The “Piminnie Pearl” (bear with me…I’ll get to the name) is chicken & pimento cheese sandwich with tomatoes & pickles on a sourdough bread. It’s pretty much summer on a sandwich for me, right up there with tomato & mayonnaise sandwiches. It’s stone cold delicious! Scroll to the bottom to learn how to make my pimento cheese (video)!
I recently bought the book The B.T.C. Old-Fashioned Grocery Cookbook and it is pretty fan-freaking-tastic. The book, written by Alexe van Beuren, is about van Bern’s small gourmet grocery store (B.T.C. Grocery, natch) and restaurant in Water Valley, Mississippi, with recipes by her clearly very talented Southern-bred cook, Dixie Grimes. The stories are great, with lots of anecdotes about Water Valley residents and about how recipes came to be. It’s been hard to put it down.
One of the recipes in the book is called the “Say Dixie” sandwich (a peek at the restaurant’s menu online reveals that the full name of the sandwich is “Say Dixie & Come to Me”. Anyway, this sandwich tops a grilled chicken with pimento cheese, Sriracha coleslaw, and bread and butter pickles on a ciabatta roll. Needless to say, I was quite intrigued (my long-time readers know that I have a bit of an obsession with pimento cheese. I eat it on sandwiches (of course) and on crackers, put it in deviled eggs, and even put it in biscuits. Yep. Pimento cheese biscuits. Dixie’s sandwich sounded pretty amazing to me.
As I started thinking about what my ideal chicken and pimento cheese sandwich would have on it, though, it differed just a little from the Say Dixie. I was first going to oven-roast my chicken, but then Philip suggested poaching it in Rogue Sriracha Hot Stout, which we picked up at Hop City on a recent day trip to Birmingham. Instead of coleslaw, I put some slices of perfect August tomatoes from Bryden’s Market, right down the street from my house, on top, and used dill pickle chips instead of bread & butter (I’m not a fan of sweet pickles). Oh yeah…I drizzled it with a little Sriracha. Cause that’s how we do.
I would have used a ciabatta roll, and I still think that it would be perfect here…but Publix bakery was fresh out the two days I stopped by to pick some up (they usually sell them in the walk-up bakery case) so I used some sourdough instead. We paired our chicken & pimento cheese sandwich with Lay’s Flavor Contest West Coast Truffle Fries flavored Wavy Lay’s (I bought 3 of the 4 new flavors of Lay’s-these, Southern Biscuits & Gravy, and NY Reuben. As I write this, we’ve only tried the Truffle Fries.).
They were every bit as deliciously Southern as they sound. I asked my Facebook followers for a little help having the sandwich. I got several suggestions, but my favorite name for this chicken & pimento cheese sandwich came from Barbara, who suggested the Minnie Pearl-Southern lady with a kick. Loved it, but wasn’t quite sure if about the legalities of using that name…so instead I dubbed it the Piminnie Pearl (pimento = piminnie, get it?)! Thanks for the name, Barbara. I hope you enjoy the sandwich!
Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link for the book The B.T.C. Old-Fashioned Grocery Cookbook because I wanted to share Alexe’s wonderful stories and Dixie’s amazing Southern recipes with you!
Yield: 4 servings
10 minPrep Time:
12 minCook Time:
Save Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
- 2 cups stout beer
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 8 small or 4 large slices sourdough bread, or 4 ciabatta rolls
- 1/2 cup pimento cheese ( here's my recipe!)
- 1 large tomato, sliced
- 12 dill pickle chips
- Sriracha
Instructions
- Place the chicken breasts in a 10-inch skillet and pour the beer over. Sprinkle with salt. Add enough water to cover the chicken in liquid (don't obsess, though...they'll float a little bit). Turn the heat to medium-high and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cover. Simmer for until temperature in the thickest part of the chicken reaches 165 degrees Fahrenheit (this took about 8 minutes for me).
- Remove the chicken from the pan and drain briefly on a paper towel. Thinly slice the chicken.
- If you are using ciabatta rolls, slice them in half. If you are using large sourdough slices, you can make 2 large sandwiches and cut them half.
- Divide the pimento cheese among the bottom slices of bread. Top with the chicken and drizzle with desired amount of Sriracha. Top with the tomato slices and the pickles, then the top slices of bread. Serve immediately.
Click here to print the recipe for the Piminnie Pearl!
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