Sandwich Theory — A Complete (Beginner’s) Guide

The “sandwich” is a well-loved but poorly-defined concept. Just ask anyone on Reddit at /r/eatsandwiches/, a sub obsessed with sandwiches, and whose banner title is “We don’t actually know what sandwiches are”. (In fact, their rules explicitly acknowledge as a sandwich anything that’s “something between pieces of dough.”)

Despite this poor definition, there’s general agreement about good sandwiches and bad sandwiches. There are basic elements of sandwich theory that I’ve learned through reading and experimentation that I’m trying to document here. I’m not an expert, but I’m good at organising my thoughts — so I welcome input. It could be that I’ve only captured a small part of general sandwich theory!

Many parts of the world are good at sandwiches, but I think America is one of the greats. America has a lot of unique sandwiches, like the Italian American deli sandwich (a.k.a. a hoagie, a sub, etc… some people have definitional differences between them) including things like the meatball sub, Jewish American sandwiches like the Reuben, stuff from the South like the Shrimp Po’Boy, and delicacies from the Northeast like the Lobster Roll. Gosh, as I research sandwiches, I keep adding “must-eat” items to the list.

People like me who visit America, eat a sandwich — any of the above, or others — and enjoy it often think “Yow, why doesn’t this exist in my home country?” Unfortunately, we have few resources to reproduce them again. There are recipes, which are more like combinations of ingredients, but there are few resources on sandwich theory — the basic building blocks of a deli sandwich. I’ve done some research and practice and so am putting this together.

I’m not an expert. I’m just a sandwich lover who has been reading about sandwiches, and generally an obsessive person who likes to document and share.

Below I’ll go over

• A definition of the sandwich I’m writing about
• Basic building blocks
• The importance of the wrap
• Some FAQs

Defining the Sandwich

Sandwiches are, to me, any open construction of filling between two layers of bread. They’re not enclosed (which is more of a dumpling, bao, or so on), nor open, like a taco or pizza, nor wrapped, like a burrito or… wrap.

There are many kinds of sandwiches world-wide and they all have merits. I’m a huge fan of the schiacciata from Florence, the balık ekmek from Turkey, and the rou jia mo (肉夹馍) in China. There are many others.

There’s a lot of debate about what exactly a sandwich is. People get into semantic arguments about wraps, hot dogs, burgers (see my separate post on burger theory), and so on. It’s interesting and important to some people. But actually, I can brush that to one side, because a lot of what I’ll discuss below is general applicable to any bread / filling construction.

See Wikipedia for a good definitional discussion about the sandwich, including regional variations and slang, plus even some court rulings about what constitutes a sandwich.

(My least favourite word for sandwich, by the way, is “butty”, a sandwich that’s buttered on the outside and then grilled. Whether you’re into it or not is irrelevant. C’mon, people. You know that’s 80% “butt”, right? Who can say that with a straight face?)

Sandwiches are filling and can be pretty nutritious (or absolutely not… it depends a lot on the ingredients), tasty, and balanced. Many sandwiches are served wrapped — I’ll talk about that below — even if they’re to be eaten immediately. They can be toasted or served untoasted. They can be vegetarian or otherwise.

The core elements of the sandwich are:

• Bread / Filling match
• Filling (stay with me)
• Lubricant / Flavour conductors (sauce/fats)
• Liquid isolation through layering (less important if eating immediately)
• A wrap (to provide pressure)
• And other optional elements.

I’ll examine all of these below.

But before any of that…

Start with Excellent Ingredients

Something I learned from eating in Europe is that using quality ingredients makes everything better.

In places like France, Italy, Spain and presumably many other countries where I haven’t lived, there’s a culture of selling good things at markets that taste great. Tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, meats and cheeses that are stand-alone treats, and so on. This is why European food often contains few ingredients — you don’t want to drown any of them out.

One ingredient that makes up almost all the visual appeal of a sandwich plus half the bulk is the bread. You can’t have a great sandwich with bad bread. It’s not always easy to get good bread — many cultures aren’t bread-centric (shout out to places like France, Germany, and Turkey, where delicious, fresh bread is abundant). Just do the best you can. Consider making your own bread — I find it therapeutic!

But it doesn’t stop at bread, of course. Your fillings and sauces should all be top-notch. A general guideline is that they should be delicious enough to eat on their own (something I learned from Serious Eats). This will make them more expensive — so use fewer of them.

The Bread and Filling must Match

After good ingredients, we can start to think of harmony between them. The first element of harmony is that a sandwich’s bread must match the filling.

You shouldn’t put soft fillings in too dense a bread, as the bread will overpower the fillings. Similarly, don’t put too hard fillings in a soft bread. It’ll just seem mismatched. There’s of course leeway for creativity, but the extremes (e.g. a steak in a soft roll) are what should be avoided.

