A couple of years ago, I saw a video featuring a British sandwich artist named Max Halley who refused to put cheese on any of his sandwiches. “No,” I mumbled, as I closed the tab and moved on with my life. “I am not engaging with this.”
But, two years later, I am ready to engage with this. Though I question—no, reject—Chef Halley’s practice of building his sandwiches on focaccia (the worst sandwich bread), he has a point about cheese. Cheese is too often a default sandwich ingredient, and it doesn’t always need to be there.
Cheese provides two things: fat and flavor, and a waxy piece of grocery store brand mild cheddar is not the best source of either, especially if you already have fatty, flavorful ingredients involved. Cheese can bring salt, umami, and—in the case of pepper-flecked cheeses—heat, but there are a lot of bland cheeses out there, and their presence can make your sandwich worse. Too much fat will mute your other flavors and textures, resulting in a dull, unbalanced sandwich.
A BBQ pork sandwich, for example, does not need cheese; cheese would only distract from and dull those smoky, rich flavors that took hours to develop in a smoker. A vegetarian sandwich, with avocado or hummus, does not need a slice of creamy cheese; a funky feta might create a nice contrast, but something like havarti will saturate your palate with fat. Putting cheese on a tomato sandwich—or a BLT for that matter—would be a big crime. (Summer tomatoes should not be forced to hide their light under the bushel of cheese.)
I am not asking you to eschew cheese entirely. Many great sandwiches have cheese—the cheesesteak, a tuna melt, bologna and American, the club, things of this nature. What I’m asking is for you to think about your cheese usage intentionally, not for any “health” related reason—I do not count calories—but for flavor.
Still not convinced? Let me tell you a little tale.
I will never forget the Christmas I broke my pinky finger on a Razor scooter. Santa had brought two of them—one for each of my twin sisters—and my dad and I decided to race in the church parking lot. I ate shit, broke my finger and banged up my head, and spent the rest of Christmas in the Amory, Miss. emergency room. The next day, as I was convalescing in the canopied bed in my grandmother’s guest room, my dad brought me a ham sandwich, made with the Christmas ham I missed out on the day before.
It was a simple sandwich made of lightly toasted white bread, chopped ham, mayo, and finely diced homemade pickles. “No cheese?” I thought, as I looked at the sandwich, but then I took a bite. It was one of the best ham sandwiches I had ever had. The ham was salty, the mayo creamy, the pickles sweet and sour—it was a perfectly balanced bite, and cheese would have wrecked it.
I’ll never adopt Chef Halley’s “no cheese on any sandwich ever” way of thinking, but I do think a lot of people could stand to be a little more thoughtful with their sandwich cheese. A good sandwich is all about balance, and cheese can tip the scale if you’re not careful.