Dill, Baby, Dill: The Pickle Sandwich Is A Thing Of Beauty
The internet: What a place! It is a fount of strange and wonderful ideas, from Cheddar Bay Biscuit-crusted fried chicken to queso using cream of chicken soup. It is here on the internet, about a month ago, that I saw a sandwich with dill pickles in place of bread. Ideas like this are typically good for a "like" or a retweet, nothing more, as many of these suggestions are more novel than practical.
But I kept thinking about the pickle sandwich. I played it out in my head: You've got that baguette-like shape. You've got the crunch. The neutrality of bread is replaced by pickle's dill-and-brine. It could actually work!
Over the weekend, I headed to my closest Jewish delicatessen, Kaufman's in Skokie, Illinois, and ordered my favorite sandwich on the menu: The New York Special, with corned beef, chopped liver, sliced red onions, and horseradish. I also picked up pickles from the in-store barrel (I had a choice of "new" and "old" and bought some of the latter, which have been brined longer).
Back home, I sliced the pickles lengthwise and transferred the corned beef and chopped chicken liver from the bread. The whole affair was messy, hard to pick up without fillings spilling out, so I inserted two toothpicks to hold everything in place.
Hoo-boy, was this great. As predicted, there was that satisfying crunch, and wouldn't you know it, dill pickles pair really well with corned beef and creamy chicken liver. The sandwich was a bit wetter than I'm used to, but this can be mitigated wrapped in a few layers of butcher paper.
This is essentially a carb-free sandwich, a souped-up lettuce wrap, a Jewish deli staple cranked up to 11. Unlike most internet fads, I can see myself adopting this going forward.
