Cheesesteak sandwiches

Denver Bread company, located just a few blocks from our home, daily makes the most wonderful sfilatini (about 16" crusty loaves with pointy ends), delectably soft and puffy sandwich rolls, and (above) baguettes. The baguettes are long enough to make 4 sandwiches.

Once again today's post is not so much a recipe as an idea forum. A few days ago I posted about home-aging steaks. After getting 2 dinners out of the steaks we still had enough for these sandwiches.

One thing we always do is to pull some of the soft centers of the bread out and make it into great breadcrumbs. We cut down a little on our carbs this way.

Cheesesteak sandwiches

4 slices of your favorite sandwich rolls

mustard or mayo or your favorite condiment (ours was a sort of Russian dressing we made for Reubens last week)

1 tbsp olive or vegetable oil

1 medium onion, sliced moderately thinly

leftover steak, sliced thinly

cheese (your choice)

salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a wide saute pan. When hot, add the onion and sprinkle with some salt and pepper. Saute until caramelized over medium/medium-high heat, tossing often (about 10-12 minutes.

Lay the steak slices on top of the onions and top the steak with cheese. Cover loosely with a piece of foil and heat through until the cheese is melted. Fill up your bread and enjoy! Messy but good!

Homemade pastrami sandwich

Corned beef and pastrami are easy to make (if you can find all the ingredients). Dry pickling mixes can be found in most supermarkets, but the pink salt (Prague powder #1) may be a little difficult to acquire. If need be, there are numerous online sources. You don’t need much, so unless you plan a lot of corning, buy just a few ounces.

This pink salt is what keeps the corned beef or pastrami pink when it’s cured. It contains sodium nitrate and sodium chloride, but gets rinsed off after the picking process is finished. I’ve followed a number of different recipes for corned beef and have settled on my own system.

Essentially I made corned beef which I then turned into pastrami (magic!). Get yourself a corning recipe online or maybe in a cook book you own. I think it’s best to use one that calls for the water and pickling mix to be brought to a boil and then cooled completely before the meat goes in.

Most recently I used a portion of some kind of chuck steak. Brisket or flank steak is the norm, but I’ve made corned beef with a number of different cuts. My only criterion is that the “grain” of the meat be discernable and consistent throughout the cut.

Some recipes say steep the beef for 3-5 days, others for several weeks. My last batch went for 2 weeks and was my best effort. After it’s cured, rinse the meat thoroughly – get all the spices bits off it. Put it in cold water and refrigerate for 24 – 36 hours, changing the water once or twice.

Now, here comes the pastrami part. Instead of simmering the corned beef for a few hours with additional pickling spice (though no pink salt), I dried it off and rubbed it with about 2 tablespoons each of cardamom seed and black peppercorns (roughly ground in a spice grinder). Then I put it in a shallow baking pan, on a rack, with water underneath it; covered it with foil and baked it for 3 hours at 250 degrees. Add more water from time to time.

The meat will dry out some, but I steam it to warm it before slicing and making sandwiches. I realize I’m counting on you for taking some initiative with this, but if you are patient you will be rewarded.

Pastrami sandwich
Russian dressing
Swiss cheese
Sauerkraut
Rye bread
Pastrami

I don’t think you need me to tell you how to make a sandwich, just be sure to steam the pastrami before slicing. And, of course, slice it across the grain and very thin. Pile it high!

LGBT sandwiches

Here is something fun and delicious. I've given it a suggestive title because it amused me to do so. In case you don't know, the acronum LGBT stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered." In my recipe it stands for "Lettuce, Gravlax, Bacon, Tomato."

In the spirit of LGBT, I include this pic of my significant other (going on 29 years). Just for the record, he's G, not L, B, or T.

Gravlax, for those who like smoked salmon, is an inexpensive and quick way to satisfy your salmon hunger. Check out my post from 8/4/2008 (one of my earliest) for the recipe.

