ALMOST a Lobster BLT

The sandwich you’re reading about is another delicious attempt by me to write about one of the best sandwiches of summer, the Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato. At this point, I’ve written about a traditional BLT where I smoked the bacon. I’ve covered a BLT with shrimp and avocado, Adam Sandler’s favorite BLT with egg, and I’ve even turned a Detroit-style pizza into a BLT. But I think we can cover at least one more time.

In this sandwich-focused blog post, we’re also saving a few dollars, all the while making a fantastic seafood BLT sandwich experience.

Note: this sandwich contains uncooked iceberg lettuce. There’s currently a widespread parasitic outbreak that attacks the intestinal system called Cyclosporiasis that seems to be attached to some veggies like iceberg lettuce in the United States. From what has been reported, supposedly, it’s only from one farm called Taylor Farms, and it’s only their shredded iceberg lettuce, but you’d better check with your local lettuce doctor to see if you should be consuming it at the moment.
I’m not responsible for your choices. Read more about the Cyclospora outbreak here.

What is this sandwich?

This is a lobster BLT, much like one I ate in southeastern Maine last year, but instead of containing super expensive lobster meat, it has a specific type of shrimp that should be close to a third of the cost of lobster.

I had a fantastic lobster BLT in Maine about a year ago, but as I’ve covered, lobster is extremely expensive right now. I recently saw this video from Brian Lagerstrom about a type of shrimp that he claimed had a similar tender texture and buttery flavor to cooked lobster meat, and this inspired me to try it and see how it worked in a BLT.

If you don’t want to watch the video below, Lagerstrom suggests using a type of shrimp called Argentine red shrimp, and he claimed it’s fairly easy to find at the grocery store, which turned out to be pretty true.

I write more about the Argentine red shrimp further down the page, but it really does have a softer texture than most other types of shrimp that I have tried. I don’t want you to get your hopes up and let you assume this is an exact substitution for lobster, but it’s pretty good, and it turns into a much more affordable option than lobster.

For me, 1 pound of Argentine shrimp made enough to create 4 or 5 Almost lobster BLTs. That means you’re basically putting 3 dollars of shrimp into each homemade sandwich. Compare that to 8 dollars of lobster meat per sandwich, and you’ll have enough savings leftover to pay for the bacon.

Lobster sandwiches in Maine

I was a little bit naive before visiting Maine last year, and I went in hoping that lobster would be priced cheaper since we were basically at the source. Newsflash: it’s not that much cheaper.

Supposedly, if you get outside of the more touristy areas, it does get a little cheaper, but the prices of the lobster rolls and sandwiches that I saw and ate seemed to be just a tiny bit more affordable than what I can find in landlocked Chicago. With that said, they do know how to cook lobster over there, and I ate some pretty good seafood on our trip.

The best sandwich I had on that trip was a lobster BLT that I ordered at Stonewall Kitchen’s York Company Store. If you’re not familiar, Stonewall Kitchen is a company that makes some really tasty jams and jellies, and also a lot of other products like hot sauces, spreads, and even things like candles and soaps. We were staying in Ogunquit and drove down for lunch one day. I kept my expectations fairly low because at first glance it seemed like it was just a deli counter with a few different quick-to-prepare options, but it turned out to be a really well-made sandwich. The lobster was tender and flavorful, the bacon was thick cut and cooked well, the tomato wasn’t the best in the world, but it was pretty good, the bread was nicely toasted, and everything worked together well.

I wrote about a lobster roll a couple of years ago, and since lobster prices are rising just like the prices of everything, I felt this was the perfect time to test Brian Lagerstrom’s Argentine red shrimp recipe and also recreate the lobster BLT experience I had in Maine.

Another shrimp BLT I’ve written about

Two years ago, I covered a sandwich memory that will likely stick with me for the rest of my life. It was the day after a super stressful moving-day-and-a-half, and the sandwich felt like it was lifesaving.

That sandwich was from a place called Brown Sack that is now closed, and I did my best to recreate it and also make a slightly more complicated version that you can go read about if you need more shrimp BLT content to read.

The former owner of the Brown Sack even found the blog post about that sandwich on their own and commented, which felt pretty good to me.

Now that we know what sandwich we’re making, I need to come up with some bread.

Honey wheat sandwich loaf with seeds

A BLT definitely needs sliced bread, and for this version, I went with a fancier loaf than just plain white bread.

