Cheesesteak-iness: Gangnam (BBQ) style

I like cheesesteaks. I like Korean BBQ. So I say to myself "Why not mash em both together?" And thus the Korean BBQ Cheesesteak was born. It couldn't be more easy. I tried this thing recently where you slice a bunch of tri tip beef real thin and marinate it in Korean BBQ sauce and then you just grill it quick over a BBQ starter chimney. Great success. So as is my tendency with good things I figure out how to cook, I made a fucking sandwich with it. Here's the process.

Got some meat. In this case I got beef Tri-tip, except the butcher told me a secret. He was like, "If you buy these things right here called 'coullote steaks' they are the exact same thing as tri tip except two dollars cheaper." I was so pumped on that. I thought to myself, "I should start hanging out with butchers. They know about stuff."

First I put the meat in the freezer for an hour because that way it would be easier to slice. I learned that part the hard way. I sliced it real thin.

Then I put these two marinades on I got from the local Japanese grocery store.

That one on the right I just guessed was BBQ sauce because it was near all the other sauces and because the label was awesome even though it was all in Japanese. And it had a goddamned picture of a grill on the front. But it was expensive, like 5 bucks for that little 6 oz bottle.

I marinaded the thin slices in that stuff in two separate ziplocks for about an hour. Then I went over to Joel's house to watch Monday Night Football. I talked him into taking the Raiders over the Chargers which was awesome for me since the Raiders are awful and doomed to suck for eternity and promptly lost. KA-CHING!

All I did for the grill was take a regular charcoal chimney starter thing and fill it up with coals and 20 minutes later its hot as crap. Put a little trivet on there and you got yourself a nice impromptu yakitori grill. Or what I imagine a yakitori grill looks like since I've never been to Japan. But this is what I hear they look like.

With the meat sliced so thin and the heat so high, they only take a couple minutes and they are practically burnt to a crisp. I like it done well, but most people will probably like it a little rarer. Those people are morons who don't mind little aliens living inside them. Me? I'm more for the cooked meats.

While that was going over the fire we sauteed some peppers and onions to get some Philly into this sandwich already.

And then chopped up the meat real good like.

Then melt some slices of good old American cheese on there in the broiler and its fucking sandwich time!

And, a close-up.

Every day I'm Sandwichin'

I eat a sandwich every fucking day, just about. I also take pictures of them like "Oh this looks good, I'll write a whole bunch of awesome shit about this bad boy." And then I never do. Like today, I totally had an acceptable pastrami reuben from this nowhere place off HWY 101 in Novato called Belli Deli. The place was in a trailer park or some shit but the nice ladies in there make a hell of a little sandwich. I found it on Yelp. The bread was toasty and the cheese was nice and melted and even though the pastrami wasn't home made or anything (like those handsome gentlemen over at Wise Sons are doing) it still tasted good and was steaming hot just how an awesome Reuben should be.

Well done, you jokers. This is another example of how you never judge a sandwich by its stand. You never know, you just never know.

Sandwich de Jesus Christo de San Francisco 24th Street Bart Station

This is a chicken torta from El Farolito in SF right next to 24th Mission Bart station. There was some ugly lady yelling out front about Jesus with a microphone and she was annoying as all hell. "I'm eating here! Sell your crazy somewhere else!" I wanted to say to her. But instead I just politely ignored her. That's why normal people get drowned out by the nuts ones. We're too considerate to raise up. Get crazy for normal, now that's  a rallying cry I can support....quietly, from afar.

Dude-made Porchetta, made by Dude.

You can do anything if you put your mind to it. I believe in dumb shit like that, putting my mind to things and accomplishing them. I put porchetta on a list of things for my mind to accomplish, and today, it did just that.

