Pakistan’s Hunter Beef Sandwiches

“Hunter beef,” the descriptions read, is “the Pakistani take on… corned beef.” It “came to Pakistan with the British invasion of the Indian subcontinent.” Yet the tools of meat preservation used in Europe–spices and especially saltpeter–were among the many coveted Indian exports that drew England’s Imperial eye to the subcontinent. Potassium nitrate, aka saltpeter, is still a common ingredient in Pakistani hunter beef recipes, though other compounds such as sodium nitrite have replaced saltpeter in much of the world, and is still widely used in agricultural fertilizers.

Saltpeter is also, of course, one of the three ingredients used in making gunpowder, a substance in great demand throughout much of the past millenium.

In Europe, in the late middle ages and the early modern period, saltpeter was produced by letting fecal material–i.e., poop–sit around until little white crystals magically appeared on its surface. (These crystals are formed due to the activity of nitrifying bacteria, yet to be discovered.) It was, thus, not quick or easy and European monarchies became shit monopolists in order to control its production. In India, however, the bacteria that produces saltpeter occurs naturally in great quantities, and veins of the chemical develop in ordinary soil, comparatively easy to dig up and refine en masse. Its use in explosives was referenced in Indian war treatises as early as 300 BCE. Its production in India is “…probably a very ancient industry” and India historically has been “…the world’s largest producer of gunpowder.” It is widely used in traditional medicines in India.

I have not, however, found any documentation of saltpeter being used for meat preservation in India prior to the Raj. This use of the substance may not have occurred to much of the subcontinent, given the prevalence of various forms of vegetarianism there. Perhaps Hunter Beef is, as often stated, a Pakistani version of the salt beef brought over by the Brits. It is an interesting take, though, one using a range of different techniques and aromatics. Corned beef is corned beef, and will be much the same from place to place, but hunter beef may be just a bit different every place you find it. If I see it on a menu, I’m almost obligated to try it, just to experience that version.

I have, unfortunately, only identified one shop in Chicago that serves an actual bonafide hunter beef sandwich though: Spinzer, on Devon.

Long time readers may remember Spinzer from our quest for Bun Kebabs–oh wow, six years ago now. They are a family-run fast-ish food restaurant and per current restaurant guidelines were doing carryout orders only on the Saturday afternoon we stopped by for their hunter beef sandwich. We ordered our sandwich, took a walk for the 15 minutes they told us it would take to prepare, and took our prize across the street to a public bench to eat.

Spinzer’s hunter beef is a bright red color, much like the standard corned beef brisket, but is seemingly made from a leaner, stringier cut. It spends some time on an oiled griddle and is served in a flat crusty bread roll with grilled onions and chilis, swimming in mayonnaise. While the meat itself may be somewhat lean, the sandwich is anything but dry.

The flavor is similar to corned beef as well as the color. In Spinzer’s sandwich, the salt of the preserved meat and the mayonnaise are the biggest flavor contributors, with some sweetness from the grilled onion and the occasional bite of a chili.

In contrast, the hunter beef served in a paratha at counter service spot Ghareeb Nhawaz just up the street lacks both the bright red color and the high saltiness of a corned beef.

This beef is served with sour yogurt and thick slices of raw yellow onion, and while the beef is quite tender, its accompaniments are comparatively brash, and the balance of the overall package suffers as a result.

These being the only two available examples I had for hunter beef in the area–a strip mall spot in Aurora serving a “Hunter Beef Burger” was out the day I visited–I of course elected to make my own. There is a commercially available Shan brand spice mix for marinating hunter beef–just mix with lemon juice–but my local spot, serving a largely vegetarian Gujarati clientele, does not carry it. It does, however, carry every spice required to make my own version based on this recipe, which I chose because of the variety of interesting aromatics it uses. Cinnamon, cumin, ginger and garlic, black pepper, clove, allspice, bay leaf, green and black cardamom–some of the elements are very familiar to someone who has made corned beef before. Many of these aromatics don’t come in the standard European-style meat cure recipe though.

In place of brown sugar I used jaggery, an Indian type of unrefined sugar, caramelly and sweet, ever so slightly bitter. In place of salt, black salt, another ingredient found at my local Indian market, a dingy gray in color and almost eggy in its sulfurous aroma. For meat tenderizer I used MSG, and for the curing salt I used good old Prague Powder #1. The recipe does not specify what cut of beef to use. Some other recipes suggest top round. I chose chuck roast instead, to avoid an excessively lean result. I mixed all this and the juice of a few limes into a slather and coated the 5 pound roast with it, letting it cure for 5 days.

After the meat cooked, I cooled it in its simmering liquid, allowing some of its rendered fat to solidify on the meat to help preserve it. The meat took on the pink nitrite color inconsistently–in places it was bright red and in other places a brown more typical of uncured meat.

The flavor was interesting. The slather did not contain much salt or curing salt, and the simmer had leeched any resulting saltiness out of the meat, so while there is a “cured” flavor, it is still a fairly mild form of charcuterie. Aromatically though, it is far more interesting. The sulfurousness of the black salt and the cinnamon are the primary drivers there, cumin and black pepper can be picked out, and there are depths where the additional aromatics lurk as well.

