Taylor has been talking about a marinated chickpea sandwich for months now. I don’t know where the idea came from but I finally told him to just find a recipe and make the damn sandwiches already. Less talk and more action; put your money sandwich where your mouth is.
I started calling these the 72-hour sandwiches long before they were finished. Were they delicious? Yes. Were they worth the 72-hour wait? Debatable. (To its credit most of the parts can be made ahead of time, making the actual assembly of the sandwiches pretty quick and painless.) But still, 72 hours for a sandwich is an awful lot. The sandwich is full of bold flavors, almost overly so. From the red peppers to the olives, the parsley to the preserved lemons, it’s not a dull sandwich, that’s for sure.
This is a copycat recipe from ‘Wichcraft in NYC. Granted, we’ve never had the real thing, so we can’t attest to its authenticity. The whole process is probably a lot more manageable for a commercial operation serving hundreds of sandwiches a day, as opposed to us, putting all this work for a few sandwiches. While it was a lot of work to assemble each component of these sandwiches, I think Taylor liked the idea of an all vegetarian sandwich. So many sandwich recipes tend to focus on animal protein, and this was a nice alternative.
The preserved lemons were probably the most unusual part of this sandwich, and boy were they strong. While they were totally inedible on their own, within the context of the sandwich they mellowed, giving an unexpected brightness to the typically flat-flavored chickpea. I’d be curious if just a bit of lemon zest in the chickpea mixture would be a bit more practical.
(holy cow that’s a long recipe) Total Time: 3 days
