Outside of peanut butter and jelly, making an enjoyable vegetarian sandwich can be a dicey proposition. A great sandwich needs texture, richness and relatively intense flavors from the filling to truly satisfy, and vegetarian ingredients have a difficult time achieving all three of those characteristics at once. That’s why I was shocked when I tried the Grateful Veg, a baked vegetarian sandwich at Peace Love and Pizza in Milton. It easily was one of the best vegetarian sandwiches I’ve ever tasted.
The sandwich is deceptively simple, made with a familiar combination of Mediterranean ingredients. Roasted red peppers, feta cheese, Kalamata olives and artichoke hearts are piled on a sub roll, then baked with your choice of cheese on top.
For my money, there might not be a better use of artichoke hearts than on this sandwich. They have a lot going on, in terms of texture, and sometimes they really can weigh down dishes like pizza. But, in a sandwich, artichoke hearts provide the needed heft that other veggies, like avocado or eggplant, cannot.
The combination of ingredients on the Grateful Veg sandwich also is juicy, in a satisfying way. The olives, artichoke hearts and feta soak into the sandwich bread without overwhelming it, and the kitchen does a good job of building the sandwich with the right proportion of filling to bread.
You wouldn’t accuse Peace Love and Pizza of being overly original, and they have not reinvented the wheel with the Grateful Veg. But, the combination of ingredients and execution does produce a vegetarian sandwich that might make you forget meat exists, for a few minutes.
Peace Love and Pizza. 12640 Crabapple Road, Milton. 706-810-8888, peaceloveandpizza.com.
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