With tomato salads, tomato sauces and tomato salsas to be had, there’s a good many things to make with the bounty of summer tomatoes. But all those recipes pale in comparison to the tomato sandwich (of which you should be eating at least one a day during the month of August). This is not a sandwich with tomato in it, but a sandwich made of nothing more than summer’s sweetest fruit. Thick, summer-ripe tomato slices and white sandwich bread (with mayo, of course). That’s it.
Blackberry Farm’s master gardener John Coykendall, a genius on the topic of heirloom tomatoes, shared the secret to building the best tomato sandwich: “To me there’s one requirement. Of course you have to have tons of mayonnaise and salt and pepper, but the true requirement is you have to have that old, cheap, white bread. The kind you wouldn’t ordinarily touch in your daily life. It’s the one thing that it was created for, tomato sandwiches. You stand over the sink [eating it] and it runs like Niagara falls — it’s wonderful.”