Your Vote Doesn't Count

I'm getting a lot of static from the Cuban peanut gallery because I ranked Italians above Cubans in my Sandwich Pantheon. You can't tell a Cuban anything non-Cuban is as good as something Cuban. I once mentioned the obvious fact that Venezuelan and Brazilian women are the hottest in the Western Hemisphere, and I caught hell for it.

Oops, I forgot Israeli women. You have to see them to believe them. They're like Italian women, only hotter. Unfortunately, they are skilled with weapons.

Is Israel in the Western Hemisphere? I forget.

Cubans are like Israelis and people from New Zealand and South Africa. Everything that happens in their country is better. They invented music. They invented the wheel. They invented TV. Thomas Edison? Alexander Graham Bell? THIEVES! You take it with a grain of salt.

To annoy Val and George even more, I am going to list the world's best sandwiches.

1. The Grease Burger. I created this one myself. It's in my cookbook. It's a giant cheeseburger fried in butter and Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce and some other things. You fry onions in the same grease and then trap them under a thick layer of melted cheese and put the whole mess on a loaf of bread with a slit down one side. Really wonderful. But a pain to cook. Even better with a fried egg tucked inside it.

2. The true Philly cheesesteak. A grease tour de force. They take weird little bits of beef and fry them on a huge griddle, and then they pile on white American cheese or provolone, with fried peppers, fried onions, and--for people who can stand them--mushrooms. You use an entire loaf of Italian bread to hold it. A real cheesesteak has at least a pound of meat in it. I used to eat mine with Wanjashan steak sauce (not the spicy kind), and ketchup and hot sauce. I can't find that sauce any more. Sometimes I email the company and beg for help, but they never answer. I may order the spicy sauce and see if it's any good.

3. Real falafel. I used to eat it at a stand in Afula, in Israel. You get spicy falafel and salad in a pita thing, and they have a counter loaded with toppings. Fried eggplant. Curry sauce. Pepper sauce. Olives. Tahini. Other stuff I can't even name. You stand at the counter, and as long as you have a tiny bit of sandwich left, you get to keep adding toppings. Total heaven. Then you get dysentery.

4. Pan con lechon/Nova bagel with cream cheese. This is a tie. Personally, I like my own pan con lechon better than anyone else's. I take slow-cooked pork and fry it with Jack Daniel's and naranja agria, and I make a pile of fried onions and garlic, and I put it on Cuban bread with Swiss cheese and cook it in a press. I squirt lime juice on it before eating it.

It's hard to get a good pan con lechon in a restaurant, because they let other flavors, like fish, get into the pork.

A Nova bagel is fit for the gods. Get a real bagel made by actual Jews, not a crappy Lender's bagel the size of a miniature doughnut. Slice it, toast it, butter it if you're really sick, add at least a quarter of a cup of real cream cheese (per half), a generous hunk of Nova, some sliced onions, and maybe a few capers. Ahhhhhh. Serve with cold Dr. Brown's. I like garlic bagels. It's not like women are lining up to kiss me anyway.

Nova is a little better than lox. Smoked-salmon trivia: light pink is better than dark pink. Ignorant people like a lot of color, but lighter-colored salmon contains more fat and is considered superior.

5. Roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy. Not really a sandwich. You get some really good roast beef and make gravy, and you make a hot sandwich with plain old white bread, and you bury it in mashed potatoes. Put gravy on the whole thing. Devastating.

I guess if I'm going to include that, I could also include my own chicken-fried ribeye on a giant bacon grease biscuit.

Right now I could go for a roast beef sub. Roast beef on a baguette with provolone, tomatoes, onions, diced hot peppers, and hot mustard. And a couple of Spaten Club-Weisses. Oh, boy.

What's your favorite sandwich? Whatever it is, you are wrong, but go ahead and tell me.