During lockdown I devoted myself to baking bread. If you wondered where all the flour had gone, now you know. In the days before the pandemic, whenever I had a spurt of baking enthusiasm, I’d give the stuff to friends. Once lockdown began, this would have constituted as clear a breach of government guidelines as a trip to County Durham, so there was nothing for it: I just had to eat it myself. This I have done for several months, with the result that my stomach has come to resemble dough that has been left to rise for too long: pale, flabby and generally difficult to deal with.
There was nothing for it: I’ve had to knock bread on the head. My sourdough starter reproaches me, well, sourly, every time I open the fridge. But bread is my biggest food issue. Seriously, one slice is too many; a hundred is never enough. Having said that, I can do without it quite easily until I want to make a sandwich. This is a problem, because I have the urge to make a sandwich at least three times a day. So the search began for the best vegetable to substitute for the bread for a sandwich.
The results of an internet search were discouraging, though I did laugh out loud at a great little piece on myrecipes.com. It’s titled 4 Times People Tried to Use Vegetables as Bread and It Was Awful. Better still is the subhead: “It’s just not right, people.” The writer, Sara Tane, goes on to share her views on four “heinous” sandwich bread substitutes: avocado, cucumber, brussel sprouts, and tomato.
I’m not quite sure what the sprouts one is all about, but I tried the other three. The avocado has only one thing going for it: the hole that accommodates the stone is useful for the filling. Other than that, it’s hopeless; my cheese and onion sandwich immediately turned into a right squidgy mess. I could have gone on to try a less ripe specimen, but it would still have been too slippery to deal with. The cucumber works rather better. Sliced in half lengthways with the middle scooped out, it too has convenient filling-space, but has more structure.
As for tomatoes, the big beefy one I used looked promising, but biting into it caused an astonishing amount of juice to squirt out. It put me in mind of the plumes of water those firefighting boats send up in celebration at royal anniversaries and suchlike. Undaunted, I stripped to the waist and pressed on. In the shower afterwards I reflected on how tasty, if impractical, it was.
Next I tried slices of aubergine and sweet potato. Fried or roasted aubergine was just too greasy. I tried drying the slices in a low oven, but this yielded something looking, feeling and tasting like the soles of shoes. I daresay that it was used as such in aubergine-growing areas by medieval cobblers who were short of leather.
The sweet potato worked rather well but, by then, the competition was over; portobello mushrooms are the clear winner. Dry roasted for 15 minutes they are good, but I prefer them raw. With their concave bottoms they are perfect for sandwiches; better than bread, in fact. Beware, though: mushroom selection is all important. I went at first for big, rounded ones. With a burger between the two of them, stalks (obviously) having been removed, it looked magnificent, but I would have needed snake jaws to get my mouth around it. With mushrooms of this shape it’s better to carefully cut through it to create two more manageable slices. Or you can just go for bigger, flatter portobellos, which somehow aren’t quite as attractive to look at, but do the sandwich job terribly well. Honestly, there may be no going back.