Saturday, April 18, 2015

BLT

This photograph has nearly 5,500 views on Flickr.


All week long I've been getting notifications of members favoriting photographs of hamburgers by the dozens.

It's the dumbest things that get the views and favorites like a bowl of cereal or a glass of Ovaltine.

Maybe they're wondering why their hamburgers don't look as good. Maybe they're wondering why this BLT looks better than theirs. Here's the answer: it's not pre-sliced sandwich bread. That kind of bread will compress inside your mouth and stick like wallpaper to your upper palate. See how unevenly this bread is cut? See its wide open crumb? The second thing is bright fresh vegetables. Bright green, bright red. This is true with all of the hamburgers.

Except the hamburger I'm making right now in the wee hour of the morning. I've been waiting for the baked bread to cool and for myself to be sufficiently starved. I only have to slice a fresh bun and toast the inside, everything is ready to go, cole slaw, pineapple, Philadelphia cream cheese mixed with feta, freshly baked bun, fried heavily seasoned hamburger patty. An Hawaiian hamburger due to the pineapple.

13 comments:

rcocean said...

Chip - do you actually eat all this bread you make? How do you stop from getting diabetes from all the carbs?

Pure luck or careful planning?

AllenS said...

I love BLTs!

edutcher said...

The bread has to be toasted.

Everybody knows that.

PS Some people are natural carb loaders. They need it.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

I am with ed on this, toasting is required! But it looks like a great sandwich.

And while I am throwing pigs under the bus, better a BLT than a Reuben!

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

(1) I'm not a big fan of close-ups of food. Seems to me that food is best viewed at about arm's length. Don't get me started on those macro lens, hyper slow motion TV commercials. Unappetizing, to say the least.

(2) I've learned when searching for GIFs on the innercloud, it's best to use terms like "reverse cowgirl" or "girl on top." If you search for "blowjob" or "rear entry," you'll get some images of gay dudes thrown in there and who the hell needs that? Real life is shocking enough.

(3) I've stepped away from some bad internet advice. I was doing my deadlifts barehanded, double overhand. The advice was to build strength in your grip. No crutches. Not even chalk.

But the fear of dropping got to be too much so I just picked up a pair of straps. All I can say is "Fuck, what a difference." That's the way of the future, baby. I'll work my grip some other way.

(4) So I'm getting over a cold and yesterday I'm deadlifting and I finish the 9th rep and I'm overcome by a coughing fit, which was weird because I barely had a cough at all. I've got one more rep to go, and I'm strapped to the bar, and fuck, I AM NOT LETTING GO.

So I'm bent over and I'm hacking like crazy and up comes this sticky yellow paste. Talk about gross!

So, yeah, I do the last rep and then I clean myself up. Talk about appetizing!

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Yum. The hamburger looks amazing as well.

Aridog said...

There is no such thing as a bad BLT.

One of my two favorite sandwiches, anywhere. One is the BLT and the other is a "Dinty Moore"...e.g., corned beef, swiss cheese and finely ground sweet creaming cole slaw. Fortunately, though odd perhaps in my Arab majority area, we still have a "Deli" that makes both with rough cut fresh baked bread.

Now that my taste buds are sparked up (thanks a pant load Chipper :-)...that's where I'm going for lunch...one of the two will satisfy me, or maybe one of each and take the halves home.

Chip Ahoy said...

Toasted bread on BLT scratches my palate and I don't like that. And this bread is worse when toasted.

I don't eat much bread. In every single instance I go, goddamnit I got no bread around here. I make bread of some sort for every single sandwich. Pan fried is easiest. I can make a couple tortillas like that *bang*.

rcocean said...

Chip thanks for the response.

BLT's are great - Pastrami on Rye is even better. Reuben's are hit and miss, they need to be made just right for me to like it. Too much sauerkraut or the wrong kind and its ruined for me.

rcocean said...

Kinda like Hash Browns. If made fresh and just right - they can't be beat.

But people either under cook or over cook them. And the frozen microwave kind are awful. I've had expensive Breakfasts and the eggs, bacon, toast, etc. are great but they serve microwaved Hash browns. I never go back.

ricpic said...

There is nothing, I mean NOTHING as good as a BLT when it's done right.

ricpic said...

And what makes a BLT double plus good? A lime coke.

Just as a pastrami on rye is not truly awesome unless accompanied by a Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Tonic.

Chip Ahoy said...

Arm's length food.

Yes. That is the best. As if you are sitting there. Best for magazines, Denny's menus, fliers, mailers, coupons, what have you.

Then there's what the dog sees when it sniffs the table.

And there's what the cat sees when it slinks across the table. And what the bird sees when it lands right on it. And what I see when I play with my food. GODDAMNIT CHIP STOP PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD! I get that. But what's the fun in just sitting there eating it? In that setup I don't really understand the food and the food doesn't really understand me. That's just such a shallow one-direction relationship.

One magazine I looked at, um, the one everyone makes fun of, um, it's a Christmas gift subscription that I wish was Arizona Highways but instead is something about Southwest living, um, Sunset! Not my thing. Know why? Drop out cards, that's why. Drop out cards piss me off. It's a magazine thing. I'm an antimagazineite because of drop out cards and other annoying stapled inserts. It's wrong and the practice abuses readers.

So, Sunset had a spread about variations of soup. It amounts to doing anything you wish. All the photographs of soup were from directly above. I can visualize the photographic setup. Very expensive. Backlit table. Umbrella diffusions for lights surrounding the whole table. Camera hoisted directly above to mathematic precision fit with a lens that keeps focus edge to edge. The result was unimaginatively unimaginative. Their equipment and technical precision and numerical fidelity produced images devoid of human creativity. In their magazine they showed colored circles and called them flavorful soups. Everything is left to imagination by reading ingredients that are not apparent to pureed html color code field.

And I thought, "Jesus Christ, these people need me." They do. My simple self. My simple autodidact self does better than this with absolutely no training at all. Just intuition.

Intuition says, you're right, arm's length is best. As if you sitting there enjoying a meal placed in front of you. Then after a couple years you get tired of that but return to it consistently and regularly. This set has such a photo in it also shown that was almost put up there on top instead on down in the stack, but I got tired of all all those thousands of arm length photos of food.