Cheesesteak – a Good Sandwich with a Bad Reputation

Cheesesteaks. I remember them on the menu of seemingly every tavern and family restaurant growing up, and I remember not caring too much for them. Maybe it was the inconsistency of the meat, which could range from sopping potroast-like strings to chunks of stew meat, but rarely was at all steak-like. Maybe it was the too-large strips of limp cooked onion and green pepper. Maybe it was the obligatory coating of too much provolone cheese (or worse, Swiss), melted under a broiler into a rubbery shell, like a sandwich-shaped bounce castle.

Could have been, probably was, all of the above. And don’t even get me started on what fast food joints have done to the cheesesteak. At some point, calling a sandwich “Philly” anything came to mean adding big strips of onions and peppers and a pile of melted white cheese, and ensuring that I wasn’t going to order it.

There have been cheesesteak variants that I’ve liked. A restaurant called Cassano’s used to serve a sandwich called the Pizza Cheese Steak that consisted of thin pieces of questionable beef (Steak-Umms or similar) stuffed into a hoagie roll with pizza sauce and mozzarella. Stoner food essentially, though it worked, the sauce making up for the poor quality of the meat. Then there was the El Rancherito Cheese Steak (the Quincy El Rancherito doesn’t have a website I can find, but here’s the Macomb location’s), essentially a giant quesadilla, overstuffed with carne asada and grilled onion, and drowned in the addictive white cheese sauce often served at Midwestern Mexican restaurants.

Of course, none of those are the real thing, which aficionados will tell you just doesn’t exist outside of Philadelphia. More specifically, they’ll tell you that only at their particular favorite local joint can you get the one true perfect cheesesteak. To an extent, they’ve got a point. It may be on enough menus to suggest that somebody actually likes this shit, but the generic idea of the “Philly Cheesesteak” that I grew up with is a terrible sandwich consisting of badly prepared and ill-matched ingredients on boring bread. We live in the magical Age of Internet though, and information about the real thing is so easily available these days that I should think there’s no excuse anymore to serve a bad cheesesteak.

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In Chicago, despite our only slightly similar and arguably superior (giardiniera y’all) Italian Beef sandwich (coming to you on the List in late 2016), there are a couple of places doing more authentic versions of the Philly cheesesteak than you’ll typically find. One of them has a location close enough to my office to make for a convenient lunch stop, so I started my research (read: gluttony) there.

Philly’s Best wears its Philly on its sleeves, with sarcastic signs and menu notes dictating unwelcome behaviors (“If we have to read your mind, $5 extra”), along with framed newpaper articles including a profile in a Philadelphia newspaper and this 1995 Phil Vettel article from the Tribune about cheesesteaks that also features the Markellos family who opened Philly’s Best in Chicago back in the ’90s.

On the pop machine there’s a sign showing that they comply with what many Philly cheesesteak fans consider the absolute, single most important requirement for cheese steak authenticity, sandwich rolls that actually come from Philadelphia. Note: do not click that link if you don’t like sites that autoplay animations with sound.

Philly’s Best offers several “cheesesteak” options–Original, Chicken, or Buffalo Chicken. I think there may be a veggie-friendly option too but I’m trying to get as authentic as I can, and I’m not willing to stretch the definition of “steak” very far for this post. I stuck with the Original. You can get the sandwich on either the regular bread or garlic bread. Garlic bread sounds delicious but same rules apply–I chose the standard roll. You can specify no onions if you like, but why would you? Then it comes down to the cheese–white American, Cheez Whiz, or Provolone.

I asked the guy taking my order (I suspect it was one of the Markellos brothers that day) what would be the most authentic choice for cheese, and he said that growing up outside Philadelphia, when they went downtown for steaks, white American cheese is the way he got them.

Though there are some visible pieces of melted cheese in the photo, the white American cheese is mostly mixed in with the steak and onions, binding the whole together. The primary flavor here is the slight sweetness of cooked onions, with mildly-seasoned beef and cheese as supporting players. The Amoroso roll’s distinct but pliable skin is to the cracklingly crisp crust of a Chicago sub roll as a gig bag is to a hard guitar case–softer, yes, but it gets everything where it needs to go. It’s chewy but molds itself around the fillings and holds together well stuffed with so many ingredients.

I went back a few days later to try the same sandwich but with Cheez Whiz this time.

Again, the onions seemed to dominate, but the increased saltiness of the Cheez Whiz helped supplement the light seasoning of the beef. The Whiz makes for a wetter sandwich though, and the bread came closer to disintegrating under it.

