Sauce: (I didn’t measure out the ingredients, this is an estimate. Adjust to taste).

• Mayonnaise (roughly 3 tbsp)
• Dijon mustard (roughly 1 tbsp)
• Mango Pickle (roughly 2 tsp). This is a salty and tangy sauce with chunks of pickled vegetables in it. It’s available at Indian stores. I didn’t use the solids, just the sauce.
• Finely grated parmesan (roughly a few grams)

Sandwich:

1. Place 2 strips of bacon in the toaster oven at 350F.
2. After about 2 minutes, place 2 slices of bread underneath the bacon (on a lower rack – they shouldn’t touch the bacon). The bread will catch bacon drippings. You don’t want to put the bread in too early, or it will dry out too much.
3. Wait until the bacon is the desired doneness (took about 10-12 minutes total for it to get lightly crispy in my convection toaster oven. Non-convection ovens will be slower).
4. Remove bacon and bacony-toast from the toaster oven. Layer bacon, tomato, onion, and thinly sliced cucumber on one slice of bread. Add sauce to other slice, and put it on the first slice. You know… like, how people make sandwiches.

I don’t have a picture because once I took a bite, I ate the whole thing without putting it down.

Ingredients:

Saucy Part:

• 1 pint 2.5% reduced fat buttermilk (they didn’t have regular at the store. It’s probably better to use regular, but I’m sure it’ll affect things like the thickness/stickiness of the batter. So I’m writing this recipe to reflect what I made on 9/4.)
• 2 eggs
• ~2 tbsp your favorite hot sauce
• Mix them all together into 1 big saucyboi. You might need to make more (depending on whether you double coat, etc.), but this should be roughly enough.

Powdery Part:

• 100g flour
• 5-10g black pepper
• ~2-2.5g Tony’s Salty Powdery Stuff
• A few grams of other spices you like, e.g.:
  • 5g onion powder
  • 5g garlic powder
  • 1-2g cayenne powder
• Mix it all together into one big powder. You might need to make more depending on how much chicken you make, whether you double-coat, etc. Probably for 3lb of chicken, you’ll need ~300g of powder.

Chickeny Part:

• ~3 lb of chicken, cut into strips. I usually use breasts, and cut them crosswise (e.g. against the grain) into strips ~.75in thick. (However big Brooklyn cut them on 9/4 was perfect.)

Oily Part:

• ~1 qt of peanut oil (or canola or whatever)

Directions:

Put the Oily Part into a pot, enough to make the oil deep enough that the chicken strips will be fully submerged (~1.5 inches). Heat to 365F.

Dunk a strip of chicken into the Saucy Part, and remove it. Shake it lightly for 2 seconds to remove excess. Then hurl it into the Powdery Part. Be sure to push firmly to help the coating stick, and roll it around real good, tossing powder over it and pressing the powder into the chicken firmly. Remove the strip and place on a cutting board. Repeat this for the next ~10 strips. Once you’ve done about 10 of them, you can repeat the process to add a second coating. (Strongly recommend a second coating if the batter is thin, e.g. if you used the reduced fat buttermilk. But if the coating seems thick enough, you can skip the second coating).

Put the first batch of chicken into the hot oil. It should violently bubble right away. If not, something went horribly wrong. You can put a few strips in, but make sure they aren’t touching or too close together, or they won’t be as crispy. You can continue dunkin’ other chicken strips in the saucy/powdery parts while waiting for them to cook.

Flip the frying strips after a few minutes. I don’t have an exact time, but the coating should be very lightly browning when you flip. Leave it in for another couple minutes, then pull out of the oil, shake dry, then place on a paper towel. Flip it over onto a fresh patch of dry paper towel after another 2 minutes. It’s really important that there isn’t excess oil, or it’ll get soggy.

When you remove the chicken, the coating should be lightish brown, roughly “golden” or a bit lighter. If you wait for it to get too dark (e.g. golden++, working towards brown), the coating might still be crispy/tasty, but the inside might start to dry out. Sometimes (esp. with thicker pieces), the center might not be done cooking when the outside is crisp and golden. Wait a few minutes to account for carryover cooking, then cut into the center and check. If it needs more time, you can just wait a few minutes (maybe 10 min, for the steam in the chicken to dissipate), then leave it in the oven (~250F) for a few minutes. I usually like to slightly undercook the first batch or two, then put it in the oven at low temp (~250F) about 15 minutes before serving, to make sure it’s hot when it’s eaten. You can always compensate for undercooking, but you can’t de-cook chicken that was fried for too long. Word of caution, if you put too much hot steamy chicken in the oven, it might get too steamy and the coating will get soggy. So leave it to cool on the paper towels for at least a little while (~10 minutes) before it can go in the oven, so it’s not as steamy. Consider checking the oven to see if it’s humid, and consider ventilating the oven by leaving the door open a bit.

