Are you wondering what the heck is tessellated cheese?
I was wondering the same thing after some web surfing led me to people recommending tessellating the cheese on their sandwiches. The general opinion is that tessellated cheese is much better than non-tessellated cheese. I have a pretty complete arsenal of kitchen gadgets but I don’t have a cheese tessellator. I put the power of Google to work and found my way to a web page that provided answers – lefthandedtoons.
Tesselllating is arranging the cheese in a pattern that provides optimum sandwich coverage and minimizes cheese overlap. It makes sense. No special kitchen gadget needed, but rather the knowledge of technique.
Further research revealed that Subway restaurants, a popular sandwich franchise in Canada and USA, had not been tessellating the cheese on their subs, to the dissatisfaction of some customers. The lefthandedtoons website features an open letter to Subway addressing the error of their ways. I’m not sure if this is an urban myth, but it seems that Subway did change their cheese arrangement practices sometime after lefthandedtoons published their request for cheese optimization.
On a recent trip to my local Canadian Subway sandwich shop I payed close attention to the cheese placement. Indeed, my sandwich contained tessellated cheese!
Make the world a better place and practice cheese tessellation whenever possible!
The Canada Cheese Man 
The term ‘tessellation’ had me stumped … thanks for clarifying! Hard to believe I’ve made it this far in life (and food blogging) without knowing about this. Now that I do, I’m sure I can find multiple uses for this technique, even beyond cheese on a sandwich. After all, optimal coverage with minimal overlap could apply to any number of situations. I just can’t seem to think of any right now… 🙂
Hilarious!! I love the whole tessellation concept!!
Love your writing style! I got a kick out of the whole concept of “tessellation” and immediately thought of Subway! I LOL’d for real when I saw that you led right into that!
I remember this a bit back, when Subway had the big changeover. Definitely makes for a better sandwich!
Whatever Subway does, this is a good technique. The sandwich chain has used cheese triangles for a long time. Using them “tessellated” may be a training issue gone astray.
Wow, never heard of this before but I like Subway and will definitely check it out next time to see if they “tessellate” the cheese on the sandwich. 🙂
This is great, but I’ve learned something from the kind of uniformity that the tessellation of cheese provides:
I have always been a very finicky person, and symmetry and other forms of order/uniformity are very important to me on some subconscious level for some annoying reason, and this may be the only reason I discovered that uniformity, especially with food, is not always ideal. At some point in my life, I started to question why my perfect coverage of things (food items) didn’t always produce the effect I was looking for. Making a sandwich with perfect coverage so that every bite has a bit of everything does produce uniformity, but uniformity can make people numb to their experiences. I realized that my evenly layered sandwiches were sometimes not as good as unevenly put together sandwiches because there was no alternation in the flavor from bite to bite. I realized that when the first bite of my “uneven” sandwich was mostly pickle, tomato, and mayo, the second bite, full of cheese and bacon, tasted so much more amazing than if every bite were cheese and bacon. The best comparison I can think of is the difference in flavor in a soup made two ways: the pureed soup is going to taste very different than the chunky soup because one provides a more dynamic eating experience. Anyway, I know I’m taking a simple issue of preference to an unnecessary level for the topic of this post, but I’m interested in sharing mostly because I’m on Team Tessellation, mostly, subconsciously, maybe, and that makes this all the more interesting to me.
🙂