When it comes to favorite sandwiches, one meat-and-veggie combination stands head and shoulders above the rest: bacon, lettuce and tomato.
A BLT is easy to prepare, uses humble ingredients and each bite provides an intoxicating mix of salty, crunchy, cool and tangy-sweet.
But what if you don’t eat meat?
I discovered a pretty tasty substitute for bacon while strolling through my Instagram feed: rice paper.
Made from a mixture of white rice and tapioca flours, salt, and water, rice paper is the paper-thin building block for spring rolls. It’s sold dried in thin, crisp, round sheet form, and has to be rehydrated briefly in water before it can be molded into shape and wrapped around ingredients.
To make bacon with it, you cut the paper into thin strips with a pair of kitchen shears, soak it in a salty/smoky/sweet marinade crafted from soy sauce, honey, liquid smoke and maple syrup, and bake it in a hot oven for around 8 minutes.
Not only does it smell like the real thing as it crisps on the pan, but it also sizzles like bacon as it cooks. Besides being vegetarian, it’s also lower in saturated fat, cholesterol and calories than real bacon.
We’re still many weeks away from the juicy, sun-kissed, homegrown tomatoes that make summer eating such a pleasure, but you can still make a fairly decent sandwich using vine or hothouse tomatoes. I made my BLT with toasted slices of country white bread, Boston lettuce leaves and a generous slather of Duke’s mayo.
Vegetarian BLT
For Bacon
