mille crêpe cake. That’s not to say we don’t appreciate the occasional uniform purity, as with a chocolate mousse, but I think that uniformity can also be straining. Can you eat more chocolate mousse, or more crème brûlée? In the Copenhagen experiment, the test subjects ate 13% more of the bilayer mousse than the monolayer.

The thing I love about this preference for contrast and novelty is that it so often happens within the regular structure of layers. The surprise we crave has to be predictable!

Is that a contradiction in terms? Does it make sense or not? I don’t know! But I find that this dual desire goes way beyond food: For me, at least, it’s want I want from life itself.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself, especially since I gave up travel writing, is that I crave structure. There are a lot of things I want to be able to do every day: I want to go running or rock climbing (or both), I want to enjoy my morning coffee, I want to make dinner and eat it with my family, I want to read and watch movies, I want to write this here newsletter. And in order to enjoy all of these things on a regular basis, I need to have a structured life, punctuated with predictable calendar events — weekends, school holidays, half-marathons, the changing of the seasons. When the structure holds, I get to live the life I love.

This was not what I expected for myself when I was younger. When I was deep in the travel writing world, no day was ever like the next. I’d be riding horses in the Tian Shan Mountains, then wandering the markets of Urumqi, then riding a train across China. I’d pitch my tent in a public park in South Dakota, shack up with friendly Iowa restaurateurs, sleep on the beach in Oregon. Anywhere in the world that caught my eye, I could persuade an editor to send me. Sure, I’d occasionally return to my apartment in New York to write and to rest, but even those stretches felt like unfamiliar interludes, as weird and novel as my adventures overseas. This was the dream — an unending flow of surprise and challenge.

These two lifestyles lie at opposite ends of the entropic scale: the former highly ordered, the latter chaotic. And yet both are, by their nature, similarly unsustainable. They both have a uniformity that is, if not exactly boring, then wearying. The monotony gets to me. After a while, I can’t take either one: I feel trapped by structure, I feel torn apart by lack of it.

And so the solution is, again, layering: chaos allowed within the bounds of regularity, order providing the opportunity for randomness. Each is a reprieve from the other, an experiment versus a comfort, whichever way you go. Is it any wonder I love striped shirts? And is there any other way to live? 🪨🪨🪨

Kwame Onwuachi’s newest Afro-Caribbean lounge is definitely worth a visit.