Similarly, the density of individual fillings should match. Imagine, for example, eating a sandwich of an uncut steak in soft bread with sliced tomatoes. As you tear through the bread, you’d get caught on the chewy steak, and drag whole slices of tomato out as you tried to bite through the meat. Even if the flavours were good, the whole experience would be unpleasant.

There’s no “correct” bread for a sandwich. Generally, Italian Subs are made in a ciabatta-like roll, something denser than a baguette. But there’s room for variation. The shape is more traditional than anything else — you can get a lot of the effect of a good deli sandwich with a square-cut loaf of bread.

Given the outside of a sandwich is always bread of some kind, I’d imagine there’s more variation in fillings than there is in bread. Still, there is a huge variety of bread options, even in common supermarkets, so be creative.

Fillings Must Be Harmonious in Flavour / Texture

Secondly, choose good fillings that match each other or provide pleasant contrast.

Typically, sandwich fillings are a combination (with no item mandatory) of

• Meat, either deli meat or cooked meat
• Cheese
• Vegetables / Salad ingredients
• Other carbs, often chips, fries, or crisps (doesn’t matter what you call them where you come from… they all can work!)
• Sauce
• Pickes / Relish
• Bread coverings (usually butter or mayonnaise)

There’s no fixed rule here for flavour and texture harmony. But a few rules that I like to employ are

• Choose fillings that bring out the best in the others. The sum of the fillings is greater than the individual fillings alone.
• You can combine and contrast both flavour and texture.
• Don’t choose too many fillings. More isn’t always better.
• Keep the fillings between the bread (though it’s ok to use pressure). You have to be able to bite the final result.

The most important thing is that there be some harmony or complementarity of flavour and texture, both between the fillings themselves and between the filling and bread.

One way to think of flavour and texture harmony is contrast. This can be, for example

• Salty + Sweet, like deli meats + relish (which is also acidic to cut through the meat’s fat)
• Umami + Bitter, e.g. Vegemite/Marmite + alfalfa sprouts, or potato crisps + salad ingredients
• Savoury + Spicy, like a burger patty + kimchi (which is also fat + acid)
• Fat + Acid, like meat and pickles or relish
• Crispy + Soft, like lettuce in a soft bun, or crunchy potato chips in a soft roll

There’s obviously a lot more you can do with this. The key is not to overwhelm with any one flavour. For example, I had a burger recently that was two patties and fried onions. It was so overwhelmingly savoury and umami, without anything to balance it out. I would have preferred less savoury, and maybe some pickles and a sweet relish to balance it out, plus the crisp of a lettuce. (I guess I’m a burger traditionalist. It’s hard to beat a great cheeseburger, in my book!)

When you’ve got ingredients that are the wrong texture, think about what you can do to change it. It might mean pre-cooking vegetables, chopping ingredients up, or using more of a sauce.

Use Seasoning / Spice Generously

Related to filling is the importance of seasoning and spice on a sandwich. I’m giving this a generally broad category as it includes things that are also generally fillings, like pickles and relish.

Sandwich seasoning starts with salt and pepper. For many sandwiches, that may be enough.

But there are many other ways to season a sandwich. Some simple and common ones include

• Chilli of various kinds
• Paprika
• Curry powder
• Coriander/Cilantro
• Pickles (or chilli pickles!)
• Dried herbs
• Anchovy or anchovy oil

One tip from Eater is to think about adding a squeeze of lemon onto fatty meats as the final touch before serving a sandwich, just as you would for a regular dish. You could broaden this to other acids.

Another interesting idea is “spiking the mayo”, from Fred Hua of Nha Minh. You can add anything you like — garlic, ginger, spices, curry, salt, even other fats like olive oil or butter — to add more flavour to it.

Use Sauces and Fats as Lubricants and Flavour Conductors

This is an interesting concept that I subconsciously knew, but never realised until it was explained to me: The role of sauces and fats in a sandwich isn’t just to add flavour. They’re there to provide flavour conductors between items and to generally add moisture to a sandwich, making it easier to eat.

In Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, the author describes the importance of fat in carrying flavour. It definitely does that, which is why so many sauces have oil in them. But there are some sauces you can use that don’t have much oil but which do help with conducting flavour.

A sandwich that’s too dry is unpleasant to eat. You have to constantly be washing it down with a drink just to be able to get through it. Sauces help navigate the dryness and conduct the flavour between the ingredients.

Think of sauces like salad dressings. Salads can be dry and difficult to eat without a dressing. But a dressing moistens them and holds ingredients together. In fact, salad dressings often make good sandwich sauces.

The way I use sauces in sandwiches is to never have too many dry ingredients together. I often layer dry with wet, e.g. a cheese, then sauce, then deli meat, then tomato, then another cheese — and so on.

I would similarly avoid putting too many wet ingredients together, e.g. tomato, relish, and pickles all together. It’s fine in terms of flavour, but pressure when wrapping or biting would make it squish apart.

If your dry ingredients have some moisture in them, as do some meats and cheeses, then you can be less obsessive about separation.

