Why Your Soft Bread Might Be Ruining Your Tomato Sandwich

A purist will tell you the bread should be soft, but I beg to differ.

We all know the rules about tomato sandwiches, right?

Fresh, never-refrigerated tomatoes. Duke's mayonnaise. And soft, squishy white bread.

I don’t want to kick the hornet’s nest, but I have a love/hate relationship with tomato sandwiches. Here's why: They’re a hot MESS.

Tomatoes are juicy fruits. Sure, they can be salted and rested, patted dry, and even deseeded, but there’s not always time for all that. If you’re in a hurry for a tomato sandwich, sometimes you just have time to slice, salt, slather, and subsequently, slurp your way through lunch.

I know, because four out of five days of the week this summer I have sat at my desk at work with an increasingly stained kitchen towel in my lap, dodging my way through each bite of my daily tomato sandwich.

That is, until I made some bold choices that might just put me in the doghouse with you kind folks.

First, I decided to deconstruct my sandwich into two halves; an open-face tomato sandwich, if you will. Don’t come at me yet; it’s going to get worse.

Hear me out on this first offense: A traditional sandwich is fine, but tomatoes are slippery, and they simply do not stack well. Since one tomato yields several slices, logic dictates that the tomatoes on a traditional sandwich must be stacked, yielding a structurally unstable sandwich.

Preparing a tomato sandwich open-faced may require some slight shingling of tomatoes, but it’s sturdier than a slippery stack. Plus, it takes more time to eat, so you get to savor the experience a little longer.

Second—and here’s the real controversial part—I toast my bread. (GASP!)

I know, I know—part of the nostalgic magic of a classic tomato sandwich is the texture-on-texture (or lack thereof) of tender bread and soft tomato, the squish-on-squish, if you wish.

But I’m a crunch boy, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I like my oysters with saltines, I like fried eggs with a crispy cheese foot, I like my casseroles cracker-topped. And I like my tomatoes on toasted bread.

Besides just satisfying my undying craving for crunch, the toasted bread addresses the clear and present danger inherent to eating a tomato sandwich—it provides a sturdy base that holds the tomato in place, so that the jellyfish of summer veggie-fruits melts in your mouth and not down your shirt.

Is my desk lunch tomato sandwich traditional? No ma’am. Neither these adorable brioche Tomato Toasts. And that’s O.K. If you want to eat your lunch in a Red Lobster bib, I will not laugh—you do you. But before you take umbrage with my lunch-life decisions, try your next tomato sandwich toasted and open-faced. You might just decide to join the dark side.

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