How to make a deluxe BLT sandwich with marinated tomatoes

Once you taste this deluxe BLT club sandwich, you’ll never go back to a boring old bacon lettuce and tomato again!

The first secret to the very best BLT

I have a thing for club sandwiches. More bread—what’s not to like? But I never used to make BLTs (or FBLTs, as I call them, since I use “fake” bacon in mine) as clubs, because the few times I tried it I had to use an insane amount of mayonnaise for them not to taste dry. And while I love mayonnaise, it was too much.

Then I came across two recipes for bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches that had marinated tomatoes as their key ingredient. And the first time I tried this technique, I knew that I would never put plain tomato slices on a sandwich again. Even if you’re not making a BLT, try this tomato method on your favorite sandwich!

Marinating the tomatoes have turned my BLTs from really good to out of this world, and it only takes a few extra minutes.

How to marinate tomatoes

The America’s Test Kitchen recipe uses two parts red wine vinegar to one part olive oil for the marinade, while the Cook’s Country recipe flips that ratio and uses two parts olive oil to one part red wine vinegar. (Those recipe links might be behind a pay wall, since they’re both part of the America’s Test Kitchen all-access membership. But if you want well tested go-to recipes, the membership is definitely worth it! And you can try it out for free.)

I tried it both ways, and definitely came down on the side of more oil, less vinegar.

You just mix the olive oil and red wine vinegar with some salt and pepper, whisking it until it’s emulsified, meaning that it’s totally mixed together and won’t separate as the tomatoes marinate. Then you soak the tomato slices in the marinade while you toast the bread and get the other sandwich ingredients together.

It’s also worth noting that this is a great way to bring out the flavor of winter tomatoes, which here in the northeast can be rather bland. Think of marinating tomatoes as a power-up: whatever flavor your tomatoes already have, marinating them is going to enhance and multiply that flavor.

Second secret: the “moist-maker”

The other key to this delicious club sandwich is to drizzle the middle slice of toast with the leftover marinade from the tomatoes. I call this the “moist-maker,” named after the gravy-soaked slice of bread on Ross’s special post-Thanksgiving sandwich on Friends (season five, episode 9). This makes the sandwich extra tangy, and takes care of any dryness.

What kind of bread?

This is not the time for hearty, earthy breads with lots of different grains. You want a soft sandwich bread. Wonder Bread works great for this, as does potato bread. We’re using three slices of bread (that’s what makes it a club sandwich!), and you don’t want it to overwhelm the other ingredients.

But make it fancy!

Now, technically you don’t have to cut the sandwich into quarters and stick a fancy toothpick into each one. You could just cut it in half and leave it at that. But when I was a little girl, my grandmother would take me to fancy lunches at the Yankee Doodle Room, on the top floor of the AM&A’s department store in downtown Buffalo. Just me, not my sisters, because they couldn’t sit still long enough for anything nicer than McDonald’s. So those one-on-one lunches were very special to me!

I would always get a club sandwich, which was served cut into four triangles, each one held together with a toothpick, surrounding a pile of ridged potato chips. Sometimes the toothpicks were frilly, and sometimes they were in the shape of a sword.

After I was done eating I would wipe the toothpicks off in my cloth napkin (again, fancy!), and my grandmother would put them in her purse and bring them home. We’d put them in little porcelain containers on the hutch in her dining room, with her fancy teacups and keepsakes. I wish I had a picture!

These days I use nice metal toothpicks. I even have a special set shaped like swords, just for my sandwiches, in honor of my grandmother and our special lunches.

Vegetarian version

MorningStar Farms Breakfast Strips are truly delicious. I’ve been eating them since I was a little girl, and jokingly refer to them as Play-Doh bacon, because they look like they were made in a Play-Doh food factory. But they’re so good that my husband, who is most definitely not a vegetarian, likes them.

BLAT version

If you have avocado available, it’s a great addition to this sandwich, making it a BLAT sandwich (or FBLAT, in my case). I put it in the top layer, between the bacon and the lettuce.