I got this bug into my head awhile back when I had this awesome pork thing for the first time at the SF Farmers Market. Porchetta, which according to Wikipedia is:  pork usually heavily salted in addition to being stuffed with garlic, rosemary, fennel, or other herbs, often wild. It blew my fucking mind. It made me question everything I knew about The Other White Meat. I'd always thought bacon was the highest evolution of pork but after trying the crunchy, flavorful, and frankly amazing, thing that is porchetta, I changed that position. Now, bacon was slightly below porchetta on the pyramid of the salted cured meats. For reference, it goes pastrami at the top, then porchetta, then bacon just slightly below and to the right of that. A vaunted place to reside, sure, but not the pinnacle, that's pastrami. If you don't like pastrami, I pity you. Some people just don't know shit about taste. For those people there's canned Spam and Wonder Bread. For the rest of us taste-aficionados, there's so much more.

The Process:

I started with the pork tenderloin and I marinated it overnight with the spices and all that. The brine I used was this:

8 cups of warm water
1/3 cup kosher salt
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup soy sauce

I mixed all that together and threw in  fresh sprigs of rosemary, thyme and some ground pepper. I mashed up the sprigs a little with a mallet so the spices would be opened up a bit. I don't know if that helped but it was fun smashing some shit on the cutting board. SMASH-SMASH-SMASH! I pretended I was the Hulk from the movie the Avengers I just saw the other night.

Then I put the tenderloins in the water overnight and let them sit.

I bought about two pounds of raw pork belly at the store to wrap around the tenderloins to make the porchetta which I then was going to roast over my new (used) Farberware Rotisserie I got from Craigslist. That part was hard to figure out because the tenderloins were bigger than the pork belly I bought so I kind of sliced the belly and wrapped the slices as best I could over the thing. I'm not so good at the butcher's twine thing either. My roast looked like it was done by a half-blind crackhead.

Then I put it on the roaster for about two hours. That's the easiest part. The fucking thing just sits and turns and juices drip out and the whole house smells awesome and before you really know, its done. I went and watched the Rangers get beat by the Capitals during this time. New York played like shit and the Caps shut down any offense by gumming up the shooting lanes on defense as they are wont to do. Its the most boring style of play that there is, but it wins games in the playoffs.

Before all that happened I also made some onion marmalade in an attempt to completely copy the Roli-Roti sandwich I fell in love with. I loosely based my thing on the recipe here but I didn't have any brown sugar so I used regular old Caucasian sugar and some honey and ballparked the motherfucker. It ain't rocket science, ya dig? Sauteing onions in butter for a half-hour is almost as easy as putting the meat on a spit and letting it go. Its like shutting a barn door, nothing more needs to be said about it.

Onions: nature's tear gas

Here's half way through:

My grandpa was a master at the rotisserie. I remember going to visit his house for the weekend when I was little and he'd put a tri-tip on the spit and while it was roasting he'd call my brother Neil and I over and he'd slice off a little bit of meat and hand it to us and admonish us not to tell any of our other cousins. Then when we weren't looking he'd call our other cousins over and do the same drill. He was a paratrooper in WWII and occupied part of Japan after that nasty business with the Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor and all that. "Here, try some of this..." He'd say.

Oh man, it was good too. I checked the inside of the meat with the thermometer and after about 2 hours the temps were 150 degrees or so, and that's good enough for pork. I think. I didn't feel like looking it up, there were sandwiches to be made.  I toasted half an ACME bread sour batard and slathered some of that onion goo on there, sliced the porchetta nice and small and put a bit of greens on top.

Closer detail:

Viola, SANDWICHOSITY!

the Semite Sandwich

Oh man, these Wise Sons sonsofbitches keep killing it. I tried a new one they got on the menu for breakfast.  

The Semite Sandwich.

Its like a breakfast 'wich but they crisp up their home brewed pastrami instead of bacon. Its a pastrami and  runny fried egg deal with just a little fancy mustard and some Swiss cheese on toasty rye bread. I loved it. I could've eaten a second one back to back. I hate you guys. Ok, I love you guys because you made a deli after my own heart. Literally, you are going to kill my heart with all this cholesterol.

Like I always say, you only sandwich once.