Classic BLTs

Summer’s not over!  Stop it with that.  Put your Halloween-candy away, Mr. Drug Store.  See these tomatoes?  SUMMER TOMATOES.

Make no mistake, Fall is my favorite season, but I’m not rush rush rushing to get there.  I don’t want a pumpkin-spice latte just yet, thank you.  Pumpkin-spice lattes mean heavy sweaters and the end of peach season and oh, yeah – that little October wedding thing.  Nooooot ready for that (I need to find shoes first, and also probably write some vows.  …Details).

I’m hanging on to peaches and tomatoes as long as I can, and as long as the calendar says it’s still summer (we’ve got a whole 19 days left until the first day of Fall!), I’m making a damn BLT for dinner.  (With peaches, I make grilled cheese sandwiches.)

The trick to this BLT recipe (if you can really have a “recipe” for bacon, lettuce & tomato sandwiches) is cooking the bacon on a wire rack set over a sheet pan in the oven (holler, sheet pans!).  Have you done this before?  It’s the only way I make bacon, these days.  Oven-baking frees up our hands to do other things (like get into the mayonnaise and shop for shoes online), and eliminates the inevitable bacon grease splatter burn of the stove-top method.

Get into this BLT!  Summer’s still hot!  

Classic BLTs

The key to the tastiest BLT is finding the best ingredients you possibly can — these sandwiches don’t require much, so in the name of quality over quantity, you’ll want the nicest bacon, tomatoes, lettuce and mayonnaise you can find.  (You can use fancy breads, but I find classic white or whole wheat sandwich bread to be the most comforting/satisfying — just what I’m used to, I guess.  Feel free to class it up a bit though, if you feel so inclined).

Ingredients:

• 6 slices bacon
• 4 slices white or whole wheat sandwich bread
• mayonnaise
• 1 or 2 ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced
• pinch kosher salt and ground black pepper
• a few crisp leaves of romaine lettuce
• salt and vinegar potato chips, for serving

Directions:

Heat your oven to 400 degrees F.  Line a sheet pan with parchment paper or tin foil, and place a wire rack on top of the lining.

Lay the bacon strips on the wire rack, spacing them evenly apart, and bake them in the oven until brown and crisp, about 20 minutes or so.

While the bacon cooks, toast the bread slices until golden brown.

To assemble the sandwich, slather a healthy amount of mayonnaise onto two of the toast slices, top with crisp bacon, tomato slices, salt, pepper and romaine, and finish with the remaining slices of toast.  Use a sharp knife to cut the sandwiches in half, and serve immediately, with plenty of chips alongside.

Makes 2 sandwiches.