Getting the Reuben Right

There are a lot of ways to fuck up a Reuben sandwich. You’d think it would be an easy win, with so many good things going for it–corned beef, rye bread, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, even the Thousand Island dressing. But a good sandwich needs balance, and a good Reuben needs it more than most. My ideal Reuben might not match up with your vision of the sandwich, but I have a few guidelines, some key words that I look out for on a menu before ordering a Reuben. Generally speaking, I will avoid these.

Reuben buzzword buzzkill number one: Marbled Rye

It seems like a lot of restaurants like to use marbled rye for their Reubens, and it’s easy to see why–it’s a visually striking bread. And while I do my best to make the sandwiches I feature on this website look good, you can’t taste pretty. Marbled rye is boring, a fairly bland rye bread with a swirl of darker color added, and is generally a lighter textured, thicker-sliced bread than a Bohemian or a seeded Rye. For me, the flavor of caraway is a necessity in a Reuben so I prefer a seeded “Jewish” rye bread for a Reuben.

Reuben buzzword buzzkill number two: Stacked High

There are a couple of competing (and in some cases bickering) theories regarding the origin of the Reuben. One of them describes a New York deli style sandwich, piled high like a New York deli does. The other describes a more modest sandwich, flat and level like its homeland of Nebraska. I may have been born without the gene that says to stop eating corned beef, but I still prefer the latter to this:

I will be the first to admit, though, that this sandwich was tasty as hell.

Reuben buzzword buzzkill number three: Sliced Thick

Now in the example above, found on Flickr from Katz’s Deli in NYC, it may not be a problem since that appears to be corned beef brisket that has been slow cooked to the proper tenderness and simply cannot be sliced any thinner. However, in the US most commercially made corned beef sold to delis is more likely to be a leaner cut that needs to be sliced very thinly in order to work well, stacked in a sandwich. If you’re buying corned beef at the deli to make yourself a Reuben at home, ask them to slice it as thinly as they can without shredding it.

Reuben buzzword buzzkill number four: Lightly Toasted

With the Katz’s deli example above, and with this example I ate at a favorite bar of mine recently, the sandwich is served on lightly toasted (or not toasted at all) rye.

The problem here is that a Reuben is, or should be, a melt. A melt is essentially a grilled cheese sandwich with other stuff in the middle. That means the sandwich should be assembled and then pan-fried with butter long enough to toast the bread and heat the fillings. That cheese needs to be melting and oozing out the sides of the sandwich along with a streamer of Thousand Island dressing.

So how would I, a big dumb sandwich guy, make a Reuben?

It’s not rocket surgery. You start with bread–seeded rye bread that is, this particular slice is S. Rosen’s seeded rye

Now this is a melt, so we’re going to put cheese on both the top and the bottom. This is not universal to Reuben construction and may in fact be somewhat controversial given my stance on balance. But if the cheese is not sliced super thick, having cheese adjacent to both slices of bread helps hold the sandwich together. Plus, who doesn’t like melted cheese?

Now is the time I will add the Thousand Island dressing

Unless of course I am making this sandwich with Russian dressing instead. For me, personally, I like the classic Thousand Island flavor but this particular Russian dressing–Wishbone brand I think–tastes kind of like Arby sauce and I get a kind of low brow kick out of it.

Now we’ll add the meat, folding the thin-sliced, nearly shredded corned beef into multiple layers. Laying the meat flat would make for a more consistently even melt but the folds help the meat bite through more cleanly.

Then I add a solid layer of sauerkraut. I’m not piling it on but I’m not shying away from it either. I should not be able to see much pink by the time I’m done adding it.

Finally, another slice of Swiss cheese

And the top slice of seeded rye bread, buttered on the outside so this sandwich can be inverted onto a griddle.

The layers in action:

I have a domed cover I use when griddling sandwiches or burgers to help the cheese melt. It just barely fits over one of these due to the larger size of the rye bread. It’s a champion at melting cheese though.

Here’s the cross section:

The Reuben is a classic for a reason. When you get everything right, all the different big flavors going into this sandwich come together to make something greater than the sum of their parts. The salty-sour pairing of corned beef and sauerkraut is a natural combination, and a crisp-but-soft textural contrast between the griddled rye bread and what’s inside it, with the Swiss cheese not just a nutty background note, but the glue that binds the whole together.

There’s an almost elemental interplay between the caraway seeds of the rye bread and the sweet/sour creamy Thousand Island dressing–the taste of one always makes me think of the other. I can’t think why this combination would induce such a strong reaction in me other than a Pavlovian response to a good sandwich.

As for the Russian dressing version–I understand there are renditions of Russian dressing that are much closer in character to Thousand Island but this one is almost barbecue sauce like, a thick mix of tomato and vinegar that makes me want to pile the meat a little higher, maybe even use pastrami instead of corned beef.

In any case, what I am looking for in a Reuben is that grilled-cheese-like quality of a melt, where the ingredients of the sandwich are relatively evenly distributed and griddled together as a whole, resulting in a harmonious combination bound by melted cheese and encased in crisp buttered bread. I suppose that puts me more on the Omaha side of things than the NYC side as far as the origin of the sandwich goes.

Still, there’s a market for everything I guess, and there are a lot of menus out there featuring Reubens that wouldn’t make my cut. So I suppose that my word isn’t the last one when it comes to this sandwich. Who out there has some different thoughts on the Reuben? Please let me know how you like this sandwich, and why!