6 Tips To Make The Best Sandwiches Ever

A sandwich is the easiest thing in the world to make and one of the easiest to make badly. Everybody has been handed one that was dry in the middle, soggy at the bottom, or falling apart before it reached the plate.

We make several thousand a week in Fortitude Valley — for breakfast, for corporate lunch, for rooms where the food has to still be good two hours after it left us. These are the six things that actually decide whether you end up with a good sandwich.

1. Choose the right bread

Bread is the structure, not the wrapper. Everything else in a sandwich is held up by it, so start there rather than treating it as the thing you had in the cupboard.

The rule that never fails: the wetter the filling, the denser the bread. Tomato, coleslaw or anything dressed needs a firm sourdough or a crusty roll. A dry filling like ham and cheese is happier in something soft.

And use bread you would eat on its own. A sandwich cannot rescue tired bread, and fresh bread will carry a fairly ordinary filling a long way.

2. Spread out the sauces

Spreads do two jobs. The obvious one is flavour and richness — mayonnaise, butter, mustard, avocado, hummus, chutney. The one people miss is waterproofing.

Take the spread all the way to the edges, not just the middle. A thin layer of fat across the whole face of the bread seals it against the moisture in the filling, and that single habit is the difference between a sandwich that holds for four hours and one that does not last one.

Be generous. There is nothing more disappointing than a dry sandwich, and no one has ever complained that the butter went to the crust.

3. Avoid sogginess

Sogginess is not bad luck, it is water finding bread. Everything wet in a sandwich is slowly leaking, and your job is to keep it away from the slices for as long as possible.

Three habits fix almost all of it. Put the wet things in the middle — tomato, beetroot and pickles belong between the meat and cheese, never against the bread. Dry your leaves properly after washing, because a wet lettuce leaf carries more water than the tomato does. And dress at the last minute if there is dressing at all.

If a sandwich has to sit for hours, leave the tomato out and hand it round separately. Everyone would rather add it than eat around a wet patch.

4. Take the edges off the onions

Raw onion is the single most divisive thing you can put in a sandwich, and it does not have to be. Slice it thin, then soak it in cold water for ten minutes and pat it dry.

That takes the harsh sulphur edge off while leaving the crunch and the sweetness, and it stops the onion being the only thing anybody tastes for the next hour. In a catering platter, where you have no idea who is picking up which half, it is worth doing every time.

5. Avoid your sandwich from falling apart

A sandwich collapses because the layers slide, and layers slide when they are all smooth and all in the same direction.

Build it so the pieces grip. Fold sliced meat into loose ruffles rather than laying it flat — the folds hold the layers above them. Put cheese directly against the bread on both sides so it acts like glue. Keep tall ingredients in the centre where the pressure is, not near the edges where they will be pushed out by the first bite.

Then cut it. A sandwich cut in half holds together better than a whole one, because the cut face gives everything somewhere to settle. Cut on the diagonal if you want it to look like somebody cared.

6. Keep it simple

The best sandwich most people have eaten had three or four things in it. The temptation is always to add one more, and the result is a sandwich where nothing tastes of anything in particular.

Pick one thing to be the point — the ham, the chicken, the cheese — and let everything else support it. One protein, one crunch, one creamy element, one thing with acid in it. That is a complete sandwich, and there is no fifth ingredient that improves it.

If you are making forty of them for a room, simple wins twice: it is quicker, and it means fewer people find something in there that they do not eat.