Heeeeeeeey, Crunchy Lady...

Sorry it's been a while.  Ever have one of those periods where you feel like nothing you do is important?  Like you're contributing nothing to the world or that your contributions hold no value to anyone outside of yourself?  Yeah, that's been 2013 in a nutshell so far.  But enough about me, let's talk about this...

That, my friends, is a croque-madame, and I'm hoping that it will change the way you think about grilled cheese sandwiches.  First, a little backstory...

The grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich is known in France as a croque-monsieur, or, if you pardon my French translation, "Mr. Crunch."  It's become such a staple dish for the French that the English feel the need to make fun of them for it.  At its best, it's bold ham and fancy cheese (usually Gruyère), grilled between fresh white bread and topped with béchamel sauce, then broiled until the sauce starts to brown.  At its worst, it's a Croque McDo, which just goes to prove that we Americans can ruin anything good.

A croque-madame (c'mon, even your French is good enough to figure out what this means) is a croque-monsieur with a fried egg on top.  It's called that because it looks like the sandwich is wearing a lady's hat.  For real.

Enough talk, let's make one of these bad girls.  First things first: if you don't know how to make béchamel sauce, let me tell you.  If you do, feel free to skip to the paragraph after the recipe (it's like a choose your own adventure book up in here).  Béchamel is a simple cream sauce, one of the 5 mother sauces of French cuisine, simple sauces that are the building blocks of other, more complex sauces.  This recipe is enough for 2-3 sandwiches, depending on how sloppy you want them to be:

Béchamel Sauce

1 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
1 cup whole milk, warmed
sea salt
ground nutmeg

Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat.  When butter is fully melted, whisk in flour until smoothly combined.  Cook over medium-low heat until golden, about 4-6 minutes; this will remove any floury taste.  (Congratulations, you just made a roux, from which you can make other mother sauces like velouté or espagnole.)  Whisk in your warm milk a little at a time, constantly stirring and adding milk until the sauce is about the consistency of half-and-half.  Season with salt and nutmeg to taste, then simmer for about 15-20 minutes stirring frequently.  Some recipes call for the addition of a little onion and clove during the simmer process, but if you're in a hurry you can get by without them.  If you do decide to add them, make sure to strain your sauce to keep the solids out of the finished product.

 For the croque-madame, I like to add a little depth to the sauce by grating some good Parmesan cheese (not the kind that comes in the green bottle) into the béchamel, which technically makes it a mornay sauce, I guess.  Leave it to an Italian to make French food better.

The rest of this is quite simple.  Ever made a grilled cheese sandwich?  Boom, you're qualified to make a croque-monsieur.  Ever fried an egg?  Boom, you just got a pay upgrade to croque-madame status.

Croque-madame Sandwich

2 slices of French bread (or Italian, or rye or whatever you have around/like best)
Ham, thinly sliced (I used Virginia ham, but, again, whatever your favorite ham is, bring it)
Cheese, grated or sliced (Gruyère or Emmentaler are awesome, Swiss will do in a pinch)
Dijon or whole-grain mustard
butter
seasoned salt
béchamel sauce
1 egg
fresh dill weed (settle down, Beavis, if you only have dried, that's fine)

Preheat your oven's broiler. Spread mustard on one slice of bread.  Pile on ham and grated cheese. Top with the other slice of bread.  I can't believe I just described how to make a sandwich.  Butter the outside of the sandwich (both sides, again, duh) and sprinkle with a little bit of seasoned salt.  Grill the sandwich in a skillet over medium heat.  When one side is brown, flip over and grill the other side.  Seriously, too much description.  When both sides are adequately grilled take it out of the skillet and put it on a foil-lined sheet pan.  Spoon some béchamel over the grilled sandwich and put it in the broiler.  Check it after a couple of minutes and take the sandwich out when the bechamel just starts to brown.  Fry the egg sunny side up in your hot skillet while the sandwich is in the broiler.  When the egg white is cooked through, remove the egg from the skillet and put it on top of your sandwich.  Garnish the top with a little bit of dill.

This is a fork-and-knife job, people.  For maximum enjoyment, try to get a little bit of egg yolk in each bite. Bon appétit...

Bay of Delicious Pigs

My four regular readers have probably noticed that I've written a few articles about pork loin roasts.  There's a good reason for that: they're relatively cheap (who isn't on a budget these days?) and, when prepared the way I tell you to, delicious.  At the risk of getting monotonous, I'm going to write one more article about pork loin and then I'm going to shelve this subject for a while.

