Cookbook Club – Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book

In honor of summer picnic season, our July cookbook was Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book. In the book, Silverton has gathered together her best recipes from the very popular sandwich night that she used to do at her restaurant Campanile (no longer open). You can examine every bread-y bite on my Cookbook Club site – for now, my dish!

A lot of the recipes consisted of long ingredient lists with multiple components that each required their own preparation. This seemed like more work than a sandwich should require, so I was immediately drawn to the Cremini Mushroom Toasts, which sounded delicious and involved a sum total of 4 ingredients. That I could handle.

I brushed one side of each slice of brioche bread with olive oil.

I flipped the bread olive oil side down, then arranged thinly sliced mushrooms in neat vertical lines on the un-oiled side of the bread (actually, at first I forgot to flip the bread over, so I had to disassemble my neatly laid out mushrooms and reassemble on the correct side – don’t forget to flip the bread!). I brushed the mushrooms with olive oil and sprinkled with salt.

I placed the bread, mushroom side up, into a panini press and grilled for 3 minutes.

The brioche gets golden, the mushrooms soften, and you get this cool aesthetic from the grill marks. It’s a salty sweet, fluffy and crunchy treat that’s so quick and easy to make. The hardest part was that I had to borrow a panini press. But this recipe was so good I’m tempted to get a panini press of my own.