I’ve waited in line in Los Angeles for wobbly brisket and tacos and French fries covered in mayonnaise, for chiles rellenos and warm pastries, for fried chicken and ice cream and bagels. But on a recent Saturday morning, I waited half an hour for a rainbow sandwich.
It was not the kind I remember from college, when I was a vegetarian — the chilled, on-the-dry-side sandwiches with dense, crumbling breads, stuffed with sprouts on the verge of withering, faintly spotted with discoloration, wrapped a little too tightly so that tomato seeds and browning avocado squelched against the plastic wrap.
No, this rainbow sandwich was made to order, spread with a blend of sunflower seeds and garlic confit, and packed with cucumbers, beets, carrots and a heap of alfalfa sprouts from the farmers’ market, along with some turmeric-stained fried tofu. It was contained in fresh, delicious sourdough.
As a whole, it was pleasing, gentle, multicolored and reminiscent of something you might pick up at your neighborhood health food store or a cult-run vegetarian cafe in, say, 1975, or 1985, or 1995 — but better. What was it doing here, now? Though Zach Jarrett developed it last September for the new restaurant wing of the bakery Bub and Grandma’s, it felt like a sandwich untethered from time.
A good rainbow sandwich will always seem this way here, as will the closely related, overlapping hippie, avocado and California sandwiches, which take inspiration from a hodgepodge of vintage food obsessions that never really went away, but settled in and evolved.
The sandwiches may or may not be vegan, but they will almost certainly contain a few different vegetables and sprouts — a great big mass of sprouts, gently compressed to make a crunchy, juicy, intensely green-tasting cushion of delicate floss.
Sprouts are an ancient ingredient, but as Jonathan Kauffman writes in his 2019 book, “Hippie Food,” until the 1970s, only Southern Californians ate raw alfalfa sprouts. Alfalfa sprout sandwiches were a local phenomenon, too, and recipes appeared as early as 1953 in promotional cookbooks published by El Molino, an old stone-ground mill operation in Alhambra, Calif., which sold grain and flour to health food shops.
The best sprout sandwiches are now complex and idiosyncratic, the work of obsessive cooks with a genuine soft spot for the genre. Some remember their parents going through a phase of shoving sprouts between dense slices of toasted wheat, but they have enough distance from the American health food trends of the 1970s to think of the sandwiches fondly, and to reimagine them with pleasure in mind.
But that early recipe in the El Molino cookbook was plain and straightforward. It consisted of two pieces of rye bread spread with mayonnaise, holding a quarter-inch layer of fresh alfalfa sprouts and optional slices of tomato. And even here, in the book’s enthusiastic how-to, which taught readers how to start their own sprout supply at home, the authors issued a warning: “It may take a little time to learn to fully appreciate the unique taste.”
That kind of hedging has haunted sprouts for decades, as if they required an apology, a defense. But sprouts aren’t a novelty, and sprout sandwiches can be their own kind of fragrant, green luxury — their own unlikely indulgence. As Mr. Kauffman writes in “Hippie Food,” alfalfa sprouts smell “as if a field of grass were having sex.”
Mr. Jarrett, of Bub and Grandma’s, said the rainbow was his favorite sandwich on the menu, hands down. “It feels really good when you eat it,” he said.
Daniel Mattern and Roxana Jullapat knew that they wanted an excellent version of a hippie sandwich on the menu before they even opened Friends and Family, their Thai Town bakery. It wasn’t just for their diners, but for themselves and their cooks (among whom it’s a favorite working lunch).
“You can have that sandwich, feel good and fueled, and still keep moving,” Mr. Mattern said. “It’s not nap time.”
Mr. Mattern shuffles a fat slice of salty feta between layers of mashed peas, sliced avocado, cucumber and thick, juicy sunflower sprouts, and the cheese works to season every bite. Part of the sandwich’s texture and charm also comes from the grainy, pleasingly close-set bread, which Ms. Jullapat devised just for this sandwich. To make it, she adds a compact mash of sprouted grains to a very strong dough of red fife flour, along with sunflower, pumpkin and flax seeds.
The version you can find at Wax Paper, a small sandwich shop with two locations in Los Angeles, is particularly magnificent, filled with grated Cheddar, pickled and raw onion, avocado, cucumber, sprouts and garlicky aioli. (Peter Lemos, an owner, calls it the “Ira Glass” on the menu; it’s an eccentricity of the shop, where all the sandwiches are named after public radio personalities.)
“There are a lot of sprouts here, it’s almost the main ingredient,” Mr. Lemos said. “But the sprouts make the sandwich.”
The quantity of sprouts at Wax Paper cannot be overstated. And something happens when sprouts appear in such a huge quantity, far beyond the quarter-inch suggestion in that 1953 recipe: It becomes clear that there’s nothing inherently austere about sprouts, nothing spare or severe or grim.
En masse, sprouts are quite the opposite, not just a cheerful frill, but an extravagance — succulent and flourishing. Not just a symbol of a new beginning, but 1000 actual new beginnings, right there, juicy and alive, waiting for you to bite.
