"sandwich" news and stories

Several weeks ago, I attended a grilled cheese and wine pairing seminar hosted by Laura Werlin, the guru of grilled cheese. You know a person really has a passion about a subject when they've penned two books about it (her newest is Grilled Cheese, Please!).

First, we sat down to four glasses of wine and a cheese plate with six different cheeses (from soft to hard). Instead of digging straight into the sandwiches, Laura had everyone taste the wines, then taste the cheeses to understand the foundation of the sandwiches. All of the cheeses on our plates and in the sandwiches came from Wisconsin and ranged from Gouda to Gorgonzola. One of the most important tips Laura shared with us was about the color of cheese vs. the wine. According to Laura, "The whiter the cheese, the lighter the wine."

Each of the unique creations we tasted came from her two books. Below are three of the six creations we tried, along with the its paired wine.

Dutch Grilled Cheese made with Marieke's Gouda
This sandwich was just full of buttery goodness. The gouda, paired with caramelized onions, cumin and rye bread with caraway was a successful balance of sweet and savory. Sometimes caramelized onions overpower the other ingredients in a dish, they complemented this sandwich because they were combined with Gouda -- a strong, distinctive cheese. The Cotes du Rhote was complex but let all of the flavors of the sandwich come through.
Paired with: Jean Luc Columbo "La Redonne" 2007 Cotes de Rhone (Rhone, France)

Happy National Sandwich Day!

Sandwiches are an ancient tradition, dating back to the 1st century B.C., when Rabbi Hillel the Elder created the Passover tradition of filling two matzohs with a mixture of apples, chopped nuts, spices, wine and herbs -- an elaborate dish, and certainly a fry cry from today's simplified peanut butter and jelly concoctions. The term sandwich, coined in 1762, emerged in England in reference to slices of bread filled with cold cuts, predecessors of today's array of fillings.

From French dips to Fluffernutters, Monte Cristos to simple grilled cheeses, sandwiches cover an ingredient listing spanning the alphabet -- and including anything that can feasibly fit between two slices of bread. What's your favorite local sandwich? Describe its contents in the comments.

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Zach Calkins, Vice President of Culinary Development for the sandwich chain Quiznos, recently gave YumSugar insight into how a nationwide eatery translates the food world's biggest hits into menu items that successfully appeal to Quiznos's customers.

So do all of their creations make it on the menu? Absolutely not. Head over to YumSugar to read what has worked and what doesn't.

Hello, St. Louis! After reading about this creamy, crunchy, multitextured sandwich via St. Louis blogger Chris Freeland at countrypolitancooking.com, I wanted to book a flight to get there for the next day's opening of the local Soulard farmers market. Chris mined local producers for both red and white radishes, Claverach farms sunflower sprouts (which some say are tastier than mung, red clover and other sprout varieties and are packed with vitamins and protein), the award-winning Baetje Farms Saint-Genevieve goat's-milk cheese ("like butter but tangy," he says), and Black Bear Bakery's pumpernickel bread. Combining them, in a nod to his radish-sandwich-loving grandfather, Chris creates something completely of its place, something of memory, and something that tastes deliciously of spring.

For more on radish varieties you might want to try at the market, or plant yourself, see this story.

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McDonald's at Chicago's Navy Pier. Photo: jwrb,Flickr.

A Chicago man has filed a lawsuit against McDonald's Corporation after he says he swallowed a gold earring in his sandwich.

The man purchased the sandwich on Aug. 11 from the McDonald's at Chicago's Navy Pier, according to the suit filed on Wednesday in the circuit court of Cook County, Ill.