Cleanin’ out my Cabinets: The Italian Beef Sandwich

I love regional sammiches and if I know an area has a signature one, I generally do whatever is necessary to sample it when I visit.  I consumed over 400 cheesesteaks during my two years in Philly, dream about the debris po boy from Mothers on a regular basis, and will write a 1,000 word missive about the Jersey sloppy joe some point soon.  They’re not all winners, though. I wouldn’t recommend you visit Pittsburgh for the soggy french fries and deli meat on stale bread sandwich at Primanti Bros.  Sandwiches You Will Love lost all credibility for me with that one.

On Kristi and my visit to Chicago, I wanted to get the famous Italian beef sandwich.  But, as documented previously, it was a pretty packed couple days and we covered two of the most popular regional specialties in hot dogs and deep dish.  The sandwich had to be passed on for, you know, normal restaurant meals and stuff.  It was a vacation away from Janet for cripes sake.

I don’t know if that’s all me or if my raincoat was full of air, but I don’t think I want to know.  Not sure if I would tell you either

Blah blah blah, I didn’t get the sandwich.  Sounded friggin’ awesome though, sliced roast beef with Italian seasonings, simmered in the cooking juices and loaded onto a sandwich.  Then, the whole sandwich is dipped back into those juices if you so chose.  Yeah, sounded too awesome to not make that for myself.

It all started with a few blade steaks.

My Friday afternoon trips to the Back Bay Shaws get a little crazy.  Anything that isn’t bolted down and I haven’t cooked before has the potential to be purchased

As alluded to in the caption, I have thoroughly enjoyed hitting up the supermarket by my office on Fridays for random cuts of beef and pork and usually some seafood as well.  These blade steaks looked good and I’d never cooked them before, so I was completely unaware that they can’t be grilled like a regular steak.  Explains why they were pretty inexpensive and had a visible ribbon of gristle running down the middle.

Since they couldn’t be grilled, what else could I do but take a crack at the Italian Beef Sandwich.  I seasoned the steaks with salt and pepper and put them in a preheated ‘Lil Blue with some olive oil to brown on the stovetop.

The gristle is pretty visible here.  It looked like a slice of the hanger meat, which is probably what I would discover blade steak is if I did even 5 seconds of research.  Meh

After the meat was fully browned, I removed it from the pot and threw in a mix of celery, carrots, and garlic that I had run through the food processor.  After that cooked for a couple of minutes I added in a sliced yellow onion.

I gave myself a lot of crap for how odd it was to send most of the mirepoix through the food processor and leave the onions whole.  But I wanted them to have a visible presence in the final sammich, and I now have to live with that visually disjointed decision

I cooked the onions until they had a little color on the edges but were otherwise translucent, about 10 minutes.  At which point I deglazed with a cup of red wine, added some dried basil & oregano, and turned the heat up a bit to reduce.

I will freely admit that this looks like a complete mess.  Usually food shots that look this crappy involve large amounts of grim looking organ meat, but this was just all over the place

After the wine had reduced by about a quarter, I stirred in a few chopped tomatoes, a cup of beef broth and a couple bay leaves.

Smelled like an awesome beef stew, but probably looks like about 30 other previous posts on this blog.  Braising is the tool of the weak and I braise a lot of stuff

I brought the liquid to a boil then lowered to a simmer for ten minutes to reduce it a bit and let the flavors come together.  Once it looked right (I have no effing idea what that means but its true), I added the blade steaks back in and made sure they were well covered in the liquid and onions.  Lid went on, heat was reduced to low, and left it to cook for 80ish minutes.  At which point I had this.

Not sure what magic happens once the lid goes on, but it seems like stuff goes into a liquid and it all comes out a thick sauce.  This bears almost no resemblance to what it was an hour and a half earlier

I fished the blade steaks out with some tongs and gave them a good shake to get the extra sauce and onions off of them before transferring to a cutting board.

For a pound and a half of meat, it contracted a ton and looked like barely enough to fill a couple sandwiches.  I think I started telling Kristi she wouldn’t like it at this point, mostly to secure a larger portion of the meal

I sliced each steak into medium thickness slices since I wanted them to retain some texture then added them back into the cooking liquid.  ‘Lil Blue went back over low heat to simmer for another thirty minutes.

As the simmering time for the braise neared its end, I sliced and lightly toasted a crusty baguette.  A couple big spoonfuls of the braise and lot of the liquid went into the baguette along with a sprinkling of cheese and, on my half, a handful of sliced sweet peppers.

Not enough liquid to do the full dip of the sammy, but I made sure it was soaked and nearly impossible to eat

With a couple more spoonfuls of cooking liquid and a knife to hold everything in place I gave the sandwich the old close and squeeze.  First I cut Kristi off her half, and then dug in.

This was a cross between the roast pork sandwich at Johns in Philly and some sort of Italian flavored pot roast.  Well, I guess that’s what it was actually.  The meat was tender but not quite to the point that it was like a shredded beef or fall-apart pot roast; still had some texture.  The liquid gave it a french dip like flavor but with the Italian seasonings and tomatoes clearly in there as well.  It was definitely a little salty from the salt on the meat and the reduced broth, but in an enjoyable way.  The parmesan cheese gave some nice contrast sharpness and the pickled peppers added some crunch and contrasting vinegar flavors.  I raced through my half to make sure there was enough for another half.

