Panini...finally

Hey all, we’re back from a brief summer break and realizing we’ve left you in the lurch waiting for a panini newsletter after teasing it over the past couple of editions. To make it up to you we’re going in hard on all of this panini controversy.

Are paninis controversial, you might be wondering? It turns out, not really. Let me explain. 

My general reference point for paninis are sandwiches that are stacked up and then smashed down in a contraption called a panini press. The gist, as we all well know, is it smushes together bread and ingredients, melts cheese, and adds griddle marks to the top and bottom of your now thinner bread. Right? Sort of.

It turns out this is only half the story. In fact, the Italian word “panini” in English literally translates into “sandwiches” (“panino” is the singular). They don’t actually have to come grilled. So I guess we’ve been writing about paninis all along!

The grilled panini is something that became more popular in Italy in the 1970s and 80s in fashionable Milan, and then synonymous with paninis in the US sometime after that. However, toasted sandwiches had been growing in popularity in the US since Thomas Edison (yes, that Thomas Edison) invented the Edicraft Sandwich Grill of the 1920s.

With the rise of the grilled sandwich, and a fancy Italian word to apply to it we started to see panini pop up in lots of places and often not with the best results. To be frank, we got lots of shops that would pump out mediocre sandwiches inside of old bread and serve them toasted to make them briefly edible. New York at a time felt like the epicenter of this unfortunate fad with many of the larger delis selling bulk made and refrigerated panini that were on a pita-like bread. It was weird. 

Luckily we seem to have exited that era and are firmly in a new era where Italian sandwiches of the grilled and ungrilled variety are more easily found showing up on a fresh delicious Italian loaf. This one from Regina’s Grocery in Manhattan comes on stirato, a kind of Italian baguette.

And if we’re talking panini, we’ve gotta give you one from their birthplace. People rave about La Vita è Un Mozzico, a tiny sandwich shop in Rome, where they heat up their pizza bianca bread once before assembly and once after for a perfectly crisp exterior. 

That’s it for this week. Go get yourself a panino, whatever way you like, and add it to the MSD!

Until next time, enjoy them hot or not.

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