I’ve used the base for this new bread recipe a bunch of times at this point. It’s basically my “honey wheat” base of dough, and when I ask my wife what I should bake, she always says “honey wheat.” But I also really like the addition of seeds in a bread like this, so I combined them.

Basically, this is a half-white flour, half-wheat flour loaf of bread where the sweetness comes in the form of honey, and then I also added sunflower seeds, pepita seeds, and rolled oats into the dough, and then sprinkled a little bit more on top. This is a loaf that requires a large, 13-inch-long Pullman pan, so it’s not a recipe everyone can use, but I do have similar loaves that use smaller pans.

Once the seed mixture is added to the dough, it’s simply a matter of an initial rise and then moving the dough to a full-sized Pullman pan and letting it rise to about 1 inch from the top of the lip of the pan.

I probably could have let this dough go a bit longer in the secondary rise phase because it didn’t square up the corners perfectly, but it still produced a pretty nice loaf that had some great flavor after baking. The slices weren’t perfectly square, but they were close enough for my purposes.

I think the bread in a BLT must be toasted. It’s just too soft otherwise, and I think your sandwich might fall apart more easily if it’s soft. You can toast the bread in a toaster, but I much prefer toasting sliced bread in a pan with just a little butter or, better yet, some leftover bacon fat from the bacon cooking process. This gives the sandwich a bit more stability, and the bread will hold up better against the juices from the tomato and mayonnaise.

Here’s my honey wheat-seeded sandwich loaf recipe that you can bake if you want. But if you don’t want to bake anything, just get some good loaf bread that you think will work for a BLT. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but just make sure the slices are around the same size as your tomato and/or half of a slice of bacon to make the sandwich a bit easier to control sizing and portions.

Honey wheat seeded sandwich loaf (large Pullman pan)

Recipe

3 hours

Honey wheat seeded sandwich loaf (large Pullman pan)

This flavorful and slightly sweet sandwich loaf produces slices that toast well with an interesting look and texture from the addition of a few different seeds and rolled oats.

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Argentine red shrimp

The secret to this sandwich is that the lobster isn’t actually lobster. It’s a sweet and very tender shrimp from the southern Atlantic Ocean known as Argentine red shrimp. When I watched the Brian Lagerstrom video about using this type of shrimp to make fake lobster rolls, I was sceptical about how easy it would be to find the shrimp, but it turns out it was easily available at my local grocery stores in frozen, raw state.

I checked, and Argentine red shrimp is also reliably available not only at my local, large grocery but it’s at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, so in theory, you should be able to find this fairly affordable shrimp near you if you live in the United States.

In fact, unless you live close enough to the ocean to own your very own Sunday, go-to-meeting flip-flops, you’re better off buying your shrimp shell on and hard as a rock.

Alton Brown – “Crustacean Nation.” Good Eats, Food Network, 2000

The process for making this shrimp is to thaw it, devein it, peel it, and/or remove the tails, and then add it to boiling water that’s been removed from the heat and count to 180 seconds (3 minutes). I found that the shrimp I had was totally cooked around 2 minutes and 30 seconds, so your mileage may vary, but between 2.5 and 3 minutes, you’ll have a bunch of fully cooked shrimp.

Once the shrimp is fully cooked, you need to chop the shrimp up into what Lagerstrom calls “peanut M&M-sized pieces” and then toss them in a pretty simple dressing. I altered my dressing to be what I used in my lobster roll recipe, but you could use Lagerstrom’s recipe for a cleaner option without the addition of Dijon mustard.

I made this shrimp recipe twice for the sandwiches I made, and ended up enjoying the texture of this shrimp chopped up just a bit more than “peanut M&M-sized.” So what I did was cut them to that size and then roughly chop them just a bit more. I think if you were making a lobster roll-style sandwich, you might want the meat to be a bit chunkier than it would be as a component in a BLT.

If you simply want to try this shrimp out for yourself and you want to get Brian Lagerstrom’s shrimp roll recipe, the link for that is at the button below.

Bacon

I think for a BLT, you need to look for thicker-cut bacon if possible. Its place in this sandwich is to bring some salt and also a bit of chewy texture that will balance out with the crispy toast and crunchy water in the form of lettuce.

I bake my bacon in the oven, but you can cook it however you’d like. Bacon in the oven tends to be fairly straight and flat, which is pretty important to the stability of a sandwich like this with a lot of components layered on top of each other. Just cook some thick-cut bacon, and you should be all good.

Oven-baked bacon

Recipe

30 minutes

Oven-baked bacon

Want a super easy way to make a lot of bacon for sandwiches with very little effort or cleanup?