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For the past few years, I’ve been hearing about a Philly Cheesesteak place in our old neighborhood of Lincoln Square on Chicago’s north side. Many Chicago food enthusiasts have seemed more excited about the cheesesteaks from Monti’s than the ones from Philly’s Best. It’s not as easy to get there for me, but on a Sunday, I talked my delightful bride into haunting the old neighborhood with me and we stopped by Monti’s for a late lunch.

Monti’s is tucked away on a northbound one-way street just south of Lawrence Avenue–you could hit it with a rock from the Harvestime parking lot next to the excellent banh mi shop Nhu Lan–and a block or so away from the “Rockwell Crossing” microneighborhood centered around the Rockwell CTA station. There’s a nice bright red awning to mark the place but I can’t say I ever noticed it there before I went looking.

Inside, it’s got a bit of a cutesy sports bar feel, not really in a bad way. It’s very clean, not too bright, not too dim, decorated with some Philadelphia-centric pennants and street signs but not a lot of vintage shop kitsch. There was a TV playing the Cubs game, but not 20 of them. They have a very good selection of craft beers and ciders in bottles and cans, and a single tap, which during our visit was pouring Begyle Brewing‘s Tough Guy, an American Brown Ale.

Monti’s doesn’t offer Cheez Whiz but they do offer an “aged cheddar sauce” instead, along with the standard white American cheese and provolone. Once again, I waffled between the cheeses, but our waiter/bartender offered the option of having white American on one half of my sandwich and the sauce on the other. Mindy ordered hers with provolone.

I’d been ordering large sandwiches at Philly’s Best; the 8″ from Monti’s was smaller by comparison, but along with the beer and an order of fries it more than filled me up (and they have a jumbo option for the big dog appetite). The bread, also from Amoroso’s, seemed firmer than at Philly’s Best–I’d taken those sandwiches to go though, allowing them to steam a bit in their paper wrappers, while this one hit the table still fresh and hot.

Really hot. The “aged cheddar sauce”–can I just call it artisanal cheez whiz?–permeated its half of the sandwich and dripped from the end, flowing magma-like into the crevices between bread and meat and retaining a gums-peeling amount of heat.

The white American cheese was also in a semi-liquid state, except where it had taken on a bit of brown color, possibly from contact with the griddle. Both cheeses were fully integrated into the meat and onion mixture, and seemingly more present than in the Philly’s Best sandwich. The beef also had more flavor–a fattier cut of meat was my guess, and this Kevin Pang Tribune article (also linked earlier) mentions that it’s ribeye vs. the leaner loin used at Philly’s Best. The beef, onion, and cheese were each present, though in this version, the beef and cheese took the spotlight from the onion.

Mindy had ordered her sandwich with the provolone, and while it did not form the mucilaginous shell I’d disliked in the cheesesteaks of my youth, I did notice it stretch appealingly into strings as she took each bite from the sandwich, like the mozzarella on a pizza. Neither of us had thought to offer the other bites, and I found myself wishing I’d tried the provolone as well.

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After reading a bunch of histories of the Philly cheesesteak* I have no better idea of the right cheese for a cheesesteak, but my overall takeaway is that white American is the standard choice; Cheez Whiz, while very popular at Geno’s and Pat’s, the 2 most well-known destinations for cheesesteaks, is for tourists; and Provolone is the original, what was historically added to these sandwiches around 1950 when they went from being plain old steak sandwiches to cheesesteaks.

* Short, possibly apocryphal version–two hot dog cart guys got bored in 1930 and made a steak sandwich. A cabbie bought it and told them, you should sell this instead of hot dogs. 20 years later, they started adding cheese.

I gotta protect my phoney baloney reputation as a sandwich expert and try one with provolone.

So I found myself back at Philly’s Best for lunch the next day, sitting at the counter with a large Original, onions and provolone, and a small lemonade in front of me. I chose to eat in rather than take out so I could experience the sandwich at its peak.

The provolone’s higher elasticity makes for a cheese that does not integrate throughout the sandwich like the American and Whiz, but rather forms a discrete layer, entrapping some of the meat and onion and leaving some loose.

The least salty of the three cheeses, provolone makes even more plain the milder flavor of the Philly’s Best beef. It also makes for a less greasy and indulgent sandwich than the others I had. The sweet cooked onion flavor that dominates this sandwich is not unpleasant, though I could wish for a beefier cut of meat, or a bit more salt. Also, how good would it be with the sharper flavor of an aged provolone–which shows up in Philly’s other famous sandwich and on some cheesesteaks as well–instead of the mild stuff that’s more common?

