I love making open-faced sandwiches. While I still worked at the previous bakery, I created new recipes on a daily basis, and we always sold out. This week, I will showcase one of these crazy experiments that actually worked! There is a simple trick behind it that you can copy and then use to make your own sandwiches that will blow your mind away.

Sweet and sour, savory and texture. Those are the four principles that you can use to build in fact any dish. Sweet and sour compliments each other, savory coats your palate, and texture (i.e. something crunchy) makes it perfect. Okay, that is a bit simplistic and poetic, but isn't creating recipes and food art? Enough of this poetic nonsense, let me show you how I make a wild green salad pesto open-faced sandwich.

The Basic Principles of a Pesto

I love making fresh pesto with a mortar and pestle. I know this is not for everyone, but the flavor you get from this will beat any other method or store-bought pesto. I use various leaves. It is winter here, so everything is green and beautiful, even the weeds. These weeds are awesome: Free tasty food! (Before consuming any weeds, always make sure to know what you consume: you can only blame yourself for eating something you misidentified.)

I use chickweeds, dandelions, garlic chives, rocket/arugula, wild rocket and basil. Sometimes I feel fancy and add things with a lemony or zesty flavor, like yellow woodsorrel, homegrown lemons, lemon verbena and local South African spekboom leaves.

The other ingredients, to a standard pesto, are any nuts, hard cheese, garlic and I add seeds for a good measure.

Handmade Pesto

Like I said, handmade pesto is not for everyone. But the procedure is simple: grind everything together, slowly add oil whilst mixing and add the cheese at the end. Any good video on YouTube will show you the technique.

The Sour Component: A Quick Pickle Salad

I love a quick 5-10 minute pickle salad. For this particular one, I added some sour apple, cucumber, and onion. I added some vinegar, sugar, and water. I let it stand for 10 minutes whilst I start to prep the sandwich bread. This quick pickle will add loads of flavor and it will break through the sweetness of the jam and make you salivate for more!

Building the Sandwich

I like to balance flavors, so I compliment the sweetness of the jam with some sour and acid in the form of a quick pickled salad. This helps to break through the sweetness, and it leaves your palate salivating for more. This is then on top of a fresh and savory pesto with aged cheese and a grassy/peppery olive oil. I know the combination sounds weird, but believe me when I say that this works. I finish the sandwich with some fresh leaves, lemon zest, balsamic reduction (some more sweetness), more cheese, and pepper. See the photographs below for a step-by-step guide of how I structure the sandwich. Two things to note. Firstly, the jam is a sundried tomato jam, so it is not so sweet. It is more savory. And secondly, the bread is also something I made myself: black malted barley (from my homebrewing days) added to a sourdough bread. I will post a recipe shortly!

(Toasted in some butter and olive oil.)