Frying one side of my sourdough bread and using it as the interior worked out well. This thinking led me to an idea that sounds a little crazy – here it is. Let’s apply a thin coating of caramel to the inner bread surface. This caramel won’t be a soft, chewy caramel. It’s a thin, brittle caramel – think like the texture of holiday peanut brittle, but much, much thinner.

What should go on the interior of a sandwich like this? More exploration is needed, but my initial experiment involved heirloom tomato, burrata cheese, a little olive oil, and a little black pepper.

The results were incredible. The thin layer of caramel on the interior of the bread offered a very satisfying crunch. Yet somehow, the brittle caramel never stuck to my teeth, as is often an annoyance associated with brittle caramel. The soft bread and sandwich ingredients intermingling with the caramel helped prevent this sticking. The caramel flavor was strong in the sandwich. It might sound strange, but the caramel flavor was a nice complement to the soft, mild burrata and the juicy tomato.

So here it is: the receipe for the caramel cheese sandwich. The real innovation here is the application of brittle caramel to the interior. Innovation on the sandwich ingredients is encouraged.

Recipe

Ingredients:

Sandwich:

• 2 slices of sandwich bread
• 4 oz burrata cheese
• A dash of olive oil
• A sprinkle of pepper
• 1 heirloom tomato
• Salt
• Butter or Oil (dealer’s choice, as long as it you can brown bread in it. I used a refined olive oil suitable for high temperatures)

Caramel Brittle

• 1.5 tbsp butter
• ¼ cup sugar
• salt

Procedure:

You’ll want to make the caramel brittle last, because it hardens as it cools. It will be difficult to apply to the bread unless it’s still hot.

Preparing the sandwich:

1. Slice the tomato, and salt it to taste.
2. Slice the cheese into manageable pieces that you can put on a sandwich.
3. Heat a pan to roughly 350F, add oil, and fry one side of each slice of bread in the butter or oil

Preparing the caramel brittle:

1. Head ¼ cup sugar in a sauce pan until melted. Swirl the sugar around frequently to avoid burning.
2. Remove from head, and add 1.5 tbsp butter. Whisk vigorously until butter is melted. Add a sprinkle of salt (to taste).
3. Allow the caramel to cool just a little, until it is at a thick, spreadable consistency. Spread it onto the toasted side of the bread (as you would any other condiment).

Final Steps:

1. Place one slice of bread fried-and-carameled-side-up. Add the tomato slices, then burrata slices. Drizzle with olive oil and pepper.
2. Place the remaining slice of bread fried-side-down on the sandwich.

Photos:

To prove to my future self that this wasn’t some sort of fever dream, I took some photos of the journey. First, we have bread with caramel applied.

Next, we have the assembled sandwich (without the top slice of bread).

Finally, the finished product. You can see the thin layer of caramel brittle on the inner surface of the bottom slice of bread.

It was delicious. Don’t take my word for it – go make it.

I’ve encountered alternative philosophies to the thin-crust ways I was born and raised into. A friend told me that, in her view, the reason pizza is delicious is that fundamentally is bread, but with a light smattering of ingredients to zest things up a bit. I have trouble understanding this perspective, but the evolution of pizza over the centuries has led to a fractured society filled with differing opinions. Some of this history is covered nicely by an episode of Max Miller’s “Tasting History”.

Reflecting on my friend’s thin-crust perspective, I thought back to the thick-crust pizzas I have enjoyed the most. As I have said, thick crust is not my style. But I certainly love stuffed crust. Ending the slice of pizza with a cheese-filled tube (rather than what amounts to a bread stick) certainly zhuzhes things up. Taking things a step further, Papa Johns offers a stuffed crust that includes pepperoni.

Why do so many pizzas end in a boring breadstick? And if we have the technology to fill the edge of the pizza with pepperoni and cheese, why can’t we experiment with other more advanced forms of pizza crust? For example, imagine taking the stuffed crust concept further, and deep frying the edge of the pizza crust. This could be accomplished, for instance, by shaping and frying the circle of pizza crust before attaching it to a parbaked disk of dough that would form the base of the pizza. The crisp texture of the edge of the pizza (which amounts to a giant circular mozarella stick) would be a welcome contrast to the soft texture of the center of the pizza.

