Introducing: Sandwich Lasagne
When life gives you long bread, make it a noodle.
The “Notes” app on my phone is a confusing trash heap of rejected or deferred newsletter topics. Free disposal of the following, which I’m unlikely to get around to writing:
Shit Yeah, They Still Got Ovaltine
Restaurants I Have Made in Animal Crossing
I Don’t Know What ‘Foodways’ Means, But I’m Sure as Hell Gonna Use It in a Sentence.
But there’s been one bullet point in there since January that I knew I was going to have to contend with eventually:
Sandwich Lasagne
I cannot explain my fixation on these words except to say that they burbled to the top of my consciousness like methane in a bog the moment I saw this tweet:
Since then, I’ve been unable to think of anything else. Chiefly because: why not? After all, what is a lasagna noodle but a dolphin-slick flatbread? Why shouldn’t I take my favorite sandwich—Half a Pound of Salami and Hot Peppers on the Nearest Available Bread—and weave its bounty into sauce-soaked striations? What dish isn’t improved by topping More of It with cheese?
Do not speak to me of Icarus. His principal sin wasn’t flying too close to the sun. It was making wings out of fucking wax.
A minor snag: I do not own an industrial bread slicer. And slicing soft homemade bread horizontally with a serrated knife is a bit like dissecting a frog with a pizza wheel. The only piece that was easy to slice was the sturdy bottom crust. Fortunately, I had baked two loaves, so I formed the lasagna with the one salvageable inner piece and two Crusty Bottom Boys (♪♫“Iiiiiii am a maaaan / of constant heartburn”♫♪)
I mayonnaise-toasted the bread in a cast-iron pan before I started layering, but the Crusty Bottom Boys had some bonus sturdiness that made assembly even easier. The lasagne maintained strict layers and held its shape without turning into Soft Bread Goop, which is the title of my forthcoming lifestyle brand.
Here’s the process: spread the top of your first toasted breadnoodle—broodle—with Second Mayo (moisture barrier!) and dribble on some finely chopped giardinera. I also added some Calabrian chiles, which are like regular chiles but expensive because food writers like them. Hot cherry peppers or peppadews would be great here, too.
Then, Tetris on a full layer of every salami you can find at Broadway Butcher Shop—Ungherese, picante, and Napoli—and some mortadella for beauty and balance.
Technically, the mortadella makes this a salumi sandwich lasagne. For a long time, I thought “salumi” was just something people said to be fancy, like when Giada de Laurentiis leans into the second syllable of “spaghetti.” But salumi is actually an umbrella term for many different kinds of Italian prepared meats, the genus to salami’s species.
Trust me, you don’t want to look like a fool ordering a salami sandwich lasagne at an Italian restaurant.
Sauce comes next. I made a hasty marinara and cooked it down until it resembled the texture of my blood after eating a sandwich lasagne. I was pretty chaste with the sauce to avoid sog, but in hindsight, it could have handled more.
Then the cheese: an even blend of mozzarella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Pecorino Romano, because those were the three cheeses I had in a big Ziploc bag in my fridge (Do you have a Cheese Bag? Let me know in the comments! #engagement)
Repeat the ritual until you’re satisfied / your loaf pan is stacked high enough to threaten God. Broodle! Mayo! Giardinera! Meat rainbow! Red sauce! Cheese!
Bake at 400 Fahrenheit until the cheese cap is brown and bubbly (my three-layer lasagne took about 20 minutes). Slice it into squares, shake some oregano over the top, and get ready for your new life.
I know what you’re thinking: “Liz, you didn’t make a sandwich lasagne. You made a Muffaletta Big Mac.”
This is not a muffaletta. This is a monolith. The cheese and sauce fuse the layers together like plywood. Only a lasagne could contain this much energy—in a literal, scientific sense. This is Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat if you read only the title and thought it was a recipe. This is a fossil record of one woman’s worst impulses. You can count my remaining years like rings on a tree.
But what glorious years! I ate a hunk of the monolith cold the next day with my hands. It held together like a sandwich, which it was, and camped out in my stomach all day like a lasagne, which it was.
If you would like to support the worst food newsletter this side of the Pyrenees, please share, subscribe, forward to a friend, or donate to the salumi slush fund (@lizcookkc/$lizcookkc).