The picture shows open-faced sandwiches. The reason: the remaining ends of the loaf of bread were kind of small. With larger slices we'd use 4 and top the sandwiches with a second piece of bread. You do whatever pleases you. My gravlax was homemade, the lettuce homegrown, the tomatoes Colorado-grown, the bread Colorado baked, the herbs homegrown.

LGBT sandwiches with herbed mayo

8 oz. gravlax, thinly sliced

4 slices bacon

lettuce, any kind

4 slices bread

1 large tomato, sliced

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup fresh herbs (including any of: thyme, basil, oregano, parsley), chopped

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put the bacon on a baking rack over a 1"-sided baking pan. Roast for 20 minutes (regular cut), 24 minutes (thick cut). Remove to paper towels to absorb the grease. Save the baking fat in the pan for frying something else.

Mix together the herbs and mayo and salt and pepper. Set aside.

Toast the bread and then let it cool down. Smear it generously with herbed mayo. Top it with lettuce, then tomato, then gravlax, then bacon. Eat and enjoy.

Bánh mì

The Vietnamese sandwich known as bánh mì is a highly individual entity. Practically anything can go into it. However, if you plan to make it with velveeta and bologna I suggest you call it something else. With leftover roast pork on hand and some slaw and cilantro it was easy for us to put together our own version.

Our wonderful neighborhood bakery, Denver Bread Company, is on Peter’s daily walk route and be brought home a baguette, the traditional bread for this sandwich. It was a long baguette and sufficed to make sandwiches for lunch two days in a row. Today’s version was the best and is worth sharing.

In order to save time and dish washing, I microwaved the eggs. Put them in two separate containers that you’ve lubricated with cooking spray. Start with 40 seconds, stir the eggs and rotate the dishes. Continue with 20 seconds, repeat the stir and turn, and finish with 15-second burst until the eggs are set.

Bánh mì
1 baguette, cut into 2 eight-inch sections
slaw
2 eggs, scrambled
Chinese 5-spice powder
leftover pork, chicken, shrimp or beef, sliced to an appropriate size
chicken broth
soy sauce
fish sauce
Chinese cooking wine
cilantro

Slice the bread in half lengthwise. If you wish (as we do), tear out some of the soft insides to reduce the amount of starch.

Season the eggs with 5-spice powder and cook in a non-stick pan or in the microwave as above.

Put about ¼ cup of broth in a skillet and add about 1 tbsp each of soy, fish sauce and vinegar. Add the pork slices and heat gently turning once.

Assemble the sandwiches: start with scrambled egg; top that with the meat; then add slaw; lay several stalks of cilantro over the slaw; fasten with a toothpick or two to hold it all together.

Eat.

For a free excerpt of my book, “A Year of Food,” in which I opine, report, cook, muse and philosophize about everything that passed my lips for an entire year, write to me at: scrout1944@msn.com.

Reuben sandwich

I managed to resist eating my homemade corned beef before Peter got back from his trip. Yesterday we made Reuben sandwiches. I realized on Tuesday that I needed to get Swiss cheese and sauerkraut, two of the 4 ingredients in a traditional Reuben along with Russian dressing.

Remembering the partial head of napa cabbage in the fridge, I consulted the book “Charcuterie,” a compendium of all things cured. I was dismayed to find that the recipe for sauerkraut called for a 3-week cure. I had 24 hours! So I improvised.

Following the basic plan the book gave me I shredded the cabbage, ending up with only about 2 cups, enough surely for 2 days of Reubens. The cabbage was tossed in a glass bowl with a generous amount of salt and about ½ tsp of caraway seeds. That was it – covered it with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. I stirred it up a couple of times over the next day. When I tasted it it was pleasantly sour and salty. I rinsed it off and dried it as well as possible. It worked very well in the sandwich.

I am not anal retentive enough to want to extend my homemade repertoire into the fields of bread and cheese making. Those items came from the supermarket.