Speaking of textural contrast – somehow, our society still hasn’t developed a crunchy pizza. Given the degree of fast-food innovation shown by companies like Taco Bell, I don’t understand why the pizza industry lags so far behind (pizza-and-cheese-stuffed-crust notwithstanding). The textural contrast of a crisp crust with the soft sauce, cheese, and toppings could really add excitement to each bite. Given that we landed on the moon over 50 years ago, it’s surprising that crunchy pizza technology is still in a nascent state. So here’s my pitch.

I propose a pizza in which the crust is composed of a giant cheeto. Imagine a giant cheeto in a disk shape, with raised edges. This is the base for your pizza. You cover it with sauce, cheese, and toppings, then bake it. The crust is one homogenous, airy, crisp wafer (not an amalgamation of a large number of small cheetos). The choice of texture (between “original” cheetos and the “cheeto puffs”) is up for debate. I usually favor original cheetos, but a slightly softer texture might be easier to bite into on a pizza. At any rate, the core idea is the same. Create a giant cheeto, and use it as the base for the pizza.

How would you go about creating this? As described in an episode of “Unwrapped”, cheetos are made from a cornmeal batter that is extruded through a proprietary nozzle, then fried. Without the technology to create a true cheeto available, I found a recipe for homemade cheetos from Serious Eats.  I rolled it out into a disk, with some trouble. I believe my cheese wasn’t shredded thinly enough.

Note that I skipped the instructions for cutting the homemade cheetos into strips, and the baking. I then decorated the unbaked cheeto crust with pizza sauce, toppings, and cheese, and baked it as normal.

I cut into it, and topped it with more of the cheese powder coating from the cheeto recipe.

A few things went wrong:
– I added the cheese powder to the crust before baking. The bottom of it burned. I should have added the cheese powder to the top (under the sauce), but not to the bottom. Note that the cheeto recipe recommends adding the powder after baking, which I failed to notice before it was too late.
– The texture of the crust did not remind me of a cheeto at all. It was more like shortbread. I will try following the recipe again before blaming it, but I’m somewhat skeptical that the light and airy texture of a cheeto can be obtained with this recipe.

On the bright side, the crisp, crumbly, shortbread texture of the crust was quite pleasant. But I think a giant cheeto could be even better.

How to proceed with further experimentation? I have a few ideas:
– Extruding a cornmeal batter through a whipped cream maker might produce a light, aerated batter. I have not tried this, and I do have my doubts. But using a whipped cream maker in some way to aerate the batter could work.
– An excellent recipe for fried fish appears in Samin Nosrat’s Salt,Fat, Acid, Heat. It recommends using beer and vodka as the liquids. The carbonation of the beer, and the low boiling point of the alcohol, help create a delicate, airy fried crust around the fish. Similar techniques of making a cheeto batter and frying it might give good results. (As an aside, I also think a funnel cake could make an excellent pizza crust. This wouldn’t require as much research, and would almost certainly be delicious).

While enjoying a cocktail at the Onyx rooftop bar in Santa Monica, I met a tax accountant who struck up a conversation with me. He told me about his love for hosting exquisite dinner parties. Naturally, our conversation drifted to my theories on the cheeto crust pizza. He gave me a few suggestions. I have not tried them yet, but they may serve as inspiration.
– Perhaps there’s a way to make something along the lines of a standard dough that is somehow aerated with egg whites.
– Try making something like a tempura batter, with egg whites and club soda.
– Consider pan frying the crust in butter, similar to a dutch baby.
– You might want to put ingredients in cheese, meat, sauce order. (I don’t remember the reason for this recommendation but it intrigues me.)
– Consider putting an airy dough or batter in an oven or dehydrator for a few hours, then use a frier or air frier to further crisp it.

So there it is – the Cheeto Crust Pizza Theory. Until I can convince Pizza Hut and Frito-Lay to team up, the best we can do is attempt to make it ourselves. This sort of partnership doesn’t sound too crazy, considering innovations like the Doritos Locos Taco. But until such partnership exists – back to the lab.

The journey is only about 1.2 miles (about 20-25 minutes). On your way up Yale street, you will encounter a spiral structure. That’s how you ascend to the bridge that crosses the 110.

The bridge over the 110 will take you to Stadium Way. Once you reach the end of the bridge, take a right.

After walking NorthEast up Stadium Way, you will see a sign heralding the entrance to Dodger Stadium. Stick to your left, on the pedestrian walkway.

From there, it’s only a few minutes of walking until you see the stadium.