Bonus tip — Many people are married to using mayonnaise or butter as the “insulator” of the bread. In fact, many people who use mayonnaise don’t realise you can use butter, and vice versa. The reality is that there are many things you can use here!

Layer Intelligently for Liquid Isolation and Flavour/Texture Complementarity

This is more important for sandwiches that are served cool and maybe have to travel with you somewhere. When I take a sandwich on a hike, I pay attention to layering so it doesn’t get soaked after a half-day trip from my kitchen to where I’m eating the sandwich.

The most important thing for me, here, is to ensure that

• Not all the liquids go together, as there’d be too much pressure on them and they’d squirt out the sides
• There are at least two barriers between the bread and the sauces or wet ingredients.

For example, if I want a sandwich to last half a day, I use thicker bread, butter it to add insulation, and then cover the bread with at least one protector, like a slice of cheese, a slice of deli meat, a big slice of lettuce (dry) — sometimes two of the above. After that, I will put more sauces and / or wet ingredients.

If there are more wet ingredients, then I can put other dry layers between them.

So an example of a sandwich construction would be

1. Bread (dry)
2. Butter (lubricant / sealant)
3. Lettuce (dry but contains moisture)
4. Mustard (wet)
5. Meat (dry)
6. Relish (wet)
7. Cheese (dry)
8. Tomato (wet)
9. Butter (lubricant / sealant)
10. Bread (dry)

Of course, that’s not a fixed rule, and some things are between wet and dry (e.g. lettuce). You can have two dry things together, or two wet things, and it’ll probably still work. It’s just a rule of thumb to not cluster too many ingredients of the same moisture content together.

There are other concepts of layering that you can employ. You can think about

• Layering warm and cool elements alternatingly
• Layering flavours and textures, e.g. not clustering fats (e.g. no cheese next to the butter)
• Putting the “feature” element at the bottom (like on a burger), so you crunch through the condiments to get to the prize
• Maintaining symmetry, with the feature elements in the middle

Again, there’s no exact rule — just some things to think about rather than mindlessly putting things together.

Apply Pressure with a Wrap

Last in the order of operations, but not least by any means in importance, is the wrap.

Wrapping is something I learned when researching deli subs, also known as “Italian American deli subs” or sometimes “hoagies” (I’ve heard conflicting opinions about whether they’re the same or different).

A sub has to be wrapped even if it’s going to be eaten immediately. The same is generally true of other sandwiches, too. You wrap it, let it rest for a minute, cut it, and serve it.

The wrapping provides pressure, which distributes the flavours around in your sandwich. Your layers of moist and dry ingredients compress together, the sauces move around, and the sandwich becomes one integrated food.

The reason you wrap rather than just apply pressure is so that the pressure is even around the sandwich — it’s from all sides. Also, it stops ingredients from escaping out the sides.

As a bonus, the wrapping paper makes for a convenient way to eat a sandwich without it leaking everywhere.

Other Elements

There are a few other elements worth mentioning for sandwich preparation. These are non-critical, but they can help!

Firstly, heat. Another one of the big four from Samin Nosrat. Applying heat to many sandwiches does help them — either toasting them in a sandwich press or in an oven. But it really depends on the sandwich and it’s not critical for every sandwich.

Heat really brings out proteins in a sandwich. Meat, cheese, and tofu all benefit from being warm (heat them up separately from things that should stay cold, like lettuce). But heating is not mandatory. It’s also really simple to apply, so I don’t think it’s particularly revolutionary to say “Consider warming it up.”

But you can think of creative ways of heating a sandwich up — for example, to heat up the bread, and maybe even toast the butter or oil onto the bread before using it. The rest of the sandwich can be cold, even!

Secondly, drink pairing. I’m no expert on this either, but I do know that some sandwiches go better with others. There’s no “rule”, and you can do what you like, but some concepts around drink pairing might help you find something you like even more. This article from Serious Eats is an excellent guide.

There may be other elements worth considering in sandwich construction. I’ll update this as I learn more!

Wrap Up

No joke intended… I end most articles with a wrap-up!

I hope the above was useful in organising your own thoughts on sandwich construction theory.

I have a lifetime of sandwiches ahead of me, and intend to learn a lot more. If there’s more you can share with me I’d welcome it. Share a pic if you can.

Resources

Below are some resources I enjoyed reading and learning from in studying sandwich construction.

• Why are Deli Subs Better than Homemade Ones? by Ethan Chlebowski, an awesome YouTube video that tells you how to make sandwiches at home as good as any you could get at a deli.
• How to Build a Better Sandwich — Serious Eats. I love Serious Eats. This article isn’t exhaustive but has many creative suggestions for things like condiments and flavour combinations.
• Reddit’s /r/eatsandwiches. It’s an inspiring and supportive community. They post sandwiches they’ve eaten (regardless of whether they’ve made them themselves or not) and discuss what makes them great.

If there are other resources out there, let me know!