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Lettuce

If you’ve been watching the news, you’re probably aware of what is going on with lettuce at the moment. I’m not so sure that I should be suggesting that you seek out or make BLTs right now, but I’m also not a vegetable scientist.

I bought this lettuce and planned this sandwich before the cyclosporiasis outbreak hit the United States. If you’re reading this in the future, cyclosporiasis is an infection in your intestines that’s caused by a parasite that lives on fruits and vegetables. I definitely DO NOT want to get into this issue, but if you’re making a BLT, please be very careful about where you’ve sourced the lettuce and make sure you wash it carefully and follow the instructions and guidelines from professionals who are not sandwich blog guys.

Anyway, I used a head of iceberg lettuce for these sandwiches because I think it really works well in a BLT. Sure, it doesn’t taste like much, but it brings a good textural experience to the finished sandwich.

Tomato

A good tomato is one of the most important components of a BLT sandwich. I didn’t have great tomatoes, but I did buy the reddest-looking heirlooms I could find at our local small market. The two keys to making not great tomatoes better in a BLT or any other sort of sandwich are to make sure you lightly season the tomato with salt, and I think it’s super important to put the tomato next to the bread that is coated in mayonnaise.

In the case of this sandwich, I salted the tomato slice and then spooned the mayonnaise-dressed shrimp on top of the tomato, which helped to form a sort of tomato dressing because the salt forces juices out of the tomato slice, which works to incorporate itself with the mayo.

Almost a lobster BLT photos and recipe

I made this sandwich five times last week, so I have lots of photos of my attempts. Do I suggest eating 5 almost lobster BLTs in one week? Only if you want to be cool like me.

Scroll past the photos for the full recipe that includes instructions for how to turn Argentine red shrimp into a lobster-meat-like experience.

ALMOST lobster BLT

Recipe

ALMOST lobster BLT

This BLT sandwich has tender, dressed Argentine red shrimp that have the texture and sweetness typically associated with lobster meat, turning a simple sandwich into something much more exciting. The shrimp idea and cooking process is adapted from Brian Lagerstrom's Argentine red shrimp method.

bacon lettuce shrimp tomato

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by Jonathan Surratt

Ingredients:

Shrimp cooking

• 3 quarts water
• ²⁄₃ cup kosher salt
• ¹⁄₂ cup sugar
• 1 pound Argentine red shrimp (21/25 or sometimes called extra large or jumbo), thawed, peeled and deveined

Shrimp dressing

• 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon kosher salt
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon ground black pepper
• zest of half a lime or lemon
• 1 teaspoon lime or lemon juice

Sandwich assembly

• 2 slices of white or wheat bread
• mayonnaise and/or mustard
• iceberg or leaf lettuce
• 2 to 3 slices of cooked bacon
• 1 to 2 slices of tomato
• dressed and cooked shrimp (from above)

Direct Link to Recipe

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Directions:

Shrimp cooking: to a large stock pot, add the water, kosher salt, and sugar, and bring to a rolling boil. 

Once the water is vigorously boiling, remove the pot from the heat and add the shrimp. Set a timer for 2 and a half minutes and get a knife and a cutting board ready. After 2.5 minutes, remove one shrimp and cut it in half, and check to see if it's opaque all the way through. If it is, the shrimp is fully cooked, and you can remove the rest. If it's still translucent in the very center, add the shrimp back to the water and cook for an additional 30 seconds or so. 

Remove the shrimp to a paper towel-lined plate or sheetpan and immediately place in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. You can leave this in the fridge overnight if you want to make the sandwiches the next day.

Shrimp dressing: when it's time to make sandwiches, chop each shrimp into 6 to 8 small pieces.

To a medium-sized bowl, add mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, salt, black pepper, lime juice, and zest, and mix to thoroughly combine. Add all the cut-up shrimp to the bowl with the dressing and carefully stir to coat fully. 

Sandwich assembly: Toast the slices of bread on one or both sides. I like to do this in a pan with butter or bacon fat, but you can use a toaster if you'd prefer.

Spread mayonnaise and/or mustard on one slice of bread. Top with lettuce, bacon, and then the tomato slice. Lightly salt the tomato and pepper it if you'd like.

Top the tomato slices with a couple of spoons of dressed shrimp. Cover the shrimp with the second slice of toast.

Serve and enjoy. 

Check back next week

I think next week will be a new steak sandwich, but I haven’t tested and tasted it yet. Stay tuned, and you’ll find out just a few days after I find out.