I didn't have time to make lunch when I left home this morning so went up to the work canteen (sorry "eatery", what a horrible word) to see if I could buy a sandwich. But there was nothing there. Well, there was stuff there, but it was all vile. Most of them look good on paper - the description on the outside of the box sounded fine - but when you actually pick them up and look at them, they don't breath life into the taste buds. Its even worse if you remember eating them before. So many of them are boring and insipid. Especially the tiny number without meat - whoever designs this range at Sodd-off-co obviously thinks that vegetables are for wimps. So I went round the corner to a real sandwich shop where they make larger sandwiches that taste better and they sell them cheaper.
This is special advice to anyone wanting to imitate the action of Sodexho and Gardner Merchant (as they used to be when they were almost as unimaginative thirty years ago) and all the rest of the lowest-common-denominator bulk food suppliers:
How to ruin your sandwiches
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Skimp on the bread
If I wanted a salad I wouldn't have asked for a sandwich. We want bread, and bread that is thick enough to be more than a wrap. The number one mistake of the big chains is using bread that is too thin for the filling. That makes an unmanageable floppy sandwich and greatly increases the hassle caused by: -
Too much gloop.
It probably looked OK when it left the factory. Now all that coleslaw or tarragon sauce or hummus or chopped crab or tuna mayonnaise has drained down to one end of the sandwich and is pressing out the clingfilm like a great ruptured vegetable hernia ready to burst all over the clothes of the sucker who tries to unwrap it. -
Always remember to use floppy, damp, soft, over-moist, crustless, thin-sliced bread.
Because we love bread that has the consistency of the mould on a fortnight-old piece of discarded cottage cheese that fell down the back of a dirty sofa. OK, you can't always use a baguette or ciabatta (though when you do you feel free to surcharge me about two pounds for it). But can't you get hold of ordinary bread with a decent crust and crumb? Or at least a stotty. -
Put meat in everything.
Because we all know all vegetarians are man-hating radical feminist ex-hippies left over from the seventies who could do with some good British beef up them. Yes, and fish is meat you prats. And no, vegans don't eat cheese. And human beings with a choice don't eat that vinegary slime you call "coleslaw", either. -
Use fake butter.
Not every sandwich needs butter. But no sandwich ever made needs OMG I'm so stupid I cant believe this crap isn't real butter!!!!!! Some kinds of simple cheap sandwiches in cheap cafes might make do with honest cheap margarine of the sort that comes in 5-kilo tubs and isn't even yellow. But the more it pretends to be butter the more it reminds you that butter tastes better. Unlike whatever it is that you use. -
Be careful not to use very much of anything.
Portion control is King. Thin sliced bread, some largish bits of bland tasteless meat (cheap chicken is so, well, cheap), a little unpleasant sandwich-spread-alike, a whiff of brownish-yellow curry sauce and call it a Chicken Tikka Marsala Sandwich. All the better if it is so thin it falls apart in the box and can't actually be eaten as a sandwich. Leave the customers wanting more. -
Keep it in a cold, clammy, fridge display
OK, you are going to tell me that there is some stupid law that says you have to keep food at precisely 2 degrees. Well, break it. If it is cold it gets condensation and becomes damp and disgusting and even more floppy and wimpish. Also I have to wait for it to warm before I can taste it properly or smell it. Or maybe that is the point? Perhaps you think that if I could smell your sandwiches in the shop I'd never buy one. -
"Brown" bread and other abortions
There's nothing wrong with white bread if that's what you want to use. Wholemeal bread tastes great and is better for your belly. But so-called "brown" bread is a pointless imitation. It looks a little like wholemeal and tastes worse than either. And all the other fake ways of inserting ickle-bickle bits of grain into white slice so Mummy doesn't have to feel guilty about feeding her oh-so-sensitive little Johnny your cotton-wool process bread and in her gratitude will pay you 90p a packet for it instead of 35p, yes they are all shit too. -
Pack it loosely and don't press down
More a fault of handmade sandwiches than the industrial-scale triangles-in-a-box. But some people just throw the filling on loosely and then put the top on. And it all falls to pieces before you have got it to wherever you are going to eat it, so you have a paper bag rotting away because the bottom is full of tomato slices and runny mayonnaise. When you have made a sandwich you press it down hard as you cut it with the knife, so it all holds together. That is how it is done. -
Overpackage
A triangular plastic box, with a sticky label obscuring the lid and one side, and another one over most of the other side, in a cardboard box, with a label all over the front of that? Anyone would think you didn't want the customers to see the sandwich. -
Stuff it with tiny amounts of all sorts of ingredients just to make the label look good.
The landlady of my local pub makes better sandwiches than you do. And most of them are simple. Just thick-sliced bread, a good layer of something that is probably cheap catering margarine, some slices of meat or cheese or some tuna mayonnaise, and perhaps a bit of salad and a sprinkle of salt and the odd tomato slice. Decent portions of everything. Nice and chunky and robust. But it works. A lot better than your "hot salmon" with all those fancy ingredients. Which I might actually rather like if there was enough of them to taste and they really were hot, instead of tasting like cheap tomato spread. -
Say there is aioli in it when there isn't.
Whatever that reddish splodge is neither smells nor tastes of garlic. It is not aioli. Oh I bet it probably passes some minimum standard for aioliness laid down by the OfficeforCondiments, but as far as I am concerned its not bloody aioli. If it was I'd have bought the sandwich. A decent bit of garlic might have kept me in the shop. -
Never use crusty bread.
What the hell's wrong with a crust? A proper crust, that is caramelised and crisp and even a little crunchy in places? This isn't just the sandwich makers, the supermarkets are addicted to soft, moist, podgy bread. Even their wholemeal bread. Especially their wholemeal bread. Its as if they think their customers will be put off by anything offering more resistance to the teeth than tissue paper. Last week at Sainsbury's I got some supposedly new-baked crusty wholemeal bread (it actually said "crusty" on the label) of the shelf and my fingers went right through. So I chucked it back. More and more often these days I see people walking up and down the aisles of the supermarket poking the bread to see if it actually has a crust as opposed to a slightly brown outer layer otherwise indistinguishable from the soggy interior. And more and more I see them walking off in disgust and buying the baguettes or ciabatta (if they have the money) or white sliced (if they don't). What's the point of supposedly baking the bread in the shop if it then comes out identical to factory white sliced anyway? -
Buy cheap and nasty hummus
I can't think of anything funny or remarkably angry to say about this. The three varieties of hummus on sale in our local Turkish shop, and the own-brands in Sainsbury's and Tesco's, all taste nice. Whatever you put in your sandwiches doesn't. It is runny and sour and greasy and has almost no chickpea taste or texture at all. -
Pretend to cater for vegetarians by making one token type of vegan sandwich
In your case its grilled or roast vegetables or something like that. They are frankly vile. Slimy and bitter and tasteless. When you supply a selection of sandwiches for a meeting very often all the roast vegetable ones are left over at the end and none of the others. Even while the vegetarians and vegans in the group are complaining that there is nothing they want to eat. Roast veg is a good idea if you can keep them reasonably firm or even crisp and put them on the bread just before you eat them with decent olive oil and plenty of freshly ground pepper and generous garlic - lashings of real garlic is almost a necessity. But yours look as if they were cooked the day before, smothered in something a little like vinegar, left in a vast vat overnight to settle into amorphous slime, slapped onto butterless bread so that all the cheap oil can soak in, trucked half way across the country for hours and then left all day in a cool cabinet slowly congealing in the dim, damp chill. Oh, they were? That's alright then.