The question is, what kind of sandwich to make with it? Recipes abound, and no two appear to be alike. Descriptions of the more traditional uses call for hunter beef to be made into breakfast sandwiches and tea sandwiches, but I have not found any really definitive recipes.

So I winged it.

Wraps

The first thing I made with it was a wrap rather than a sandwich. It went down like this–I’d ordered a shawarma wrap to be delivered for lunch, but that order fell through. So I sliced up some hunter beef and threw it into a pan, making sure to get some of its fat in there with it.

The slices of beef broke up into chunks and shreds as they sauteed, and I tipped the resulting mess of meat out onto a shrak flatbread. This is more Palestinian than Pakistani but it’s what I had on hand at the time. Besides, the recipe I’d quickly found used flour tortillas. This was at least geographically closer.

Atop the beef, I added a handful of French fries and a drizzle of chili/garlic mayo.

To finish, I added some hastily-chosen salad vegetables–romaine lettuce, julienned carrots, thin-sliced radishes. Just whatever I had lying around.

Of course then I got impatient while rolling up the wrap and tore it. Still, while it was not a beautiful finished product, nor an authentic example of Palestinian-style hunter beef, it was a delicious sandwich.

Perhaps slightly more authentic was the Chapati wrap I made. Starting with Atta flour and water, I (clumsily) rolled out these flatbreads and cooked them on my 14″ flat cast iron skillet. The wraps consisted of chapati stuffed with mint chutney, shredded hunter beef, scrambled egg, chopped cilantro, and more of the chili/garlic mayonnaise.

Chapati are a pain to make, too much work for what may be my least favorite of the Indian flatbreads. The dough is thin and wet, unsturdy enough to break easily yet still solid enough to require rolling out by hand. But the charred bits lend the bread a good flavor, and while they are still fresh, warm, and pliable, they are far more enjoyable to eat than otherwise, making an excellent wrapper for tasty ingredients like these.

A Veggie Sandwich

When it came to sandwiches, my first thought was to make something much like the Indian vegetable sandwiches we explored a year ago. There are in fact many recipes for just this type of sandwich online, but there are many commonalities, and I prefer to make my own version, using the things I like. Starting with the thin slices of Pullman-style sandwich bread that I buy from my local Indian market, I first added butter and chutneys–a mixture of mint and green chilli chutneys on the left, tamarind chutney on the right.

On the mint/chili side, slices of boiled Yukon Gold potato, and on the tamarind side, sliced tomato. To both, a generous sprinkling of Sandwich Masala, a mixture of spices and powdered green mango that adds earthy, aromatic, and sour elements.

To these, a thin slice of red onion and a layer of sliced cucumbers.

Finally, the hunter beef.

This sandwich was every bit as good as the vegetable sandwiches we tried last year

However, it wasn’t any better than those sandwiches; the beef didn’t really add anything. This is a delicious sandwich, with a wild combination of flavors and textures that somehow work together, like any of the best of the vegetable sandwiches we had last year. It is not the way to feature hunter beef as an ingredient, though.

Melted Cheese

Once again, I turned to the lessons of the past, and when it comes to Indian sandwiches, one of my favorite ingredients has been Amul cheese. Amul is a processed Indian cheese made from Water Buffalo milk and sold in cans. It has a sharp, salty flavor like cheddar, but with a slightly sour element that gives the cheese a more complex profile than the standard salty/waxy American cheese. It goes great with chutneys, with jams, with those vegetable sandwiches. It tastes great in a vada pav or in whatever you care to serve it in. It ought to make a pretty great sandwich with some hunter beef

Starting with green chilli chutney, I added a layer of finely-shredded Amul.

Then I added the sliced hunter beef and some of that chili/garlic mayo that’s been getting a workout in these sandwiches.

And of course, another layer of cheese to help glue this sandwich together.

The sandwich went into a sandwich press until well browned, with the cheese nicely melted.

It was an absolute knockout of a sandwich. The chili chutney and the chili/garlic mayonnaise (essentially mayo mixed with chili/garlic sauce) provided both heat and acidity that cut through the fattiness of the cheese and beef, and while you may think that the fattiness of cheese and meat is what you want in a melt, it’s even better with additional layers of sour and spicy.

It was a delicious sandwich, but a deceptively simple one. Making this sandwich gave me the confidence that melts were really the way to best showcase the flavor of hunter beef. Confidence that, it turns out, was completely unwarranted.

Melted Wings

Say, I thought to myself. If a simple melt is this good, what would be even better? A more complicated melt! Hunter beef is basically corned beef, right? And what kind of melt uses corned beef?

A Reuben

So what would you put into a South Asian version of a Reuben, if you were to make one? Hunter beef will stand in for the corned beef, of course, and there’s no point in trying to find a better analog for Swiss cheese–Amul is just too good. But what about the sauerkraut? Well, Indian cuisine is rife with various pickles. It wasn’t hard at all to find a recipe for a cabbage pickle. I did not have any mustard oil at home–and it’s pretty powerful stuff, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to go buy any. So I substituted with a combination of regular olive oil and a good amount of Colman’s English Mustard powder to simulate the burn of the mustard oil.

