oh lawd, sweetpea baking company makes a mean sandwich. and i do mean mean. i just polished off a little no-chicken salad number, and it kicked my ass right in… right in – with goodness! what’s that? that doesn’t make any sense? shut up, it does. i should have taken a picture to show you, and then you’d see.
what made it so good? wetness. wetness made it good. the sandwich was just the size of a regular piece of bread, but it probably weighed damn near… i don’t know, a lot. sorry, i’m not good with the weight estimations. it’s my shortcoming; we’ve all got one. anyway, it was a heavy heavy sandwich, and i attribute the pleasing heft to the high water content of the ingredients. now don’t get me wrong, the sandwich was by no means soggy – that would ruin it – but it was wet enough that wherever i gripped it firmly, the bread would compress and get a little damp, and some sauce would even squeezed out through the pores. delightful!
see, i’m a believer that wetness and heft are always critical to the success of a sandwich. this is obvious when it’s no-chicken salad we’re talking about, but even sandwiches with just veggies and some sort of slices-of-whatever need to work it with the dampness. while moistness alone can’t guarantee a sandwich victory, the lack of it leads to certain failure.
so what’s the key to getting the saturation level just right? if the item that your sandwich is based around is nice and moist, that’s a start. freshly washed lettuce or spinach can really add a lot too, since they’ll bring some droplets to the game. tomato is obviously a good idea. i like a few olives or peppers in a sandwich as well, straight out of the jar, so that you get some juice.
the real key, however, is in the condiments.
mustard. oh, mustard, you’re truly my favorite kind of ‘tard. what would i do without you?
and mayonnaise… oh how i love the mayonnaise! unfortunately, mayonnaise is made from sadness eggs, so i do not buy or eat it. very fortunately, there is something just as good, nay, better, on the shelves of just about any grocery store classy enough to not sell slim-jims at the checkout counter. it’s called…
vegenaise!
go get some, even if you’re not vegan, ok? it’s better. it tastes better (very very similar, but better) than mayonnaise, and it’s probably better for you as well, which is good, because you’ll want to put it on everything.
combo some vegenaise with your mustard of choice, slather it on thick, and you’ve got a solid base for a world-class sandwich right there! it’s so simple!
and yet…
in my travels – sometimes as far away as one hundred miles from my house – i have had some truly (truly) awful sandwiches. more specifically, awful sandwiches that didn’t have to be awful. and the reason why? no damn vegenaise!
see, a lot of sandwich joints have bread that is vegan. a lot of them have some sort of vegan thing for the middle part of the sandwich too, like a veggie-patty, or some faux meat slices. if they don’t have anything like that, they’ll certainly do you a vegetable sandwich piled high with plant goodness. what’s commonly missing though, is the vegenaise. you can get an otherwise deluxe sandwich, but if you have to eat it on dry bread… well… shit.
and that seems to happen a lot.
the part that kills me is this: vegenaise is neither expensive, nor hard to come by. a jar takes up very little room in a fridge, and it lasts for a really long time. there’s no good reason for a place to not have it around. if it’s the sort of thing a business just hasn’t thought of, then i understand, and i’ll try to make comments. if it’s something they’ve heard of, and they just don’t have any? well that’s just lame. if the place has actually gone out of their way to create vegan options by omitting the non-vegan stuff, and then they don’t bother to have vegenaise to put in its place? if that’s the case, i’m done with ‘em. yes, i’m looking at you, burgerville.
it’s a $5 jar of magic, and if a place surprised me by having it, i’d be batting for their team ’til the end. it just seems like such an easy way to make a customer happy, while ensuring some loyalty and future visits, you know? the same goes for tofutti cream cheeze. just have a tub, and i’ll love you forever! it’s not that hard!
anyway, sweetpea has the vegan condiments, and they’ve got them in spades. they use them liberally, and they’ve won my heart. three cheers for heavy sandwiches!
love,
the tiniest sprinter
