I’m Krysten, an associate editor at New York Times Cooking, taking over for Tanya this week. And I love sandwiches.
A sandwich is one of life’s great pleasures: two pieces of crisp-tender bread, filled with any combination of deliciousness, drizzled or smeared with a glorious sauce. They’re portable, affordable and — critically, for the purposes of this newsletter — amenable to vegetables.
It’s with great excitement that I share the sandwich list my brilliant colleagues have put together after months of work. Woven in among these 57 unmissable New York City classics, new and old, are a handful of veg-focused favorites, including one near and dear to my heart: the Scuttlebutt.
All hail the Scuttlebutt, a perfect expression of the form, from Saltie, a beloved, now-closed Brooklyn sandwich shop. To say Saltie to a Brooklynite of a certain era is to send that person straight into nostalgia, to conjure a memory of sitting at the counter of the South Williamsburg shop, eagerly taking that first sloppy bite and savoring the rubble that fell out the back end.
So strong is the Scuttlebutt’s allure that a friend once hosted a party dedicated to its assembly, lovingly preparing the focaccia, pickling the beets, boiling the eggs and picking the herbs. We each built our own, piled high with this culinary bounty, and dug in, joyously: an ode to our long-missed Saltie.
Gloriously, the sandwich made its return in 2020, three years after Saltie closed, when the chef Caroline Fidanza started selling it at Marlow and Sons in Brooklyn. And now we have the Scuttlebutt recipe!
Scuttlebutt
Returning to the list, we also have a recipe for Baby Blues Luncheonette’s HLT, a play on a BLT but with smoky grilled halloumi instead of the bacon and arugula in place of the crunchy lettuce. It’s peppery and bright, with a bit of bite from red onion.
If it’s Houseman’s French onion sandwich you crave — a maximalist grilled cheese, as Melissa Clark described it — try Vallery Lomas’s French onion sliders, which tuck gooey caramelized onions and melty Gruyère into buttery brioche buns. (Want even more sliders? Try these bhaji sliders, or these filled with Nashville-style hot tofu.)
And while we may not have the key to Superiority Burger’s collard greens sandwich on focaccia, my colleague Alexa Weibel was fortunate enough to snag the recipe to another one of its favorites, the crispy fried tofu sandwich: Marinate extra-firm tofu in pickle brine before dipping it in a spiced batter, frying it to perfection and tucking it into a soft potato bun.
Superiority Burger’s Crispy Fried Tofu Sandwich
One More Thing!
Speaking of pickle brine, if you have a little extra after you’ve made that perfect crispy fried tofu sandwich, you’d do little better than making this pickle brine margarita, which my colleague Nikita Richardson adapted from Heather Rush of Pine Box Rock Shop in Brooklyn. Dry and tart from triple sec and lime juice, and gorgeously salty from the brine, this is an ideal drink to pair with any of the sandwiches above — or to sip on its own while these long summer days go by.
Email us at theveggie@nytimes.com. Newsletters will be archived here. Reach out to my colleagues at cookingcare@nytimes.com if you have questions about your account.
