Fried Bread
The results are in and they are . . . spectacular
Here’s the one sentence summary: If you want to make a truly remarkable sandwich, fry the bread.
Within the last couple of years, I started making fried bread to accompany Sunday breakfasts. I’ve been stocking Pepperidge Farm super-thin sliced bread in the freezer. To make the bread I put a little butter on each side of the bread and cook it in my big carbon steel sauté pan — long and low, until it is nice and toasty brown on both sides. Then I stash it in a warming oven until the meal is served.
COOK’S NOTE: It’s easier to spread the butter if you take it out of the fridge an hour or so before cooking, or store some butter in a countertop crock where it is always room temp. It is fairly easy to spread butter on bread when it is just out of the freezer, too. But I have also been known to melt a bit of butter and then brush it on the bread with a silicone basting brush.
TEST KITCHEN NOTE: I made my test sandwich with white bread (Arnold’s Farmhouse variety) rather than rye bread which I think is tastier. I was going for the lowest common denominator for the bread. If this was good, any more interesting bread would be better, I thought.
A little (Tiny) Bit of History
After thanksgiving, we had a classic leftovers dinner the next day. Reheating all the basics, a traditional leftover meal.
The next day, I was thinking it would be nice to do something different with the leftovers. I saw a recipe for a Thanksgiving club sandwich somewhere—probably the NYT cooking section. I didn’t really read the recipe but I did catch the idea of substituting the classic club sandwich middle slice of bread with a patty made of leftover stuffing.
NOTE: Here is a link to the NYT article that started me down this rabbit hole. Nice photo! No wonder it caught my attention. But wow, did I deviate from the specifics.
And so, in “no-recipe” mode, I tried to make stuffing patties and assembled the other ingredients: light and dark turkey slices, some gravy and leftover cranberry sauce. The big idea—build all those ingredients into a sandwich that tastes like Thanksgiving.
And—for my sandwich, I snagged four pieces of Levy’s rye bread from the freezer. And using my usual Sunday morning technique, I fried it.
The Thanksgiving Club Surprise
My stuffing patties turned into toasted, crumbled stuffing. (Remind me to look up that recipe — I’m wondering if they added some egg to the stuffing to bind it together. (See link to recipe above. They did not.))
I added the turkey slices and sauces, put a little pile of stuffing crumbs in the middle, and presented my creation.
It didn’t look like much. It seemed a little too tall to be an easy bite, and the stuffing crumbs were falling out. I was thinking that it was, perhaps, a disaster. I cut mine in half and took my first bite.
Wow!
It was good. No, it wasn’t good—it was GREAT! It was special. It was off the charts.
At the time, I couldn’t verbalize what was so good about it other than saying that the fried bread added a whole new dimension to the sandwich. And one thing I definitely said about the fried bread: “It would make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into something special.”
Toast, Frybread, and other Pretenders
Toast is toast in my new approach to sandwich making. Toast can be quite nice, but it is superficial. A little browning on the outside, a lot of squish in the middle. In a matchup with fried bread, toast is wimpy.
What about frybread?
I’d heard about bread and frying as something that was part of native American cuisine—from the times when tribes were subsisting on government-supplied rations. Frybread, it seems, was a kind of batter made from wheat flour that was sort of deep fried. In a way, it seems like a distant cousin of fried dough and elephant ears—food truck and fairground fare.
The closest thing to my fried bread, I thought, was a grilled cheese sandwich. It delivers some of the crunch and fried food goodness, but a grilled cheese sandwich was only fried on one side.
A Final Taste and My Analysis
This morning, I made a slice of fried bread and turned it into a half of a PB&J sandwich. Would any sandwich, placed between slices (half-slices) of fried bread, be more delicious?
The answer is yes!
I don’t usually (make that never) eat PB&J for breakfast. But, risking a serious disruption of my circadian rhythms, I taste-tested my sandwich. It was very, very good. It didn’t surpass the Thanksgiving club sandwich from Saturday, but it was good. And there is, I believe, a reason for it.
Fried bread turns any sandwich into a double-your-eating-pleasure event.
First, there’s the initial bite. It is totally crisp and buttery and tasty. If that was all you got, it would be very satisfying.
But then, the flavors and textures of the filling kick in. With PB&J, it’s the PB first, and then the sweetness of the jelly. It blends with the bread into an extremely delicious bite. And this is just with peanut butter and jelly! Imagine how good it will be with other fillings.
But Wait, Is there More?
Hummn? What would happen if you made three pieces of fried bread and cut a hole in the “middle” slice? You’d have a nice large space for a filling. You could put anything in there — some hash, even a fried egg. Oh, it would be messy, but I’ll bet it would taste really, really good.
Just a thought.
Anon.
Ridge