I’ve been playing a bit with dry aging steaks recently and was looking to expand the playing field a bit. In the past I’ve made my cheese steaks with steak-ums thinking the creative dressing on the sandwich covers the low rent meat (I use sauteed sweet onions, baby bella shrooms and yellow bell peppers with a smoked provolone, if you’re interested) i though I could try changing the meat quality so i figured i could age a roast of some kind and shave my steaks off that. Any suggestions on best cut, best aging technique, prep suggestions, cooking technique? And how do you dress your Phillies?
First of all, the whole point of a cheesesteak is that it lets you make a tasty dish from subpar meat. If you want to use high-quality meat, that’s fine, of course, but it’s not at all necessary.
Second, I don’t know what you’re making there, but it’s not a Philadelphia cheesesteak. The only ingredients in a cheesesteak are the bun (which really should be from Amoroso, but if you’re outside the Philadelphia area and can’t get those, it absolutely must be something firm and crusty: You should be able to hold a cheesesteak in one hand), beef, optional mushrooms and onions which are cooked in with the beef, and some sort of cheese (there’s tremendous latitude on the kind of cheese-- The original was Cheez Whiz, but the most common is white American, and Provolone is also pretty popular for a low-grease option).
To make a cheesesteak, you need a pair of long-bladed steel spatulas and a flat cooking surface. You slap your meat down on the grill, and while it’s cooking, you continually chop and shred it with the spatulas. If you’re adding mushrooms and/or onions, you put those on around the time the frost is off the meat, and chop/shred those into the pile of meat. When it’s done, you shape it into a long thing the length of your bun, arrange a few slices of cheese over the top, and let the cheese melt a bit, then you take your bun (which is sliced only partway through, like a hot dog bun), open it up and put it on top of the meat-and-cheese pile, slide a spatula underneath the meat, and flip the whole thing over.
I’m interested in the dry aging process.
Chronos is right – though what you’re describing may be a tasty sandwich, it ain’t a cheesesteak.
I misread the title as “dry aged beef for cheesecake”. I’ve tried interesting cheesecakes (mint, key lime) but never beef…
Brian
Same here. I keep running across it in cooking shows, but haven’t been arsed to google it up, and would like to hear some Dopers’ experiences with it.
From steak-ums to dry aging your own beef? I’m curious about that.
Hmmm…. As long as we are looking at sandwich recipes………
This is more in line with Italian beef. But very very simple.
Get a pound (or two adjust accordingly) of sliced roast beef from the deli.
Chop it and slice it up into strips.
In a large skillet, heat Campbell’s French onion soup. Add a bunch of sliced bell peppers. Red and yellow and green.
Add pickled jalapeños and their juice.
Add the sliced meat.
Simmer.
Serve on a hoagie with Swiss cheese.
I think you guys are all wrong about a traditional cheesesteak being made with subpar meat. Pat’s and Geno’s both use thinly shaved prime rib. I’m not necessarily sure if it’s prime grade, but I’m sure it’s decent meat or at least comparable to something you might get at the grocery. Prime rib is definitely not a subpar cut of the animal, and I think the marbled fattieness of a prime rib is probably integral to the final cheesesteak. Something too lean will probably just fall short. If I were going to substitute anything for the prime rib, about the cheapest equivalent cut in terms of flavor and marbling I would probably be willing to drop to is either a strip loin or top loin.
Is it the addition of peppers that you find non traditional?
Not a Philly cheesesteak or not a cheese steak at all? Seriously, its a sandwich with steak and cheese, therefore a cheesesteak. I include elements of the italian beef and the french dip, but it’s at heart built on the Philly cheesesteak. Maybe I’ll call it a parthenocheesesteak.
Prime rib, strip loin or top loin. Good deal.
Me too. My mind immediately went to a nice blue cheese. It could be an interesting concept. Not dessert, but maybe good with port!
For the cut of steak: Pat’s and Geno’s use ribeye. Jim’s uses top round. Those seem to be the two most popular cuts I’ve seen for cheesesteak. And the beef isn’t shaved off a cooked roast–it’s griddled raw and, as described above, chopped up with a couple spatulas as it cooks. It’s difficult to get a cut thin enough without a deli slicer, but if you partially freeze the meat before cutting it, it makes it easier to get it the right level of thinness.
So, at my local Korean supermarkets, I can get thinly sliced frozen beef (for bulgogi, a grilled beef dish). Seems like it’d be a good option for cheesesteaks, right? At least better than Steak-umms?
Yeah, I think that should work quite well, indeed.
Smoked provolone, portabello mushrooms – too upscale. Cheesesteaks are street food.
That, and the description of the onions as “sauteed”, which seemed to suggest the wrong cooking methods. Apologies if I came across a bit strongly: Ever since I left Philadelphia, I’ve been annoyed by the difficulty of finding a real cheesesteak anywhere else in the country, an issue which is all the more perplexing by the fact that they’re really easy to do right.