The Tichotino 🥪 the legendary ‘tonijntino’ sandwich veganised

This sandwich, which I have jokingly called the Tichotino after the site’s mascot, comprises vegan tuna salad, tomato, pickles, shoyu-soaked, sautéed shiitake mushrooms, pickled onions and tabasco. You may be asking yourself ‘why?’. Well the answer to that question is a long story.

The fabled sandwich

As you might have guessed, the original sandwich that this is based on is not vegan. It uses real fish for the tuna salad and instead of shoyu-soaked shiitake mushrooms it uses anchovies. And the pickled onions in the traditional version are usually the pearl variety.

The ‘tonijntino’ as it’s called (tonijn being Dutch/Flemish for ‘tuna’) is quite a common sandwich in the Flemish region of Belgium, where I live. And I believe it is based on a sandwich called the ‘Martino’, which is a similar combo except with a raw steak paté instead of the tuna salad. The Martino, and by extension the Tonijntino, are such fabled sandwiches here that their origin stories are disputed.

From omnivorous to pescatarian to vegan

Before I was vegan, I was vegetarian. And, while I was vegetarian, I had a pescatarian phase. Because I was led to believe that omega 3 could only be gotten from fish, and that my brain would dribble out of my nose if I didn’t eat some fish. That’s nonsense, of course, but I digress …

During my pescatarian phase, there was a 24-hour diner in Ghent (the town where I live) that specialised in serving drunk people sandwiches at all hours of the night and morning. I was such a person on occasion and would usually go for the tonijntino. And, indeed, you do need a bit of ‘Dutch courage’ to plump for such an odd combo. But it really works: the sweetness of the pickles, the pungency of the onion and tuna, the kapow of the tabasco and the salty handshake of the anchovies.

Veganising the tonijntino

The good news is, all the animal elements can be easily veganised these days. For the vegan tuna salad I just used the spread from the Belgian brand Delio (not sponsored!). This spread is impressive but does need to be seasoned well with salt and pepper to bring it up to snuff, in my opinion.

A while back I found that a good substitution for anchovies is sautéed slices of shiitake mushroom that are subsequently bathed in shoyu (soy sauce). This gives you a suitably impactful umami flavour and saltiness. It doesn’t taste like fish, of course, but it is a delicious replacement.

Pearl onions are indeed already vegan, but here I subbed in my own beetroot-pickled onion slices just for aesthetics.

Subway-style bread

I made my own bread for this sandwich because it is admittedly not that easy to find (fresh) vegan bread of this variety near me. The recipe by Favorite Family Recipes was recommended to me by Old Kings on Instagram. It’s not a vegan recipe, but it was easily veganised by swapping butter for coconut oil. I’m not a seasoned baker, and I don’t have a stand mixer, so I was really happy when these bread rolls came out perfect first time. They’re soft and pillowy, with great flavour and the perfect crumb. Highly recommended!

Exploding sandwich

If you’re wondering how I got this shot of the exploding sandwich, I have Skyler Burt / We Eat Together to thank. I watched his tutorial on YouTube for how to achieve this effect. In short, it’s a matter of suspending the different layers on threads, taking a photo, then removing the sandwich to take a photo of the background. Then you put the sandwich photo on top of the background photo and erase the threads, revealing the empty background in those areas. Clever and effective!

Fair warning: a shot like this is extremely tedious to set up. It’s like playing food jenga. The heavier the layer is, the more the threads stretch. This compounds the nightmare of achieving the correct spacing between the layers. I had to start again at least 5 times after the whole thing collapsed. Still, if you don’t end up pulling your hair out, the dramatic result is quite gratifying.