Lobster Rolls are like New Englander hot dogs. That’s about as close an analogy I can get. Omit the crustacean aspect, and now you have a cruelty-free, delicious kind of weird sandwich hot dog thing.

Lobster Rolls, sans lobster: Jackfruit is versatile and you don’t have to source it from a coastal state. But you do have to buy nori.

LOBSTER-LESS ROLLS

prep time: 25 minutes
cook time: 25 minutes

Before jumping right into the jackfruit, we’re gonna lay a saucy foundation.

What you’ll need:

red onion
chives
parsley
dill
celery
apple cider vinegar
smoke paprika
old bay
lemon
vegan mayo

Rinse off all of your ingredients that need rinsing. Particularly that celery. Trim your parsley off the stems and dice it down as fine as you can. Dice the chives down too. And then the red onion. Then dice the dill down too. Again, as fine as you can get it. Now take your presumably clean celery and slice it down as thinly as possible. You can use a mandolin too if you have one but be careful!

Once all that stuff is chopped up, toss it into a bowl. Add about two tablespoons of smoked paprika and two tablespoons of old bay right into your dry mixture. Add one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and then add a generous squeeze of lemon juice into there. Mix it up a little bit and then toss in three tablespoons of vegan mayo. And as always, I’m going to stop using the word vegan now and all the ingredients will be implied vegan.

Dry mixture without the aforementioned fix-ins.

Once your mixture is ….mixed, put it in the fridge for now so it can solidify a little bit.

Now, you can prep your jackfruit.

What you’ll need:

two cans of jackfruit
olive oil
garlic
nori
smoked paprika again
salt + pepa

Drain the two cans of jackfruit, rinse them and dry them off. Try to break them down as much as you can but without getting them mushy and weird.

Pulled apart but still with some texture to it. Remove the seeds if they bother you. They don’t bother me.

Mince up some garlic and oil a pan on a medium flame. Put the garlic into the pan and let it cook out a little bit. Add the jackfruit from the pan and toss it around with the garlic. Then comes the weird part. Take a sheet of nori and break a piece off. Chop it down as fine as you can. This part sucks because the nori is sticky. But it will add a “seafood” like taste to the dish. Add it to the jackfruit and then add salt and pepper. And then smoked paprika. As much as you want, you earned it.

After your jackfruit is cooked, turn off the flame and let it rest in the pan. Once it cools, you can add it directly into your cold mixture from earlier.

Add your chocolate to the peanut butter. Wait!

Put your wet jackfruit mixture in the freezer for the duration of the next part. The next part is prepping the bread.

When you remove it from the freezer, it’ll look like this.

For the bread, you can use a soft roll / hot dog bun / potato roll / sub roll. The sub roll was the best choice in my opinion. Just make sure there aren’t any pesky dairy ingredients all up in there.

What you’ll need:

sub rolls (or any of the aforementioned)
butter
an oven set to 350°
a brush

Preheat your oven to 350°. Use a knife and cut a slit in the top of the roll. Melt down your butter and apply it very generously to the entire roll. Inside and outside. Repeat that process for as many rolls as you want to use. This recipe yields about four rolls. Probably more if you use hot dogs buns.

Bake them in the oven for 10 minutes. While they are baking, take your jackfruit out of the freezer because you are going to apply the cold mixture to a hot bun.

Optional side dish: You can serve these vegan lobster rolls with fries, chips, or some kind of slaw. I chose some kind of slaw and if you are interested, it’s a bag of slaw from the grocery store with mayo, lemon, old bay and chickpeas.

Assuming you cut up too much parsley, throw some of them shits on top for garnish and eat! Also there’s that slaw back there. Slawing it up.