Bread recommendations for home-made BLT?

[chocolatetartguy]

OK, I have the Fatted Calf bacon and my home-grown Oregon Spring and Black Prince tomatoes. What bread will stand up to my ingredients? Saturday I kept getting to bakeries right after closing: Cheeseboard, Bread Workshop.

[himbeer]

burp from my 2! bacon, cucumber, tomato on toast sandwiches. just went to my local grocery store, the one owned by Palestinians for the bread and bacon. didn't use mayo, that is for a club sandwich. yum.

[chocolatetartguy]

Umm, pork. Is spicy coppa the same thing as capicola?

[Windy]

I think so, but I'm no expert

[Windy]

All this BLT business made me hungry. I stopped by Lucca for ravioli on my way home from Ritual and got 1/4 pound of their spicy coppa, thin sliced, and a hard sour roll.

Enjoyed the roll with thick slices of vine-ripe shady ladies, extra virgin olive oil, and coppa.

But I spilled some fancy oil on the cutting board, and sopped it up with a slice of stale Tartine olive bread, which was even better with the coppa and tomatoes.

[Chuckles the Clone]

Orowheat Oat-Nut bread toasted makes the perfect quotidian BLT. But somehow I
feel bad recommending supermarket sandwich bread for a Fatted Calf event.

[chocolatetartguy]

Actually I did buy a loaf of that as a backup just in case I couldn't find an artisan loaf. I ended up buying the last Pullman loaf of Acme Whole Wheat Seeded at Andronico's. Funny thing, the Acme loaf cost less than the Orowheat.

I sliced the Acme a little on the thick side and it soaked up the tomato juices without falling apart. I'm a bit of a purist, so no toast, avocado, etc but I had forgotten how good a BLT could be. The Oregon Spring (red, juicy, midsized, sweet) tomatoes worked better than the Black Prince (blackish, smaller, milder). I'll remember again on Thursday when I dispose of the other half a pound of bacon.

[Carb Lover]

A good BLT is absolutely dreamy...

Did you use rindless or rind-on FC bacon? Speaking of, I'm totally out and need to get my bacon fix again! Time to head up to the East Bay...

[chocolatetartguy]

I used rindless at their suggestion. I like my BLT to be easy to eat, so no toast, no rind, no crusty bread, not too much mayo. Actually my 1.5 sandwiches stayed together for most of the meal.

I loved the sandwich, but am not sure FC bacon is that much better than others. It was very lean and certainly was very good, but I've pretty much liked every bacon I can remember except pepper bacon. I may not be that discriminating where rendered pork fat is concerned.

[Morton the Mousse]

An interesting thing about Fatted Calf is that their products are not always consistent. As with anything artisinal there are small changes from week to week, and some weeks it is more delicious than others. The bacon this week was leaner than usual and, although good, it was not their best.

[Carb Lover]

Mine was def. not lean. As I said before, the most fat I've ever seen rendered from 4 strips of bacon. Makes sense what Morton said about variability.

[chocolatetartguy]

Mine rendered surprisingly little fat. I like my bacon fatty. I'll give it another try next week. I'm told that grocery store bacon isn't that much less than FC.

[Morton the Mousse]

CTG & CL - you are both right. I cook FC bacon every week. Most weeks, I get about a cup of rendered fat from my pound of bacon and I have to empty the frying pan several times to keep the splattering at a minimum. This week, I only had a couple of tablespoons of rendered fat, if that, and I never had to empty the pan. This was an unusually lean batch of bacon.

[Windy]

I've always loved the BLTs at Cafe Intermezzo, which serves them on a sweet whole grain bread and adds avocado. I think the key is toasting it.

[Morton the Mousse]

Oh, yeah. You gotta toast it...in the bacon grease.

[rworange]

OK, this finally got to me.

The bacon crawl begins ... I've been working out for it with all that chorizo.

So, how does one toast bread in bacon grease? Only a thin bit to coat the bottom of the pan? Both sides or only the interior side?

[The Chowhound Team]

To continue the discussion of how to toast bread in bacon grease, please head over to the Home Cooking board, where rworange has started a thread: http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/...
There other home cooking 'hounds can chime in with their recommendations.

[chocolatetartguy]

Actually no, I'm not that obsessive and I don't usually eat mayonnaise.:) So far I haven't gone to much trouble since I usually go to the BFM on Saturdays anyway and have only to step out my back door for the tomatoes, which didn't really require much care.

[Carb Lover]

Well, it looks like you are halfway there. Since you are going to all this trouble, you better be making your own mayo too. ;-)

My FC bacon, spinach, tomato didn't even have the best bread (TJ's sprouted wheat) and it was still great. If Acme were convenient, I'd go w/ one of their loaves. However, TJ's has decent sliced loaves too. I tend to prefer wheat to white, and def. no sourdough!

Enjoy!

[The Blissful Glutton]

Whole foods sells this bread called california black bread. It has only 4 ingredients or something like that. It is the best sliced bread you will ever eat. the same company also makes a white bread called great white bread. it is a lovely and dense white bread which would work quite well.

[himbeer]

when i'm in a poached egg on toast or bacon, tomato, cucumber on toast mood, I'll just buy the generic white bread at walgreens.

[JasmineG]

I'm a big fan of the Acme Pain au Levain, but The Bread Garden's Pan French would be nice too.

[rworange]

Ok, an even worse recomendation because it is in SF Ferry Plaza on Saturday, but I would be remiss not to add it ... Downdown Bakery's Como bread ... it is a dense, yeasty white bread ... no chewey sourdough crust to interfere with the BLT. It is like a loaf of classic house-baked white bread, but that dense texture is just the perfect match for tomatoes.

Closer to home, I'd say Bread Garden's Salt Rising bread would be a nice match. The bakery slices the bread so you have uniform slices.

I'm not so into cutting my own rough-hewn slices from loaves like Acme for BLT's. The thickness interferes with the sandwich ... but others may have better luck with slicing.

Don't spit at me but ... House of Bread in Albany next to Nizza La Bela makes some nice organic breads and they slice. EVERY bread can be sampled, so you can decide how it would fit with your BLT tastes. No, it is not rock-star name bread. Yes, it is a franchise ... but flour is ground in-house and the breads are also made from scratch. Also, they have pretty long hours.

Semi-freddi is ok and they slice too.

[Robert Lauriston]

Acme's Pullman loaf would be the classic.

I would use Vital Vittles whole wheat. It's very soft but firms up when toasted to a golden brown, and pairs well with tomatoes.

[Morton the Mousse]

I use Acme Pain au Levain. You might drop by Tuesdays Farmers Market to get avocados and Blue Heron Little Gems.