There’s a slight bread craze here in San Francisco. You likely have heard of San Francisco’s sourdough bread, and you may have heard of specific places that make it. There’s also a bit of an obsession with local bakeries. One of those most recent bakeries to soar in popularity is Josey Baker (yes, there is a cookbook) and The Mill. Tourists and locals alike line up out the door at The Mill to grab a coffee and their famous toast, and take home a warm loaf of bread. When we want some Josey Baker Bread, we like to skip the lines and pick it up at Rainbow Grocery or Bi-Rite. This weekend we picked up some “wonder bread” from Rainbow that was still warm in the bag! We had some amazing orange heirloom tomatoes, so we decided to make the best BLT sandwich for lunch, and upgraded it in every possible way.
We started with some amazing thick-cut bacon from Olivier’s Butchery. We baked it in the oven at 400°F on a cooling rack placed inside of a sheet pan so that it wouldn’t sit in the grease. If you wanted to step it up, you could even brush the bacon with maple syrup. We usually cook it for about 15 minutes or until crispy.
We cut extra thick slices of wonder bread, brushed each side with melted plugra butter, and grilled it on our Staub grill pan and press (c/o). Something we love about it is that it’s the heaviest grill pans we’ve ever held and holds heat like a champ. For our friends with harsh winters, if you have this pan and a good vent in your kitchen, you could grill steaks all winter long! Actually, the first grill pan we ever had, we bought in Chicago during the winter. It didn’t hold up, and we always wished we had this one.
To finish the sandwiches, we cut our tomatoes with our bread knife. The serrated blade makes it easy to cut through crusty bread and a soft tomatoes alike. It’s especially helpful for tomatoes because it saws through without crushing them. For years we didn’t have a good bread knife. Now we don’t know how we survived without one. We always hand wash our other knives, but this one was inexpensive has survived the top rack of the dishwasher for a few years now.


This was the best BLT. We’ll be making more of these. If you don’t eat meat, try a tomato sandwich in the same style sans the bacon. Looking for more ideas on how to use tomatoes? Try this easy tomato confit risotto and our tomato tart.
Thanks to Staub for partnering with us in this post.
- 2 2-inch slices of bread
- Plugra, melted
- 3-4 slices of tomatoes
- 2-3 pieces of lettuce
- mayonnaise
- 4 slices of bacon, cooked
- Heat your grill pan.
- Brush all sides of the bread with plugra.
- When the pan is hot, add the bread and top with the grill press. Turn as needed to toast both sides. Remove toast and set aside to cool slightly.
- Apply mayonnaise to one side of the warm toast.
- Add bacon, then tomatoes, then lettuce.
- Top with the second slice of toast.