The World’s Greatest Tuna Sandwich
The first thing to know about pan bagnat: It’s not your everyday tuna sandwich.
To me, that means a mayonnaise-y deli salad that’s sandwiched between slices of toasted wheat or rye bread. Pan bagnat, the iconic Provencal tuna sandwich, is something entirely different—and, dare I say, far more grand. It’s essentially a nicoise salad served between two halves of a loaf of crusty bread: Chunks of high-quality canned tuna; sliced hard-cooked eggs, tomatoes, and red onion; briny nicoise olives and (sometimes) capers; anchovies; garlic; and fragrant herbs are carefully layered and dressed in a mustardy vinaigrette. And here’s the brilliant part: The sandwich gets wrapped tightly with plastic wrap and pressed under a weight, which tamps down the piled-high filling. This step ensures that the whole package is compact enough to bite through and the filling slightly saturates the crumb without softening the crisp means “bathed bread” in Nicard, the local variant of the Provencal dialect, referring to how cooks once “refreshed” the stale bread by softening it under a stream of water.)