I left some for Kristi’s second half as well.  I am a jerk and all but I save some sammich for the ladies

Man of the match is probably the crusty Iggys bread since it was just crusty enough to hold it’s crunch/crust while also being completely soggy and soaked with sauce.  This was a solid sandwich.

I was going to make these again for the Super Bowl but couldn’t find the right sized bread.  Probably for the best, we always have way too much food.

Snowstorm this weekend!  Gonna make some sh*t.

The Cassoulet: Day One

Cassoulet has been mentioned a few times on this site, but I couldn’t tell you for sure whether I’d ever consumed it in my first 32 years.  Pop Ryan loved it, Mommy Ryan claims to have cooked it, but I have zero recollection of consuming it before our Chicago trip in September.  That meal at Maude’s was awesome, but I knew it wasn’t the authentic cassoulet that someone in the french countryside would cook over several days.

After researching a bit, I discovered that this dish is the equivalent of a French kitchen sink chili, so of course I was intrigued.  I also loved the sound of duck, pork, and sausage in one rich pile of food.

Nothing to do with the current topic, just proud of my little girls for chowing down on some homemade scrapple.  She ripped her first piece off my breakfast and then wouldn’t leave me alone until i gave her a bigger piece.  Pretty sure she hit her organ meat threshold after this one, though

An authentic Cassoulet is a multi-day process that includes over 25 ingredients, so I’m going to break this up into a couple of posts.  I learned my lesson from the Turducken last year; too many images slow the site to a crawl and make the whole posting process utterly infuriating.  Not so coincidentally, the plan was to serve it at the same annual holiday dinner with friends that featured the Turducken last year

I wanted to approach this in a way that wasn’t too far removed from what might happen in a French countryside kitchen (read: make everything as difficult as possible for no good reason).  So, I decided to avoid pre-prepared ingredients like chicken stock, sausage, and duck confit.  Do it all myself.  I’m a freaking moron.

Friday

The process started with a thawed duck carcass I’ve had in my freezer for awhile.

The remnants of a previously frozen deboned duck, definitely not the prettiest start to a multi-day cooking event

After heavily seasoning the bones, meat, and skin with salt and pepper, I heated a stock pot on the stovetop with a little olive oil in the bottom.  Once the oil was hot, I threw the duck in to brown for a few minutes.  While the meat browned, I chopped up the standard carrot, celery and onion and smashed a few garlic cloves leaving them in the skin.  Everything went into the pot.

I don’t think I’ve properly explained how much I bit off more than I could chew with this one, yet chose to make it harder for myself at every turn.  I haven’t felt this overwhelmed since I chose to cook a bachelor party dinner for 20 people, which is remarkable since that day started with 4 hours of sleep, 150 fresh clams, and way too many beers in my stomach before 1PM

Since I had a good 6 hours to cook the broth and get good flavor out of all of the ingredients, I filled the pot to near full and set to a low simmer.

Always the onions that float to the top and make your broth look like an immediate failure.  I had faith, though.  Ignorant Confidence might be the next title of this blog when I switch it up again in a few years

While the broth simmered (yes Tim, you friggin jerk, I aimed to have one bubble every 30 seconds or so), I got started on preparing the duck legs for the confit process. Discovering that I could get these at the Shaws next to my office was a wonderful revelation.

These things are almost entirely skin and fat, but they’re really awesome on the inside.  I feel like I am setting you up on a blind date with duck thighs or something

I referenced a few sources on how to confit, including old standbys Ruhlman and Lagasse, before generally following the cure recipe from Ruhlman since he has yet to steer me wrong.  The legs were rinsed, patted dry, given a heavy rub of salt and left to rest for 15 minutes.

While the legs rested, I prepared the other items for the cure.

Welp, that’s one hell of a boring picture.  Please make sure to send the link to this blog to your friends and family and mention that I show great pictures like a peeled garlic clove and a small pile of brown crap

The clove of garlic was sliced thin and the pile of “brown crap” is a few peppercorns and whole cloves chopped/crushed together.  Pair that with some fresh bay leaves sliced into slivers.

We have two grades of Pyrex in the Ryan household, Extremely Clean Wedding Gifts and everything else. “Everything else” is the random collection of browned, stained Pyrexes we both brought to this partnership from our single lives.  Yeah, those are the ones I’m allowed to use for curing sh*t

The duck thighs were tightly wrapped in plastic and headed into the fridge.

After a 3-4 more hours of occasional stirring and maintaining low heat the stock was looking pretty good.

I love when stock looks like this, feels like I could keep it on a back burner on low heat for a few weeks.  That being said, I am sure this is not the definition of “looking pretty good” to most people

I shut the heat off of the stock and put the lid on to let it slowly cool overnight.  Final step before I went to bed was covering two pounds of dried cannellini beans with water for an overnight soak.

Big bowl o’ beans.  Two pounds seemed like a ton since a normal batch of momere beans is only a pound, but each of the recipes I referenced said two pounds so I went with it

And with that I headed to bed for a night of nervousness about everything flying off the rails on Saturday.  On the docket for the next post, hopefully in the next few days, is the first day of cooking the pork and beans together, grinding a toulouse-style sausage, and confit-ing the duck.