Binghamton, NY’s Spiedies

Spiedies are a kind of sandwich from central New York, Binghamton to be exact, consisting of marinated chunks of meat, grilled on a skewer, and served in rolls or on slices of white Italian bread with a bit more marinade drizzled over them. It’s a big deal there, on the menus at many local restaurants, and with its own page on the Binghamton tourism site. Binghamton has even held Spiedie Fest every August since the mid-80s featuring concerts, a balloon rally, and a Spiedie cooking contest.

In the Binghamton area, many people make their own marinades, consisting of red wine vinegar and/or lemon juice, olive oil, dried and fresh herbs, salt, and pepper, but there are also a couple of main brands of commercially-made marinades available.

A year or two ago, I happened to notice a single bottle of the Salamida State Fair brand of marinade available in my local grocery store and picked some up. It sat in my pantry all this time–I kept figuring I’d use it at some point, but it took Spiedies coming up in the List for me to get around to it. Of course, we were slightly past the best-by date on the bottle at this point, but since it’s essentially a vinaigrette I figured it’d be fine.

Chicken

Spiedies call for a long marinade–the Lupo’s bottle says 48 hours, but most sources say 24 hours or at least overnight, and with a ratio of marinade-to-meat that makes it more like a brine. I used an entire 16 ounce bottle to marinade about 3 pounds of chicken thighs. Such a long time in an acidic mix cooks the meat a bit, much like the fish in a ceviche. By the time it hit the grill the next day, the chicken already had the white color of cooked meat.

Just on the outside though–they still needed to be cooked all the way through, and browned a bit, before they were ready for a sandwich.

I threw some sub rolls on the grill too for a minute, just to toast them a touch.

Sandwich assembly is easy–you just lay the skewered meat in the bread, close the bread around it, and pull the skewer off. Then you can drizzle some of the marinade over the meat, and over the bread as well if you like. Don’t just slop the same marinade on top that the chicken soaked in overnight–use a fresh bottle, or bring the used marinade to a boil and then simmer it for 5-10 minutes first.

This is pretty great stuff–the sandwich would be fairly dry without the drizzle of marinade, but the sauce gives it a lot of flavor and moistens the bread enough to make it seem like more than just bread and meat.

Beef

I wanted to try it with other meats as well, and my local had brought in more bottles of Salamida by this point, so I cut some thick sirloins into cubes and started them marinating. I didn’t want to use the gas grill again though–I wanted to get some charcoal flavor into these skewers. Spiedies are derived from Italian spiedinis or arrosticinis, small skewers of meat cooked as snacks or street food on canala, long narrow coal-fired braziers with rails just far enough apart to support the skewers with meat between them.

So I decided to build a canala, out of leftover paving bricks from my back patio project a couple years ago.

The bricks were a little wet–it’s been raining a lot–but they dried up pretty quick when the charcoal got hot. I lit it in the chimney starter I use for my smoker and poured it into the canala when all the coals were burning. A full chimney gave me just the right amount of burning charcoal for this project, leaving about 3 inches between the coals and the beef. My skewers are flat, which makes it ideal for browning either side nicely but not as good for browning inbetween the top and bottom.

Still, I managed to get a nice crust on them, and served them in hoagie rolls like I had the chicken.

The marinade did not take as fully with the beef as it had with the chicken, despite a similar marinade time. However, the sirloin was excellent, the charcoal flavor was a great improvement over the gas cooking, and by using the very hot coals, I was able to put a nice char on the steak while leaving it medium rare on the inside.

Lamb

Reading about those arrosticini got me thinking about them though. According to Wikipedia, they’re made with lamb traditionally, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, and served with crusty bread soaked in olive oil and Italian chilis, preserved in oil. The lamb is not marinated or seasoned, but salted once it’s over the fire.

So I bought some thick lamb chops, and some olive oil, and some red chilis preserved in oil, and some good Italian bread from Damato’s. I removed the meat from the lamb chops, saving the bones against some future purpose, cut it into cubes, and I marinated it overnight anyway, in a mix of olive oil, lemon juice, red wine vinegar, fresh mint and rosemary, salt and freshly cracked black pepper because that sounded good.

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I drizzled some olive oil over the bread

Topped it with the lamb, grilled on skewers over charcoal on my homemade canala

and topped that with the red chilis.

Now I figure this is not the way they do it in Abruzzo–most likely they alternate bites of meat from the skewer and oil-soaked bread, perhaps scooping up chilis with the latter. But this is a sandwich blog, dammit, and we’re gonna sandwich things.

Wait, whatever happened to that Lupo’s marinade?

I had to order it from Amazon, but I finally did get around to trying the other major commercial brand of Spiedie marinade, Lupo’s. The marinade was darker in color, perhaps from a higher percentage of red wine vinegar or from additional spices. I used it to marinade cubes of chicken thigh, to compare against the chicken thighs I’d done with the Salamida marinade, and used the same sub rolls I had before, but I gave the Lupo’s a bit of a head start–now that I’d built my canala, I wasn’t going back to the gas grill for these skewers.

I ran into a bit of a problem boiling and simmering the marinade after using it–the Lupo’s separated in a visually unappealing way, leaving a mess of solids suspended in a reddish oil that would not recombine no matter how I worked it with a whisk. Still, I went ahead and drizzled a bit over the meat in the sandwich once I’d placed the skewer in the roll.

I’m sad to say I didn’t care for the Lupo’s marinade. There was something off about it, some slightly rancid or cheesy flavor that I could not place. Or maybe I was thrown off by the visually offputting mess it became after heating. I would try it again, but I’d use something else to dress the meat after putting it in the roll.

Still, the chicken itself was great, and the flavor of grilling over charcoal instead of gas made the experiment worthwhile. I still have a bottle of the Salamida marinade left, and hopefully I’ll get to use it before it expires this time. Perhaps I’ll improve my banged-together canala design as well. This sandwich is a perfect taste for summer, which despite the near-constant rain we’ve had, should be coming soon.