Michael Symon's Live to Cook_ Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen - Michael Symon [18]
Sandwiches, on the other hand, are great anytime, all the time, year-round, for breakfast, lunch, or dinner; the only thing that limits your sandwich repertoire is your imagination.
I compose a sandwich the way I do a finished dish on a plate: it should achieve a balance of textures and flavors. Just as soups need a great base, so, too, do sandwiches. And that base is bread, of course. You need a great bread—hard or soft, depending on the sandwich, but I usually prefer a sturdy bread. A sandwich always needs some crunch, if you ask me. Potato chips are one of my favorite ingredients to put on sandwiches, but you can also get crunch from raw vegetables or lettuces. Sandwiches need a creamy element, like mayonnaise, aioli, or cheese. And of course they need a little bit of acid, whether from something like a tomato or a smear of mustard, or—you guessed it—pickled vegetables. Add a little bit of heat if you wish, some chilies, fresh or pickled.
The only sandwich that doesn’t fit any rules is peanut butter, honey, and banana—which Liz makes for me—toasted in a pan. I guess you could say it’s a sandwich that can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or dessert!
Sweating and Caramelizing
Two techniques that I use a lot, and that are very important to flavoring a dish—every thing from soups and sauces to braises—are sweating and caramelizing.
Sweating an onion or any aromatic vegetable means cooking it gently in a little oil or butter until it becomes translucent without giving it any color or browning it in any way (which would create sweeter, more complex flavors). Try to keep the ingredient in a single layer so that it cooks evenly. Sweating will deepen the aromatic’s effect on the finished dish and is very important. Generally, the longer you sweat vegetables, the greater the final flavor impact.
I always hit the vegetables with a little salt as they’re sweating, which helps to extract moisture, concentrating flavor, and begins the seasoning process for the finished dish. I never miss an opportunity to sweat.
In addition to vegetables, fish bones and the shells from shellfish to be used for stock are usually sweated as well, again to develop flavor.
Caramelizing, which means cooking vegetables until they brown, adds a different and complex sweetness to the finished dish. Part of the browning comes from actual caramelization of the natural sugars in the vegetable, but there is other browning going on in the process as well. Whereas sweating is always done in the service of some other dish, sometimes caramelization is an end in itself: caramelized onions are a great topping for steak and are the main ingredient in onion soup, for example; and I might caramelize endive to use as a side dish.
Both sweating and caramelizing are done over low heat, though caramelization requires a little higher heat. When you’re sweating vegetables, if the heat is too high, they’ll brown. The browning of sugars and carbohydrates happens at temperatures well above boiling, so browning can’t occur in a moist environment. You need to cook off much of a vegetable’s moisture before it will begin to brown. But you have to do this slowly; if you try to do it quickly by using high heat, you might burn the food instead, making the vegetable bitter rather than intensely sweet.
Generally, for lighter stock and sauces, the aromatics should be sweated. For brown sauces and for darker, sweeter, more complex preparations such as braises, the aromatics can be caramelized.
Sweating and caramelizing aromatic vegetables are used not just in these soups but throughout all the cooking I do. I rarely put a raw vegetable into a