13 amazing sandwiches that use cheese, bacon, and pepperoni in lieu of bread

The bacon-weave taco.

The Earl of Sandwich was rightly recognized for his contributions to deliciousness, but his ideas are sooooooooooo 17th-century. In the years since, stalwarts have taken the basics of Earl's creation and innovated. We now live in a world where everything from bacon to cheese to sandwiches themselves has taken over for plain ol' bread. It is a good world indeed

Bacon is obviously better than bread, especially when it becomes a taco shell (suck it, Doritos) as in that weaved-bacon thingy up top from Philly's PYT (it's got fish in it too, so it's healthy). You can also learn to weave your own bacon into a bun to create beauty like this breakfast sammie

The classic BLT gets an Atkins-y makeover with this crunchy number that ditches boring bread for crispy American cheese

More cheese for buns! Namely, hot Finnish bread cheese. And here's the recipe to make the above cheese on cheese on cheese sandwich from DudeFoods

If you are feeling compelled to use bread, you may as well hide it in the middle, as propositioned by Edzo's of Chicago with its Inside-Out Grilled Cheese, which is coated on the outside with a layer of charred, shredded Parm

Eating chicken & waffles with your hands can be a rough task (just ask Sterling Archer), but that doesn't mean you should shy away from the hand-held waffle slider perfected by Atlanta's Slideways

Often called the Dutch Taco -- a name also often adopted by Rutger Hauer on Cinco de Mayo -- waffle sandwiches can come loaded with pretty much anything, as evidenced by the waffle sandwiches at Boston's Max Brenner

Combining 3000 years of Jewish tradition (but omitting the Moses and Sandy Koufax), Boulder's Jimmy & Drew's 28th Street Deli piles corned beef, kraut, swiss & Thousand Island between two fresh tater pancakes

Rachael Ray, you dirty, naughty minx. You didn't just invent a Monte Cristo that uses butter-fried chicken instead of French toast. You also taught us to make it

The good maniacs at Insanewiches have concocted this amazing sub made with pepperoni instead of a hoagie. Do it with dry salami and you've got the best party sub ever

Not to be outdone, one of that site's readers devised the Deathburger, which plops a double cheeseburger & 1lb of bacon between two personal pizzas

Puerto Rico has given us everything from every single Molina to Rosie Perez's Trebek-accepted pronunciation of "quince", but nothing compares to the jibarito, created in Chicago by Puerto Rican immigrants and using fried plantains to contain steak and veggies

Ok, ok. This one uses all sorts of bread -- two grilled cheese sandwiches' worth of it, to be exact. But when you sub in entire sandwiches in the quest to make an even larger sandwich, you can sneak your way onto any list. Congrats, Portland's Brunch Box, which ditches buns for two Texas-toast grilled cheeses that bookend a mound of meat, more cheese, and bacon

And, of course, there's the favorite from the West coast to the East -- the donut burger, whose origins are somewhat shadowy, but whose creator should be granted a title far more honorable than Earl.

The bacon-weave breakfast sandwich.
The breadles BLT.
The all-cheese grilled cheese.
The inside-out grilled cheese.
Chicken & waffle sliders.
The waffle sandwich.
The potato-pancake reuben.
Breadless Monte Cristo.
The pepperoni sub.
The Deathburger.
The jibarito.
The grilled cheese burger.
The magical donut burger.