This thing will reaffirm your faith in the humble white-bread sandwich. But there’s so much going on under the hood. Here’s what makes it so special.
White bread is underrated. Leaham Claydon thinks so, anyway.
“For me, you can’t find a good sandwich on a piece of white bread very often,” says Claydon, who owns the recently opened Jane’s Deli in Coorparoo with his partner, fellow chef Jianne Jeoung.
“I love a white bread sandwich that you can just squish around. It’s the perfect platform for a good sandwich.”
Or, as is the case with Jane’s Deli’s Hainanese chicken sanger, a great sandwich. A very, very great sandwich.
Who is Jane and where is her deli?
Claydon and Jeoung opened Jane’s Deli in the front half of the premises formerly occupied by California Native. The rationale behind the venue was simple: to peddle a bunch of menu items that were regularly requested next door at Snug, their popular cafe and wine bar.
“What we were getting asked for was smoothies, and sandwiches,” Jeoung says.
“At Snug, it’s really hard to push high volumes of takeaway and the food we serve there isn’t really suited to it … This is set up as entirely takeaway. You can sit down if you want but it’s all about grab and go.”
Besides smoothies and sandwiches, Snug sells an impressive range of fancy pantry staples, cheeses and small goods.
Jane’s Deli’s Hainanese chicken sandwich
Why hasn’t someone thought of this before?
Hainanese chicken is, of course, usually associated with chicken rice, a national dish in Singapore (alongside chilli crab) that’s also enormously popular in neighbouring Malaysia.
One caveat with sticking it in a sandwich, though, is that much of the flavour of chicken rice often comes from the rice and typical condiments such as spicy garlic chilli, dark soy, and ginger sauce. The chicken itself is as much about its glossy texture as it is its taste.
Claydon and Jeoung have it covered, though.
Let’s start with that bread. It’s a pain de mie, the French-style sandwich loaf characterised by its soft interior and thin crust. This is an absolutely perfect take produced by Cordelia Sourdough Bakehouse, silky and fluffy without being rich or sweet. It will reaffirm your faith in the humble white-bread sanger.
The pain de mie is given a liberal smear of mayonnaise, a layer of salted cucumber, and shredded iceberg.
For the protein, whole chickens are separated into legs and crowns and then dropped in a hot brine with shaoxing, ginger and spring onions.
The chicken is then rested, shredded, chilled and tossed through a ginger scallion sauce.
The resulting chook is juicy but firm, and has been left with the skin in the mix, again recalling a traditional chicken rice.
The final flourish is a drizzle of Mama Liu’s chilli oil (which is on the shelves at Jane’s Deli) for a big dash of umami.
We bang on in this column sometimes about chef-made sandwiches, but this is absolutely that, with a clear, purposeful flavour profile. But it’s also in the texture, and the mouthfeel. The only thing stopping you from wolfing it down is the time you’ll take (and maybe a few curious prods inside) to consider how Claydon and Jeoung pulled off such a rare and precious thing.
“We actually did this one at a sandwich pop-up Jianne and I did a few years ago,” Claydon says. “It’s now much more considered and better. Our main goal was to construct the sandwich in a manner that allows it to be made in the morning and pushed out very quickly without compromising [on] quality.”
This sandwich absolutely sings. Please go eat it.
Where to get it
The Hainanese chicken sandwich is $15.50, making it a relative steal when compared with many fancy sangers around town. Find it at Jane’s Deli, 321 Chatsworth Road, Coorparoo.
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