Oh shit, I’ve only got 3 days left in April and I’m gonna DIY this one, aren’t I?

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To take the guesswork out of it, I’ll start with the technique described in the Tribune article above, which seems pretty on point with the results I’ve experienced.

Fuck sirloin tip though, I’m getting ribeye. I bought some thick boneless ribeye steaks at my local grocery store, froze them flat against a cutting board for about an hour to stiffen them up a bit, then cut them very thin using a professional deli slicer that my buddy Rich keeps in my garage.

I’ll need to quickly find a recipe for a Philly style torpedo roll as well. Some comments on food sites suggest Peter Reinhart’s Italian Bread recipe from a book called The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. No time to find and buy the book–also, let’s face it, I’m lazy and cheap–but here is a site that has “adapted” the recipe. Good enough for me. Ah, crap, it takes two days. That’s cutting it close. Better get that biga started.

Biga is the Italian version of a starter dough or pre-ferment. French baking uses something similar called a poolish. It’s essentially flour, yeast, and water, slow-fermented overnight before building a dough from it. The slow fermentation develops more flavor, and the pre-ferment can also improve the hole structure and stability of a finished bread. I let this one ferment for 20 hours in my refrigerator before completing the dough, which rested in the fridge overnight before I shaped it and baked it into 7″ hoagie rolls.

In the meantime, I needed to find some sharp provolone. Luckily, there is a wonderland of imported Italian cheese available to us in Chicago. On my way home from work, I stopped by the insane cheese counter at Eataly, as I had while researching the Chilean Barros Jarpa.

I got someone’s attention and asked after a sharp, aged, imported provolone. The cheesemonger brought out a 24 month provolone that was delicious, but its texture was too crystalline for this purpose, I thought.Then she brought out another cheese. “This is like a sharp provolone,” she said, and cut off a piece for me to try. The cheese was Ragusano, a Sicilian type of Caciocavallo, and it was delicious, sharp and a bit funky but with an underlying sweetness. Given that Caciocavallo is itself a hybrid form of Provolone, it was close enough for my purposes. Also I am a sucker for funky expensive cheeses. So I bought it.

I wanted that nice sharp flavor, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed the texture & meltiness of an American cheese–the sandwiches seemed to work better when the cheese was melted throughout the whole. Which meant the thing to do was to make a sauce. I used Kenji J. Lopez-Alt’s easy cheese sauce method from Serious Eats–I grated the cheese, tossed it in some corn starch, then melted it with a little less evaporated milk than Kenji calls for, resulting in a thick, intensely flavorful cheese sauce that cooled into a smooth spreadable texture.

With the meat, bread, and cheese out of the way, once I sliced some onion nice and thin, it was go time.

I heated my 12″ cast iron pan with a little oil, added the onions, seasoned with a little oregano, and let them cook for a minute before adding the thinly-sliced ribeye and seasoning with salt and pepper.

After flipping the mess steak-side down, I added the split sandwich roll, cut-side down, to let it steam a little.

Then, once the steak was nearly cooked, I chopped up the onions and steak the best I could–I don’t have one of those sturdy long sharp metal spatulas like the pros use, so I held the meat and onions against the griddle with a regular spatula while I cut it with a knife, shaped it all into a roughly sandwich roll sized rectangle, and added the cheese just long enough to let it melt. Then I scooped it all into the roll and voila!

The cheese is not terribly visible in that animation but it’s in there–a thin coating spread throughout most of the meat and onion, with a few concentrated areas underneath.

So how was it? Well, I definitely need some practice on my technique, and I should try not to overfill the sandwich as much, but it was good! The steak and onions and the roll were right on. I did go too aggressive on the cheese though–I still want that sharp flavor, but this is a really assertive cheese, even once it’s diluted into a sauce, and I should dial it down a bit. The steak was extra beefy, the onions did their part, and the cheese spread throughout the sandwich nicely, but those occasional bits with a little higher concentration of cheese sauce were distracting.

It was a good sandwich, though not the perfect one I was aiming for. I’ll get it right next time, or the time after that. But you won’t get to read about it, because I’m out of time for cheesesteaks on the Tribunal. It turns out they’re a much better sandwich than I anticipated, even though I’m sure that the average Philadelphian could tell me a half dozen things I got wrong. But that’s what the comments are for! Tell us about your favorite cheesesteak below!