Last time we talked pork, I was telling you my plan to make a bacon-wrapped loin roast with Hoppin' John and dijon carrot slaw.  As you can probably guess by the photo above, that all turned out great.  Still, since I was only cooking for the lady and me, we had a fair amount of leftover pork.  I'm a lazy man around the house (well, until my resolution kicks in) so most of the remaining pork got eaten as it was prepared.  However, toward the end of its shelf life, I decided to dress it up a little bit by turning those last few slices into sandwiches.

Specifically, Cuban sandwiches.  There's something mysterious and magical about the Cuban sandwich, despite its simplicity.  Roasted pork meets ham, plus Swiss cheese, mustard and pickles on crusty bread, all pressed together and served hot.  If it's that easy, why do so many attempts miss the mark?  As with most sandwiches, the answer is simple: if the bread's wrong, the whole thing is wrong.

Traditional Cuban bread is similar to commonplace Italian or French bread, but with the addition of lard to the dough.  My wife has been experimenting a lot with baking of late (despite my culinary prowess in several areas, I am a shitty baker) and makes a pretty impressive rustic Italian loaf.  However, when I suggested that she bake a pan Cubano for our sandwiches, she was put off a bit by the idea of larding up the bread.  I suspect that revulsion, along with the fact that the hardening lard makes the bread nearly inedible after 24 hours, explains why it's nearly impossible to get Cuban bread north of the Everglades.  We settled instead for some ciabatta mini-loaves.  Yeah, it's not authentic anymore and I'll bet you'll view the rest of this post with disdain, but you know what?  It wasn't going to be authentic anyway, because I was repurposing leftover pork loin instead of slow cooking a shoulder in mojo marinade anyway, so shut up.

I sliced my pork loin pretty thick and I knew I was going to need thinner pieces for these sandwiches, so I beat my meat.  Yup, just plopped it down there on the counter and pounded it out.  I'll be here all week, folks.  First, I had a little bit of tenderloin on these slices so I separated that into small chunks, then I hit the remaining loin portion with the tenderizer mallet until they were a little under 1/4-inch thick.  A layer of mayonnaise on the bottom bun (optional), a little bit of shredded Swiss cheese, then the tenderized loin, then the tenderloin chunks (the pinkish meat on top in the following photo).

If you ever find yourself in Ybor City, you might see something called a "sandwich mixto" which is another name for a Cubano, so named because it is a mix of ham and roasted pork.  You might also see something called "medianoche" which is a Cuban sandwich made with soft egg bread instead of crusty Cuban bread.  Nothing wrong with that either.  Anyway, throw some shredded Swiss cheese on top of the roasted pork (I like to layer the cheese throughout the sandwich to help it all stick together), then add thin sliced ham (you can also add some salami, but it's not an essential ingredient), more cheese, dill pickles and more cheese.  Dress the top bun with yellow mustard and finish off the sandwich.  Now for the fun part...

A Cuban isn't a Cuban unless it's pressed to within an inch of its life.  I guess, in retrospect, it's social commentary on the oppressive Castro regime, but I'm sure that's not why the sandwich is made that way.  Probably more to do with, you know, taste than politics, especially since the sandwich predates the dictator.  Anyway, if you happen to have a commercial panini press at home, you're in luck.  If you don't, you have a couple of options.  The George Foreman grill is a common bastardization of the panini press, but you may find that your sandwich is too big for the Foreman to accommodate it.  I went with a griddle pan on the stove top, plus a heavy cast iron skillet (with a layer of aluminum foil between it and the sandwiches) and a little bit of extra downward pressure provided by my burly man muscles.  I've actually seen people use foil-wrapped bricks to crush their sandwiches.  The instrument of oppression is secondary to the drive to make the sandwich submit to your will.

The key here is to melt the cheese, heat the meat and crisp the bread without burning it.  I found that my bread got toasty on the bottom well before the cheese in the middle melted, so I gave them one more downward push and then finished them in the oven to get more even heat than the stove top griddle could provide.  If I had a panini press, there'd be heat coming from both the top and bottom.  Probably should've heated up my cast iron.  Eureka moment: if you have a pizza stone, heat that up in the oven and then use it to press the sandwiches.  Boom, homemade panini press.  Be careful though: obviously balancing a 450 degree pizza stone on top of sandwiches on your range is a little dangerous.

Once everything's all hot and gooey, you're all set.  The salty sweet of the ham plays off the savory roasted pork, the acidity of the pickle gives depth to the tart spice of the mustard and the luscious melted Swiss is contrasted by the crispy, toasted bread.  If there is such a thing as the perfect sandwich, the Cuban has to be in consideration for that spot.  So simple, yet so richly complex.  And to think something this good came from transformed leftover pork loin.  A food that I shall not speak of again until, oh, let's say, June.