During the worst of the Pandemic, one of our better local restaurants opened what I thought was an ingenious outdoor kitchen. It was a cookshack, really. There was no buildout required, since the structure had been the place they barbequed and “smoked” salmon.
What they perfected during this time was, as you might now guess, the SLT, and it blew me away. I’m a sucker for a great BLT–the sweet tomato acidity, lucious mayo mouthfeel, and the fulfilling double crunch of iced lettuce between toasted bread just make my day.
So it was an epiphany of sorts to find the SLT didn’t suffer for subbing sockeye for bacon. In fact, the mouthfeel was even better.
With good, ripe tomatoes coming on, and fresh local sockeye and silvers in affordable abundance (the key being the thin belly meat of smaller fish), I’m going to be making a raft of SLTs this summer.
What riffs are you other Onions playing off the venerable BLT?
I just watched a Pepin video on FB. He cooked arctic char fillets in a skillet, skin side down, because char has thin skin and no scales. Once the skin started to crisp, he covered the pan. Never flipped the fillets. The skin was as crisp as bacon, and delicious, his granddaughter confirmed.
I’ve never cooked char, which has flesh the color of salmon. But I DID do fish this way when I had a local fishery share, if the scaler had done a thorough job. It tasted like crispy chicken skin. And somewhere I learned (true?) that the most beneficial nutrients in fish are in, and just under, the skin.
There is a local place, Slake, that does (or did?) a BLT on a brioche roll with aioli and onion marmalade. It technically lacks lettuce since it subs arugula, which is cruciferous, not a lettuce. It is a mammoth sandwich. I ate a lot of them when I worked downtown.
Years ago, I saw a much older Pepin video on this technique and now that you mentioned trout, I seem to recall that he was using whole sides of small fish so probably trout.
I dislike raw, fresh tomatoes, so I make a BLN - bacon, lettuce and nectarine sandwich, with a drizzle of balsamic glaze. I mash the nectarines a little, so they don’t slide off the bread too badly. Delicious to me.
I don’t care for fresh raw tomatoes. In the minority I know. But crispy fried green tomatoes and avocado to go along with the BL. Very good. And if you want to gild the lily and have some leftover fried shrimp from the night before, so much the better. Mayo and toasted bread.
I have made many tomato/lettuce sandwiches without the bacon. The tomatoes must be at the zenith of ripeness, though. Imho they are the true summer sandwich, besides chicken salad. I have also made up ‘bacon mayo’ ( made from leftover bacon—if there is any) for the tomato sandwich (now making it a BLT of sorts?) that satisfies that extra ‘umami’ taste need, without having to freshly cook up more strips. Maybe that’s whats for dinner tonight!
Amazon has a variety of bacon jams. I like Stonewall Kitchens maple bacon onion jam, and TBJ bacon jam. Just a thin schmear on the bread/roll is all that’s needed for a lot of bacon flavor.
