How to Make a Sandwich Out of Whatever's in Your Fridge

You know the deal: It's midnight, you're hungry, and your fridge is full of random stuff. There's only one thing to do: Turn it into sandwiches!

By Sam Dean

April 6, 2013

On Wednesday night, we asked our readers to go to their fridges at midnight (The 'Wiching Hour!) and tell us what they had lying around. Our promise: to turn those scraps into sandwich gold.

We thought you guys would make it tough on us (jelly and fish sauce! oysters and blue cheese!), but we should have known better. Turns out Bon Appetit readers tend to have naturally harmonious fridges, even in the middle of the week, in the middle of the night! For all of these suggestions, you can just slap the ingredients (after cooking up the eggs and meats) between a couple slices of bread, and you've got yourself a bunch of totally respectable sandwiches:

A few were a little more minimalist (you guys need to go shopping), but still sounded great as-is (though you might want to try turning the tofu into a stripped-down scramble):

And one was practically our April cover recipe, the Fried Chicken Sandwich!:

But two of the reader suggestions turned out to be a little too much for us to handle. So we went down to the test kitchen to ask Associate Food Editor
Chris Morocco how to salvage these sandwiches.

For the first head-scratcher, Chris came up with a pretty brilliant solution:

Think of it as a Banh Mi! "I would go heavy on the pickled element," Chris said, "and try to add in some other pickles, if you can find any." Just a dab of the miso butter is probably plenty to counteract the acid and spice from the pickles and peppers, and (assuming you like anchovies) those will add some extra umami to the mix. It may be a strange sandwich, but a sandwich it shall be.

But for the second stumper, Chris had to resort to deleting an ingredient:

OutOftheKitch: hoisin, pastrami, Brie, arugula, and shrimp paste

If you guessed that the shrimp paste was on the chopping block, you are right. "Hoisin and pastrami together are great," said Chris, while arugula is a nice addition to any sandwich, and going light on the brie will make sure that its slight funk doesn't mess with the pastrami-hoisin connection. Feel free to try a little shrimp paste in there, but no one at Bon Appetit would recommend it.