Italian Beef: bringing more pride to Chicago than all their sports teams combined.
With last week’s nonsense choice of a sandwich out of the way, we were more than ready to return to, “now-that’s-what-I-call-a-sandwich” territory. Fortunately, the list was like, “we gotchu, boo,” and came ready with the Italian Beef sandwich.
The Italian beef sandwich is straight-outta Chicago fare and is, “thinly sliced and seasoned beef topped with au jus (or “gravy” if you’re in the know) and peppers or giardiniera.”
If you look up any recipe online, people are very opinionated about what makes an authentic Italian Beef sandwich. There are a lot of slow-cooker recipes out there where you shred the beef when it’s done, but the comment sections are rife with Chicago-natives who are very upset with this method. Apparently taste isn’t the only thing that matters. You HAVE to thin-slice your meat. None of this easy-to-shred malarky, I guess.
Not wanting to be greeted at the door by the Italian Beef Police, we opted for a more hands-on, oven-roasted option. And, ̶n̶o̶t̶ to throw shade at crock-pot purists — but it wasn’t really that hard. I get that the crockpot is a handy-dandy tool for some meats/meals. Hell, we used ours just a few weeks ago in lieu of burying a pig in a sandy backyard (since, you know, we don’t have a backyard, sandy or otherwise.) But I don’t think it’s the ideal method for all meats.
Also, I really don’t want to piss off people from Chicago. They are birthed into this world with the sick burns fully locked and loaded into their verbal repertoire. I had a mouth stroke while trying to say the word, “vernacular” the other day. I’m not equipped to compete with that.
So, we got our top roast seasoned and prepped first thing Sunday morning and popped it in the oven to cook low and slow until it reached that medium-rare sweet spot. Afterward, we just let the beef hang out and redistribute its juices until we were ready to slice it up.
We realized on Wednesday that giardiniera was 1) hard to find in stores in LA and 2) takes a minimum of 72 hours to make properly. Fortunately, we discovered this in time to make a batch that was ready for Sunday night’s dinner. We’d never heard of giardiniera before, but it’s essentially pickled vegetables. The Chicago-style version that we used has cauliflower, bell peppers, carrots, celery, hot peppers, olives mixed in with olive oil, herbs, water, and just a little bit of vinegar. It’s relatively quick and easy to make…it’s the waiting game that takes time.
But shiiiiiit. It was pretty worth it. I fully expected to hate the giardiniera because I don’t like olives and am not the biggest fan of cauliflower. But somehow this combination works and it was spectacular.
When dinner time rolled around, Nate (once again) was in charge of putting the sandwiches together while I had a toddler firmly rooted to my hip. Nate dunked the thinly sliced meat in the heated up and reduced jus and piled it high on sliced rolls. He topped it off with freshly sauteed bell peppers and the giardiniera.
The verdict? First of all let me say that we fully acknowledge we used the wrong bread. We needed something a little more glutinous to handle all of the moisture that’s inherent to this sandwich. Despite our best efforts, finding the right bread has been tough where we live. We struggled with that on Florida’s Cubano as well. But we can still recognize a good sandwich when we taste one.
And this one was damn good….just not damn great.
Ultimately we felt the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts. The meat was fantastic. The giardiniera was *chef’s kiss.* The peppers were sauteed to perfection…but altogether it was just a bit soggy for us.
Would better bread help? Absolutely. But it’d still be a soggier-than-typical sandwich and I guess I like my sandwiches like I like my cereal and my socks: not soggy.
But now I’ve got that giardiniera recipe to impress people with for the rest of forever, so this week still goes down as a winner in my book.