Peter whipped up a very plausible Russian dressing using just mayo and ketchup. The bread was a new Safeway product, packaged panini bread. It wasn’t as good as what the deli counter has sold me a couple of times, but it was fine when grilled.

Reuben sandwiches
2 slices panini bread
4 slices Swiss cheese
generous helping of corned beef
Russian dressing
Homemade sauerkraut
1 tbsp butter

Layer the sandwich thusly so that it will hold together when you flip it. Of course I’m assuming that most folks, like us, don’t have a dedicated panini press – that’s why you gotta turn it.
Russian dressing, half the cheese, corned beef, sauerkraut, the remaining cheese.

Heat a sauté pan over medium heat and rub a stick of butter onto it where the sandwich will go. Place the sandwich in the pan. Cover with a piece of foil and weight it with a teakettle. Cook for 4 minutes. Set the sandwich aside while you rub the pan with more butter. Return it to the pan, turned over, for 3 more minutes weighted. Cut across the sandwich to make 2 portions.

Behold the sandwich!

Everyone eats sandwiches. We throw them together at home, buy them in a thousand varieties daily, munch them while driving or sitting on a bench during lunch hour or at a sports event. What we do not do, generally, is be creative in the ones we make for ourselves.

As a believer, like Food Network’s Alton Brown, in eschewing “mono-tasking” appliances in the kitchen, we do not own a panini press. Yet we make panini quite often. We grill sandwiches, we toast bread for sandwiches, and we even eat them with the bread fresh and un-fooled-around-with. A snooty aside: "panino" is one sandwich, "panini", 2 or more.

Peter and I eat lunch at home every day (with rare exceptions) since he left the employ of Opera Colorado earlier this year. Lunch, the majority of the time, consists of a sandwich and some fruit salad. Almost never do we repeat the same sandwich the same way. There are just too many opportunities for variations. The first variable is the bread itself. Our Safeway will sell us slices of panini bread or focaccia. They have loaves of sourdough, cheese or onion rolls, and a plethora of other breads.

Our newest favorite is made locally (Denver) by Udi’s. It’s not a soft kind of bread. It’s moderately dense and well suited to grilling or pressing. There are few rules. If the filling is to be something eaten cold (egg salad, chicken salad, etc.), we leave the bread alone. If we have some cold cuts and cheese, or sliced beef and cheese (read Philly cheesesteak) we’ll often make panini. How, without a press?

The answer is so simple that it rates a 10 on the “duh-factor” scale. Using a steel skillet, or our non-stick skillet or frying pan, we coat the bread with butter or olive oil, top it with a sheet of foil, and weight it down with the tea kettle. By the way, for panini we use olive oil, for grilled sandwiches we use butter.

The cooking time is fairly rigid: 4 minutes on the first side and then 3-4 on the second side. This is the same for pressed and grilled alike and the time is merely a function of crisping and coloring the bread.

Now, let’s get down to the heart of the matter: what will the sandwich be today or yesterday or tomorrow? For us, this is determined by something in the fridge, generally speaking – leftovers. A few days ago we had grilled chicken and pork cutlets on successive nights. There was some of each left. I chopped up the meat and mixed it with a couple of spicy little red peppers, a stalk of celery, some corn and tomato relish we had made from fresh ingredients as a variation to corn on the cob, some mayonnaise, salt and pepper. We ate it with some romaine lettuce on untoasted Udi’s sourdough. It was stunning.

In conversation with an acquaintance yesterday at a tennis match, I pointed out that if you find three things in your fridge that, individually you really like, you can find a way to make a meal or sandwich, combining them in an inventive way. This chicken/pork salad followed that axiom precisely. I guess it tasted pretty much like chicken salad as that was the larger quantity of the two meats. You don’t have to have corn relish, you probably have something else you could use. You don’t actually need anything other than the meats and some mayo. Add a little Dijon or other mustard for a bit of a zing.

