How To Layer Your Bacon For The Perfect BLT

The ingredients in a scrumptious BLT sandwich are vital for the taste experience, but how you arrange them is also key to your sandwich enjoyment. To ensure your BLTs are the stuff of lunchtime legend, Mashed turned to Hilda Ysusi Salgado, culinary director at The Goddess and Grocer in Chicago, to hear her insights into sandwich construction. According to Salgado's expert guidance, carefully layering the bacon is the way to go if you want to optimize flavor and structural stability.

The culinary director advised, "Lay the bacon flat in overlapping layers to ensure every bite includes bacon." Along with ensuring the deliciousness of your sandwich, Salgado's recommended bacon strategy also enhances stability. "A lattice pattern works well to keep the bacon evenly distributed and prevents it from slipping out of the sandwich," she said, highlighting the challenges improper bacon placement can cause. For those unaware, creating a lattice pattern entails laying vertical strips of bacon across the bread, then weaving in strips horizontally so they overlap. The technique is common for pie crusts — here's a guide if you want further instruction.

Along with the proper way to layer bacon in a BLT, Hilda Ysusi Salgado also shared with us the wrong way to incorporate the key element of this beloved sandwich. The culinary director explained, "Throwing bacon haphazardly in the center leaves the sandwich unbalanced, with some bites lacking bacon altogether." In addition to Salgado's ingenious lattice-layering method, you can forever avoid a messy sandwich with a foolproof trick that involves placing textured ingredients (i.e., bacon) next to slippery ones (such as mayo or tomatoes).

Salgado also offered a word of warning about the crispness of your bacon. "Non-crispy bacon can also make the sandwich greasy, ruining the texture," she shared. Fortunately, you can avoid the big mistakes everyone makes when cooking bacon by cooking the strips in a cast iron skillet and adding the breakfast meat to the skillet while the cookware is still cold. The simplicity of BLTs is a big part of their charm, and Salgado's tips ensure this humble yet tasty dish hits all the right notes.