We always love a good sandwich, but sadly vegetarian versions can sometimes be very disappointing. We’ve encountered more than our fair share of meatless sandwiches that were just a bunch of salad veggies dropped into a roll, which is not at all interesting or satisfying. You really need some good flavors and hearty ingredients to make a vegetarian sandwich worth trying, and that’s why we were excited when we came across this recipe in Bon Appétit. It’s got eggplant, one of our favorite sandwich ingredients, prepared milanesa style – which you usually see as a preparation for meat, but here it makes for a tasty veggie. Coupled with some other inspired toppings, and with our own spin on this recipe, we made some pretty impressive sandwiches (if we do say so ourselves). Here’s how!
For these sandwiches, you’ll need:
- A small red onion
- A lime
- A can of chipotles in adobo sauce
- Mayo
- A medium Italian eggplant
- Flour
- 2 eggs
- Panko breadcrumbs
- Vegetable oil
- A long Cuban bread loaf
- An 8-ounce block of Oaxaca cheese
- An avocado
- A jar of pickled jalapeños
- Cilantro
To start, slice your onion thin and place it in a bowl along with the juice of your lime and a large pinch of salt. Let the onion marinate while you work on the rest of your sandwich ingredients.
Now cut your eggplant into slices that are about 1/3-inch thick. Take a plate and spread out 1/3 cup of flour, on another plate measure out 2 cups of panko, and also beat your 2 eggs in a bowl. Take one piece of eggplant at a time and dip both sides in flour, then in the egg (but don’t let the slices get too soggy), then in a heavy coating of panko. Place your breaded eggplant onto a baking sheet and repeat with each slice, using more panko or flour as needed.
Take a large cast iron pan and pour in enough vegetable oil to shallowly cover the entire bottom of the pan. Warm over medium-high heat, then place in as many eggplant slices as you can without them overlapping. Cook on one side for about 2 minutes, until the panko is browned, then flip over and cook the same way on the other side. Use tongs to take out the eggplant slices and place them on paper towels to drain and cool.
When all the eggplant is cooked, cut your bread loaf into four equal pieces and then cut each of those pieces in half. Mix 1/2 cup of mayo with 2 tablespoons of adobo sauce from you can of chiles, then fish out 2 chiles, chop them up, and stir into the mayo. Spread this mixture on each side of your pieces of bread.
Top half of the bread pieces with 2 eggplant slices each.
Now pull strings off your Oaxaca cheese and place a few on top of the eggplant.
Finally, cut your avocado into slices and layer these on top of your cheese. Add on some onions, jalapeño slices, and cilantro leaves.
Close your sandwiches with the remaining pieces of bread, and dig in!
That’s a pretty impressive sandwich, no? Eggplant is often a great substitute for meat in sandwiches, and breading and frying it makes it more delicious, naturally. Then you’ve got an interesting choice of cheese, some rich avocado, pickled onions, spicy jalapeños, and cilantro serving as the greens – all on a canvas of simple and fluffy Cuban bread. It’s a towering meatless masterpiece, and we enjoyed biting into all this. It was enough of a meal to be our dinner one night, and we had fun frying up the eggplant and piling everything together. We discovered that milanesa is perfectly delicious with eggplant, just as it is with meat, and we’re proud of our sandwich – so much so that we think you should make it too.