I was inspired to write about the sandwich by a miraculous creation that came about completely serendipitously 2 days ago. I may have mentioned picking up a package of brats from the sale bin? There were 6 of them. I kept 2 in the fridge and froze the other 4 in 2 packages of 2.

Using the stovetop grill, I cooked them through, turning them often. The ridges on the grill helped keep them upright when they curled a little. They would have curled more if I hadn’t pierced them 3 or 4 times with the tip of a paring knife. When they were nearly done (and I could easily have done this sooner and speeded up the cooking time), I sliced them lengthwise just enough so that they would open up flat on the cooking surface. When they were all cooked through, we assembled our ‘wiches, using the last of a previous Udi’s loaf, a garlic and something bread. First went down a slice of cheese, the type doesn’t matter – whatever ya' got. Next came the brats, open and flat on their backs. Next some of the corn and tomato relish (pickle relish sounds good, too), and then another slice of cheese.

Putting cheese on both the top and bottom translates into the sandwich holding together better when you flip it over.

We brushed olive oil on both outside surfaces of the bread (before assembly) and grilled them for the requisite time as noted above. We took our first bite … and we both groaned with an almost carnal pleasure. Peter immediately said to me, “get two more of those suckers out of the freezer for tomorrow!” I concurred absolutely. We didn’t eat the other brats the next day, we decided to use up that chicken and pork. However, today will be a tiny violation of our general rule on repeating things – we will recreate those brat panini precisely. Oops, that's not quite true. Our cheese is different today.

My mouth is watering and I note that the current time is 10:56 MDT. Exactly 1 hour and 4 minutes to go before I close my teeth around that sandwich. Eat your heart out.

Do you like cheesesteaks? Who doesn't? If you have some leftover steak or roast beef, slice it thin, cook some onion just until softened, warm up the meat and put it all together with cheese in a roll of some kind or, as we do when we have them, in a flour tortilla you've warmed on the stove or even in the microwave.

That's enough for today. Go press yourself a sandwich!

A Mixed Bag

In my book (unpublished and likely to remain so), “A Year of Food,” I chronicled my intake, philosophized, cajoled, and was generally quite witty (well, I’m writing this review!). In this blog I include only the new and inventive things I manage to do. Ergo, I will mention lunch today.

My homemade corned beef has been ready for a couple of days. We have a loaf of Udi’s rosemary sourdough bread and some Swiss cheese. It’s time for Reuben sandwiches.

Reuben’s usually have sauerkraut in them. We don’t have any. Instead, I concocted a slaw with stuff I scavenged from the fridge. This is an example of my philosophy about cooking. Find what you like, find what you have; put them together. Eat.

Stevie’s slaw

The remains of a head of napa cabbage, sliced thin
2 stalks Chinese celery, finely chopped
½ yellow jalapeno-style chili, seeded and finely chopped
white wine vinegar
olive oil
1 tbsp mayonnaise
salt and pepper to taste

Toss everything together an hour or two before time to eat. This will allow the cabbage and celery to wilt a bit. As often happens, I can’t give you precise measurements for the dressing. It depends entirely on how much cabbage and celery you are using. Start with small amounts and add more as your taste dictates.

Reuben sandwiches

4 slices bread
corned beef
2 slices Swiss cheese
2-3 tbsp slaw
schmear of mustard
1 tbsp butter

Slather a bit of your favorite mustard on one or both pieces of bread. Assemble the sandwiches in this order: ½ slice cheese, as much corned beef as you want, slaw, ½ slice cheese.

Heat a griddle or large sauté pan on medium high heat. Rub a stick of butter on the pan and add the sandwiches. Cover loosely with a piece of foil. Grill for 4 minutes. Remove the sandwiches long enough to rub in more butter, turn the sandwiches, put them back in the pan, cover with the foil again and grill for 3-4 minutes until well colored on the bottom.

