Posted: 2025-10-20
🔗 Introduction
"Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming — WOW — What a Ride!"~ Apocryphal, often attributed to Hunter S. Thompson
This is no mere BLT recipe: this is a roadmap to a weaponised sandwich. It's a love letter to lipids and a sonnet to sodium. Your cholesterol score will go up 3-5 points simply by reading this, and that's okay.
The central challenge with this approach is timing. We're frying the bread in bacon fat and butter, so it only keeps the "crispy on the outside, soft on the inside" texture for a few minutes before it turns into a greasy mess. Generally you want to get everything you possibly can ready ahead of time, and then fry the bread last, assemble quickly and eat while it's still fresh. These sandwiches are great for informal entertaining where a group can pounce on them as soon as they're ready with a beer in hand. Making a mess is kind of the point.
🔗 Ingredients (Per-Sandwich)
- Pane di Casa, sliced double thickness (1.5-2cm)
- Streaky bacon, 4 pieces
- Half a small tomato, sliced
- Shredded iceberg lettuce
- Kewpie or other light mayo
- Sweet Baby Ray's, Hickory Smoke and Brown Sugar
- Sweet onion relish
- Butter (full salt; not margarine)
- Mersey Valley Classic Cheddar
🔗 Prep
- Assemble ingredients.
- Slice the tomato.
- Slice the cheese.
- Slice the bread.
- Spread the bread on both sides lightly with mayo.
The Kewpie/mayo improves the searing characteristics of the bread by providing reducing sugars for the Maillard reaction.
You really want everything basically ready to go as soon as the frying's done.
The thicker bread slices are really critical as we need the bread to hold structural integrity.
🔗 Fry
- Fry the bacon in a pan. Place on a paper towel in a vain effort to reduce the greasiness.
- Keep the bacon grease in there. Add butter: as much as you feel is right.
- Fry the bread on both sides in the bacon grease-butter mixture. There should be just enough that it is almost all soaked up and incorporated into the bread. "Scrub" the pan with the bread to pick up some of the bacon fond. If you over-fry the bread it can become a little too hard and dry — we want a solid chew.
🔗 Assemble
Put the various components together any way you please. Don't overthink it: for many other sandwiches, you can engineer the arrangement of ingredients so that the bread does not absorb too much moisture. That doesn't apply here: you have to eat this straight away regardless, so just throw it all together.
If you are making more than one of these: make them one at a time so they can be eaten in realtime.
🔗 Eat
Eat with friends and beer. It should be messy and fun. Put down what you're carrying for an hour or two. Sharing ridiculous sandwiches with people you care about is a great respite.
Checkin
Version: 1
Written: 2025-10-20
Written on: 10mg olanzapine since 2025-07-20, 7.5mg before that - likely causing severe cognitive impairment
Mental health was: poor - estimate 20% brain