SOS – Chipped Beef Requires Assistance

I grew up eating creamed chipped beef on toast. It’s something my Mom ate as a kid, and a recipe she took with her to adulthood, something cheap and easy to feed a family. She tells me she’s been making it for me all my life.

For some reason I associate it with my ex-stepfather Tim though. Tim didn’t come into my life until I was in 3rd grade or so, at which point I’d been eating creamed chipped beef on toast for years already. Tim had been in the Army though, and once he and my Mom were married, it was no longer called creamed chipped beef on toast. Though Mom would shush him, and though we weren’t allowed to say it in front of them, from then on the dish became Shit on a Shingle.

SOS is just chopped dried (chipped) beef in a cream sauce on plain old buttered toast. You can still find dried beef in jars in grocery stores, right where they keep things like Spam, deviled ham, and other tinned meat products, but my Mom, and probably a lot of yours, didn’t bother using anything quite that fancy.

I hadn’t eaten SOS in years, but I had a pretty good idea exactly how to make it. I texted Mom and got her recipe anyway. Soldiers may grumble about it, but SOS is comfort food, and comfort food doesn’t get any more comforting than when you make it just like Mom used to do.

Mom’s recipe, scaled to enough for 2 adults, 3 teenage boys (the neighbor kid was over) and a 2nd grader, goes like this:

Mom’s Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast

• 8oz Buddig beef, chopped up into 1/2″ pieces or so
• 4T butter
• 4T flour
• 2C milk, hot
• 1/2t each salt and pepper

1. Melt the butter in a pan over low heat, then mix in the flour, salt, and pepper.
2. Slowly add in hot milk bit by bit, letting each addition be absorbed fully before the next, and keep stirring until the sauce reduces and thickens just a bit.
3. Add in the beef, leave it on the heat just long enough to come up to temperature with the sauce, and serve it on buttered toast like so:

I served this to my family for lunch on a Saturday and it went over very well, though I don’t think we’d ever made it for the kids before. It’s simple, tasty, unchallenging, filling. Comforting, even if you don’t have a history with it.

I’ll admit it though, simple isn’t always my bag. I’m a gild-the-lily kind of guy, and even though I enjoyed this preparation, it got me thinking….

How can I fancy this up?

SOS has three basic elements. Bread. Meat. Sauce. Let’s work on them one by one.

Bread

For my recent post on the chip butty, I’d made a loaf of sourdough bread. That was gone, but I still had half the biga I’d started it with left in the fridge. I used it to make another nearly identical loaf. Here’s the basic prep:

Jim’s Sourdough

• Biga*
• 3C bread flour
• 1C tepid water
• 1T olive oil
• 2t salt

1. Combine in the bowl of a stand mixer and knead them for 9 minutes on medium-low.
2. Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl (rolling it in the oil to coat it) and cover with plastic wrap, then let it rise overnight in the refrigerator (about 20 hours)
3. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, tuck the sides in to make it loaf-shaped, then put it in an oiled loaf pan to proof for another hour or two.
4. Bake at 350 for about 65 minutes. Remove from the pan, shut off the oven, and return the loaf to the oven rack for another 20 minutes.
5. Cool loaf on rack

* The half biga left over from last week had continued to slowly ferment and filled most of a quart container. The full biga basically consisted of about 3 1/2 cups of bread flour, 1 3/4 cups of water, a teaspoon of dry yeast, and a couple tablespoons of my rye sourdough starter, combined in a bowl and allowed to ferment in the refrigerator. I used half of it for each loaf.

I cut off one heel to check the crumb–looked like it would work just fine for SOS.

Meat

I’ve heard of people using leftover roast beef or hamburger in their SOS, and even though those might be an upgrade over ye olde Buddig, they really aren’t as fancy as I’m shooting for.

Let’s look instead at the dried beef that was originally used to make this. Classically, dried beef starts with a lean cut of meat that is rubbed with sugar, salt, and potassium nitrate and cured for several days, then hung and dried for weeks or months.