And now for the Russian dressing. What condiment in South Asian cuisine would replace a pinkish or reddish or purplish salad dressing, a little tangy, a little bit of spice, maybe with some diced up vegetable matter in it? I really thought about it a lot. Raita, a condiment made from yogurt, cucumber, and spices came to mind almost immediately. But raita is very plain and white looking–at least in its most common forms. There are many types of raita though, and it turns out that there are plenty of recipes online for beetroot raita. I chose a recipe that used roasted beets, as I prefer the texture of them roasted. But instead of pureeing a single roasted beet, I used 2 of them, shredded, to keep some of that texture of the vegetable in the sauce. The color was intense. The flavor was fantastic, the beets just sweet enough to take the edge off the sour yogurt, plenty of toasted cumin seed flavor, a good amount of heat from the chopped chilies.

Finally, the bread. Though finding a South Asian analog for seeded rye would have been preferable, I just could not think of a thing. The Indian sandwich bread that I use would have to do. After all, it toasts up nicely, and goes so well with the Amul cheese.

Atop the cheese I placed a double layer of hunter beef, to simulate the thick wad of corned beef so common to Reubens.

Then the beetroot raita

and the cabbage pickle

before finishing with another layer of Amul cheese. This sandwich was vivid going into the pan to be toasted.

It was less vivid coming out–the raita and pickle had combined into a gloppy orange mess. Still, I was sure it would be delicious, and I could make another one, keeping the raita and pickle separate if I needed to. I took a bite

This was an awful, awful sandwich, and entirely because of one single ingredient: the cabbage pickle. I can’t even blame the recipe writer, since I made substitutions, but I do not feel motivated to make it correctly and try again. The basic problem, at least for me, was the combination of spicy mustard and fennel seed. Picture this, if you will: you bite into a sandwich that has that spicy mustard flavor. You’re getting that good sinus hit, that chemical burn-like sensation you get from a good hot mustard or horseradish or wasabi. But you are also inhaling the sweet scent of fennel, and even more so now that your sinuses have been cleared. Your brain is taking in this combination–a burning in your sinuses and back of your throat, the pain sensation from the chilies, the watering of your eyes from both of the above, and that sweet smell of fennel, amalgamating these things, processing them. The gestalt–your brain ends up interpreting this particular blend of sensations as a sign that you have been poisoned. It stops, sits down, crosses its arms and refuses to let you take another bite. Before you know it, you’ve thrown the rest of the sandwich straight into the garbage.

Massive, unprecedented failure. I really wanted that sandwich to succeed, but no. That beetroot raita is excellent though. I’ve been eating it for breakfast.

A Sausly’s Clone

Rather than end this post on such a downer, let us return to simplicity, and how good a sandwich can be just combining a few quality ingredients.

A few months ago, my friend Arafat tagged me in a post he made on Facebook talking about the best sandwiches he’d ever eaten. All of them looked tasty–Arafat is a man of taste and quite a good cook. One caught my eye though, a hunter beef sandwich from a shop in his native Bangladesh called Sausly’s. He described it as “such a uniquely subcontinental thing. It’s like chipped beef cut into tiny cubes and mixed with butter and mayo, and it is the greatest thing ever.” He also scared up a photo from the dregs of the internet to demonstrate.

It doesn’t look like much here. It resembles a very simple tuna salad sandwich to me, one without celery or onion or giardiniera or any of the crisp or pungent or sour and salty little add-ins that make tuna salad interesting. It looks a lot like the British Rail sandwiches that ruined our day back in 2015, wrapped in plastic and sitting in a glass cooler until someone buys it.

Arafat raves about the things though. I searched high and low for a recipe to supplement Arafat’s increasingly visceral descriptions: “literally swimming in butter… so much butter that they have to serve it to you cold… VISIBLE BUTTER like mayo in egg salad!” The best I found was a description in this online article that called it “the perfect meal all rolled into one — the soft white bread, biting into which you get a mouthful of flavoursome chopped hunter beef and mayonnaise.”

Still, I trust Arafat’s palate. If he says butter, the sandwich has butter in it. I started with two slices of the Pullman-style sandwich bread I buy from my local Indian market and spread them somewhat liberally with butter.

To this, I added a simple mixture of mayonnaise and finely-chopped hunter beef.

I topped this with another slice of buttered bread, removed the crusts, cut into triangles, and voila! My version of Sausly’s infamous hunter beef sandwich.

This is good. This is really good. The mixture of hunter beef and mayonnaise, along with the schmear of butter, brings to mind, vaguely, texturally, and in some remote way flavor-wise, deviled ham. But where deviled ham is salty and greasy, this is aromatic and fatty, the beef and mayonnaise mixture soft and lush, covered in just enough bread to keep your fingers from getting dirty. This may not be just like what Arafat remembers from his days in Bangladesh, but it’s a simple and beautiful sandwich that I’ll remember for a long time, and may be the way that I use up most of this hunter beef. There is kind of a lot of it left.