BLTs, mayonnaise, and ketchup

When it's late summer and you have an abundant crop of tomatoes, one of the best ways you can eat them is in a sandwich with bacon, lettuce, and mayonnaise. If you're American, you probably already know that. Leave off the bacon if you want, or substitute another kind of meat, but don't leave out the mayo.

Is there such a thing as too many tomatoes?

Actually, fresh mayonnaise is pretty easy to make. That's a revelation to most people outside France, where mayo was invented. You put a raw egg yolk in a mixing bowl along with, say, half a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a few drops of vinegar, and just a little salt and pepper. Mix all that together well and let it stand for a minute or two.

The makings for BLTs — using a French loaf that we get
from the bread lady, who delivers five days a week.

Pour ¾ cup of canola oil into a measuring cup that has a pouring spout or beak. Then start adding the oil to the egg mixture very slowly, stirring it all the while with a whisk. Or a fork — that works too. The important thing is to go slow, especially at first, making sure that the oil is being absorbed into the egg yolk, and that the sauce is emulsifying. Stop pouring and keep beating the sauce if it looks like it is separating.

You'll be amazed at how much better it is than the mayonnaise you get out of a jar from the supermarket. That mayonnaise (with exceptions, like Duke's mayonnaise in the South) is usually full of sugar in the form of corn syrup. Home-made mayo, sans the sugar, is much better. Here's a video lesson in making it. Lemon juice can replace the vinegar, and you can make mayo without the Dijon mustard, but it is harder to get it to emulsify.

Home-made ketchup

Yesterday I found out it is also pretty easy to make ketchup using fresh tomatoes. We have so many tomatoes right now that I'm looking for ways to process and preserve them. For ketchup, you cook the tomatoes with a little water until they fall apart, and then you strain them through a sieve or food mill to remove the skins and seeds.

Cook the resulting tomato puree with salt, pepper, hot red pepper, vinegar, allspice, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, and sugar. There are a lot of ketchup recipes on the web, using different blends of spices. The tomato ketchup cooks down slowly, reducing and thickening. An advantage of making your own is that you can reduce the sugar, for example, or increase the vinegar, spices, and hot pepper to find the flavor you like. You can make it with canned tomatoes, of course, but it's when you have too many fresh tomatoes that making ketchup really makes sense.

Pommes frites made from fresh potatoes

I made ketchup because a week or so ago I found potatoes on sale at Intermarché — 5 kilos, or 11 lbs., for two euros. They were nice, smooth, light tan potatoes, some pretty big and some pretty small, and there was no indication on the sack about what variety they were. They looked like good French-frying potatoes to me. And they are. We've made a couple of batches of fries using them, and they are excellent. They also make a very good potato salad. We've had potatoes both ways with BLTs over the past week.

Fines tranches de poitrine de porc fumée

In France, bacon is « fines tranches de poitrine fumée » — thin slices of smoked pork breast. Or belly. Nothing could be Frencher, actually. You can buy it at the supermarket, or you can have the pork butcher, the charcutier, slice it for you. You cook it the way you cook American bacon — slowly and carefully, so that it doesn't burn. I think American-style bacon like this might be called streaky bacon in some countries.

I don't know if people in other countries make bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, called "BLTs" in the U.S. I know in France you can get something called « un club sandwich » is some cafés and restaurants. That's a Club Sandwich in English, and I wonder why it's called that. The standard Club is a double-decker sandwich — three slices of bread — with lettuce, tomato, bacon, mayonnaise, and sliced, cooked chicken breast. That's a story for another day.