There’s a fancy term for this type of meat preservation. It’s called charcuterie. Or, alternatively, salumi.

Enter bresaola. Bresaola is an Italian style of dried beef, cured with salt and spices, wine and herbs (often including juniper and rosemary) and dried for months. I called around and found a few places that carried it, but decided to get it from Publican Quality Meats, where they make theirs in-house.

PQM is a deli, butcher shop, and bakery, sort of one-stop shopping when it comes to sandwiches–in fact, they make pretty great sandwiches, in addition to selling their own homemade sausages and charcuterie.

You can see the bresaola down there in the lower right, dried to a dark red, nearly black on the edges.

I bought a half pound of it, sliced paper thin. If they’d known what I planned to use it for, I feel like they might have thrown me out.

Though the slices were thin, the flavor was huge–salty, fermented, herbacious. Going from Buddig to this was an upgrade of vast proportions, cosmic in scale.

Sauce

Did the method for preparing the cream sauce in Mom’s recipe sound familiar to you? It should have. The cream sauce is essentially the same as the country gravy you might have had on chicken-fried steak or mashed potatoes, the sawmill gravy in biscuits and gravy, the layer of white sauce in most lasagnas or the base you use when you’re making a homemade macaroni and cheese. It’s a bechamel sauce. So how do we fancy up something that’s already one of the 5 mother sauces of French cuisine?

Let’s try a different mother sauce.

Velouté starts the same way bechamel does–with a roux made from butter and flour. Instead of milk though, the roux is used to thicken stock–usually fish or chicken stock. The resulting sauce is very much like a simple gravy–but velouté is seldom used as is. Instead, it is usually used as the base for another sauce. For example, if we were to make a chicken velouté, reduce it by half, then add an equal amount of crème fraîche, we’d have something similar to a French Suprême sauce.

So in fact, with a few embellishments of my own, that’s what I did.

Jim’s Fancy SOS

• 4T butter
• 4T flour
• 2C chicken stock
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed and peeled
• 1 bay leaf
• 8oz creme fraiche
• black pepper to taste
• 2oz asiago cheese, grated
• 8oz bresaola, thinly sliced, chopped to 1/2″ pieces
• freshly grated nutmeg

1. Melt butter in pan over low heat. Add flour, cook for a few minutes but not long enough to add any color
2. Add stock in small increments, stirring to combine fully, until all the stock has been added.
3. Add whole crushed garlic cloves and bay leaf to sauce. Stir frequently over medium-low heat until reduced by half. Remove garlic and bay leaf.
4. Add creme fraiche. Season with black pepper. Stir over heat long enough to heat creme fraiche
5. Add asiago, stir until fully melted and combined.
6. Add bresaola. Keep on heat just long enough to bring it up to temperature.
7. Remove from heat. Grate a little nutmeg over the sauce, stir once, and serve on toast.

Result

Here’s my homemade sourdough, sliced, toasted and buttered.

Here it is topped with my fancy version of creamed chipped beef:

The sauce was quite salty–I used an unsalted chicken stock, but the bresaola (and to a lesser extent the cheese) added more than enough seasoning. It wasn’t inedibly salty–it was good, I thought–but I could have wished for less. There were a lot of flavors vying for attention in this sauce–the savory chicken stock, the slight sourness of the creme fraiche, the nuttiness of the asiago, the wine and juniper flavors the bresaola released into the sauce and the beefy flavor it kept for itself. If you try this recipe for yourself–and I’m not saying you should, it was an extravagant waste of some nice salumi–you should use unsalted butter in addition to unsalted stock and possibly leave out the cheese as well.

But did it work? I think it did, in terms of taking something bland and comforting and making it far more interesting. Of course, the easy quick meal that cost less than $5 to make the first time now cost over $30 with a whole lot more effort involved. Can we still call it Shit on a Shingle?

Gotta be honest though: Mom’s way is still the best.

By the way, I completely forgot to mention that this was the Tribunal’s 100th published post. Good job, us!