We Tried 4 Top BLT Recipes From Celebrity Chefs — Here's Our Favorite

The BLT is the ultimate summer sandwich. It's the perfect excuse to use up all your fresh in-season tomatoes and it's so incredibly easy to make. With just a few ingredients, you can throw together a savory, juicy, crispy sandwich that's bursting with flavor in no time at all. But how your BLT tastes really comes down to the recipe you choose.

It should come as no surprise that basically every chef has their own signature BLT sandwich — you might even have one too. We put four celebrity chefs' recipes to the test to find our new go-to BLT that we'll be making all summer long. Let's be honest, since the ingredients are actually available year-round, we'll be enjoying these sandwiches well beyond the summer season too.

Best BLTs At A Glance

Easiest Sandwich: Ree Drummond
Most Flavorful Sandwich: Joanna Gaines
Biggest Splurge Sandwich: Ina Garten
Most Traditional Sandwich: Martha Stewart

Celebrity BLT Taste Test

Ree Drummond

The Pioneer Woman's BLT is aptly named the "Monster BLT" — and a monster it was. This sandwich was a triple-decker, piled with eight slices of bacon, Roma tomatoes, romaine lettuce, and a heavy slather of chipotle mayo on marbled rye bread.

Our immediate thought was that this sandwich was too big. The middle piece of bread was pretty unnecessary, so when we make it again, we'll probably skip that piece. However, that being said, this was our favorite sandwich.

The homemade chipotle mayo really made it. It was so delicious and perfectly spicy. Even if we don't use that middle piece of bread next time, we'd still use the same amount of mayo because it was that good.

If you're not a rye bread fan, no need to fear. You can still enjoy this sandwich because the other ingredients really outshine the bread's taste. All and all, this is the perfect quick and easy sandwich to throw together — and bonus points because it's ridiculously delicious.

Joanna Gaines

Joanna Gaines' BLT recipe can be found in her Magnolia Table Cookbook. It's made with butter lettuce, applewood-smoked bacon, vine-ripened tomatoes, and a homemade herb mayo on country-style white bread. The herb mayo can also be found in her cookbook and it's made with mayonnaise, garlic, chives, parsley, dill, lemon juice, salt, white pepper, and sweet paprika.

The country-style white bread is really tasty — and we loved that you toast it in a skillet with mayo. But the herb mayo is really what takes this sandwich to the next level.

We thoroughly enjoyed this sandwich. It tastes very elevated thanks to the high-quality bread and herb mayo, but it's still easy to make and attainable for the everyday meal.

Ina Garten

Ina Garten has two well-known BLT recipes: the Lobster BLT and the California BLT. We went with the lobster-topped BLT because it's essentially the same as her California one, just with the addition of lobster and Thousand Island dressing.

The Barefoot Contessa star's sandwich is made with slices of bacon, Bibb lettuce, sliced tomato, avocado, lobster meat, and homemade Thousand Island on fresh bakery white bread.

It's clear that this BLT is an indulgent meal. Lobster meat certainly isn't cheap, but it does add a great flavor to the dish — and it's a nice change from the traditional bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. If you don't like Thousand Island dressing, you can go lighter on that layer (like we did), but the dressing really does go together nicely with the other flavors.

Overall, this is definitely not a sandwich we'd make every week, but it was a nice treat.

Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart's iconic "Perfect BLT" is pretty simple. It's two pieces of bacon, an entire vine-ripened tomato, romaine lettuce, basil, and homemade mayonnaise on white bread.

After two failed attempts at making Martha's homemade mayo, we had to use store-bought instead. But that still worked just fine.

We had high hopes from the "perfect" in the name, though the sandwich itself was kind of basic. While we love basil, the addition was a little lost in the shuffle and didn't add too much to the BLT. It was a fine sandwich, but we wish there was more bacon. The two slices of bacon to an entire tomato ratio seemed a little off. So it tasted more like a tomato-basil sandwich than a BLT — all we needed was some mozzarella and we'd have a great Caprese sandwich.