This week we say goodbye to the Tomato sandwich (at least at the MIT truck, the other trucks and HSQ will have it for the next few days), and start running the Basil sandwich.
A little history on the Basil. It was our first Seasonal sandwich. Ayr and I had come up with the first 4 sandwiches, and we wanted to expand the menu a bit. Part for variety and part for balance of menu mix. The eastern side (chickpea and egg & egg) was heavily overpowering the western side (BBQ and BLT) back in those days.
The original core idea for the sandwich was pesto. Ayr said, don’t limit it with nuts and dairy. So I worked around that by featuring the base of pesto, which is just basil. We were also really limited by space. We were packing a lot of things on the truck in the morning. The Basil sandwich had to be tasty and it also had to use ingredients we were already packing. So it gets a thin layer of basil spread, havarti cheese, thick slices of cucumbers tossed w/Aleppo pepper (which we were already cutting up in the morning for cucumber tomato salad), and pickled red onions (which we were slicing and pickling for the chickpea fritter sandwich).
Every truck is going to get something like a case of basil every day. An entire case. They’ll make up the basil spread using all that basil in the morning. Look out for this sandwich starting tomorrow (Thursday) at the MIT truck. If you have it, let us know what you think.