The reason you want cheese on the top and bottom is so that the sandwiches hold together when you need to turn them while grilling.

I paid a visit to Pacific Ocean Market yesterday for a Chinese food fix. I had a short list of items I culled from a very interesting cookbook called “Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook” by Fuchsia Dunlop. I’m not sure why, but the revolutionary part seems to include countless pictures of Mao.

I intend to make a stir fry for dinner for which the protein will be thousand-year-old preserved duck eggs. I had these in Hong Kong, more specifically on the island of Kowloon, when on liberty from the U. S. S. America during the Viet Nam war.

There were 8 or 10 of us who took the ferry from Hong Kong and then rode rickshaws to a restaurant someone had recommended to us. My memories are somewhat vague, but it was 1968 after all.

We were the only westerners in the place, a cause for much staring from around the dining room. I managed to communicate to the owner that we wanted a real feast – 10 courses, and asked him to suggest a menu constructed just for us. In a few minutes he returned to our table with a napkin on which he had written, in Chinese characters of course, a list of items. He was able to use just enough English words to tell us what everything was. It sounded swell.

I remember only two specific things we ate that night: grouper which was snared right out of a fish tank lining one wall of the room, and what I always called century eggs. Here is the description of them from Dunlop’s book:

“Preserved duck eggs, otherwise known as ‘century eggs’ or ‘thousand-year-old eggs,’ are caked in a paste made from soda, quicklime, salt, and ash, often with the addition of tea leaves or rice husks, and then left to mature for a rather prosaic three months. When the paste is scraped off and the shells broken, the eggs have creamy grey yolks, and dark brown, translucent albumens that are threaded with beautiful flowerlike patters which seem to be etched beneath the surface. These eggs can be eaten straight from the shell or used in cooking.”

I do not remember the taste. I do remember that we all ate them and cleaned the plate. I have some trepidation about them after all these years, but with the tea leaf curing part they are at least seemingly reminiscent of some tea soaked eggs Peter made a while back. They were quite lovely.

Another memorable thing about that evening is that the rickshaw ride cost $1 Hong Kong and the dinner about $10 Hong Kong. Each Hong Kong dollar was worth about 18 cents American. You do the math.

I have had fermented black beans in many a restaurant dish, but have never used them myself. I am fond of using ramen noodles to serve a stir fry. For one thing, they are extremely inexpensive; for another I love their texture. They also take only 3 minutes to cook. After draining them, I like to toss in just a couple of pinches of the powdered flavoring that comes with them. Don’t use too much or it will hijack your dish.

Bean curd skins are made from the protein-rich skin that forms on cooling soymilk during the preparation of bean curd. They are hung to dry.
Here’s my plan:

Red bell peppers and Chinese celery with century eggs

2 large red bell peppers cut into bite size pieces
Chinese celery, an amount about equal in volume to the peppers
Bean curd skin
1 tbsp fermented black beans, rinsed and lightly mashed
1 large clove garlic, minced
sesame oil
soy sauce
salted chiles, chopped
2 tbsp peanut oil for frying
2 preserved duck eggs, sliced into 6 pieces each

Rehydrate the bean curd skins in hot water. After 1/2 hour, drain and add more hot water for another 30 minutes. Cut the skins into bite size pieces.

You can, or course, use regular celery. The Chinese variety has thin stalks, quite bitter leaves, and a taste that is a bit more interesting than our everyday variety. Trim off all the leaves and cut the stalks into lengths approximating the size of the pepper pieces.

Heat the oil in a wok or large sauté pan until smoke begins to appear. Toss in the peppers and celery and bean curd skin and fry for several minutes, just until the peppers begin to soften. Add the garlic, fermented beans, red pepper flakes and salted chiles and continue frying for about a minute. Take the pan off the heat and drizzle very lightly with sesame oil and soy sauce. Use no more than 1 tbsp of each. Give the whole mixture a final toss and serve over ramen noodles. Arrange the eggs around the outside.