Rachel, Rachel, I’ve Been Thinking

The Rachel sandwich is a Reuben variant, which according to Wikipedia “substitutes pastrami or turkey for the corned beef, and coleslaw for the sauerkraut.” If you recall the brief discussion of the Reuben origin from my writeup back in 2018, both Omaha and NYC have claimed to be the birthplace of this classic sandwich, the ingredients for which are not in doubt. The Rachel on the other hand appears to have no claim of origin, no set recipe, and only a fairly short list of guidelines to define it.

I ordered a few this month, just to get a feel for the sandwich. Jewish delis are probably the best place to get either a Reuben or a Rachel, and the one closest to me is Bergstein’s NY Deli in Chicago Heights. Their Rachel is a turkey sandwich on a pretzel bun with coleslaw, Russian dressing, and Swiss cheese. The turkey is warm and soft-textured, moist, unlike either the dried-out shredded turkey breast many people experience at Thanksgiving or the gelatinous sheets of unidentified off-white substance that passes for most deli turkey. It’s a good sandwich.

At JB’s Deli, a sandwich counter that has taken over the front of a small pharmacy on North Clark St. in Chicago, their Rachel sandwich is called a “Rachel Reuben” and does appear to be, essentially, a Reuben. I’m assured this was pastrami on the sandwich, though I don’t see the smoky peppery black edges I would expect from pastrami. Regardless, JB’s knows how to make a sandwich, and this one satisfied.

Besides Jewish delis, Rachels can sometimes be found at more mainstream chain delis. McAlister’s Deli, founded in 1988 in Mississippi and currently with several locations around Chicagoland, serves a Rachel that is a Reuben in almost every way, simply substituting turkey for the corned beef. It’s not a terrible sandwich, and in fact it conforms in many ways to what I want from a Reuben–tender meat, the sandwich well-griddled, the cheese nice and melted. None of the ingredients were particularly good though, apart from the pickle that was served on the side.

Hell, you can even get a Rachel at Arby’s! Full disclosure: I did not.

I wanted to restrict myself only to restaurants selling a sandwich called Rachel, but I couldn’t help taking this opportunity to check out a new business near my home, DA’s Deli on 167th Street in Oak Forest, “Home of the One Pounder.” Built into a tiny building that doesn’t appear to have any seating, during its soft-open period DA’s is serving from the drive-through only. So I drove through and ordered a one pound Pastrami Reuben. It was excessive–nicely fatty pastrami, certainly not piled much higher than I’d had elsewhere. But the sandwich was poorly constructed, the sauerkraut shoved entirely over to one corner, the bread merely toasted rather than griddled, and the whole not really coming together into a harmonious whole the way the best Reubens do.

A Rachel, it seemed, could exist on a spectrum of Reubenness, ranging from “pastrami Reuben” to “turkey sandwich with coleslaw that is not very Reuben-like at all.” Beside the variance in meat and in the cabbage preparation used, it could also conceivably be made with various different breads, Russian dressing or Thousand Island or who knows, even barbecue sauce based on some reports!

So if we filter in 2 kinds of meat, 2 kinds of cabbage, let’s say 3 kinds of bread, and 3 different sauces (for the sake of my sanity nobody suggest that the cheese might vary as well), that makes, uh… 36 possible variations?

No. 36 variations on this sandwich is a bit much, even for me. But I could handle, maybe… 4?

So fine, I’ll make my own pastrami–as it happened had a brisket curing in brine, part of which was intended for St. Patrick’s Day

I used half the flat of the brisket for corned beef dinner on the 17th and the rest got rubbed with a mixture of black pepper and coriander, smoked for 6 hours over alder wood, then steamed for another couple hours to become pastrami.

While that pastrami was steaming, and the smoker was already lit, why not also smoke a turkey breast? This I dry-brined for 3 days using a mixture of kosher salt, garlic powder, onion powder, white pepper, cayenne pepper, hot paprika, and some dried sage. I used applewood for the turkey; the skin ends up taking on most of the blackened color from the smoker and helps keep the breast from drying out, leaving a moist, sliceable, mildly smoky, well-seasoned turkey breast.

And why not make my own Russian dressing, that’s easy enough, a mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup, grated onion, Worcestershire sauce, dried mustard, salt, pepper, and a truly irresponsible amount of horseradish. Also a Jewish-style sourdough rye bread seems like a worthy project, even if I’m garbage at shaping such a wet dough and don’t have a banneton to cheat with. (Note to self: buy a banneton)

Despite dropping my roll of plastic wrap onto the far end of the loaf while trying to cover it for proofing, the loaf didn’t turn out that misshapen, and the crumb was fairly nice for a sourdough.

I also made my own sauerkraut, salting thin-sliced cabbage and letting it sit covered in water in my fermentation crock just over a week. And of course I made my own coleslaw as well. So with homemade bread, meats, dressing, and salads, what about the Swiss cheese? I bought some at an Amish store. Pretty sure it was made in somebody’s home. Then I sliced it, the turkey, and the pastrami all on Sandwich Tribunal HQ’s handy deli slicer.

As I mentioned, the best Reubens are the ones where all the parts are in balance, coming together to form a single entity rather than a pile of discrete ingredients. One of the key ways this happens is that great Reubens are made as melts, like a grilled cheese but with meat and cabbage and dressing stuffed into it, rather than just toasted bread, warm meat, and cold or room-temperature-at-best cheese, kraut, and dressing being slapped together and thrown on a plate. I suspected that the same might be true for the Rachel and had the bright idea of trying to make my first Rachel, a combination of smoked turkey, Swiss cheese, coleslaw, and Russian dressing on sourdough rye, using a sandwich press.

Now, your methods may vary, but the first thing that happened when I put that sandwich press lid down on the top of this Rachel is that all the coleslaw dressing and the Russian dressing got squeezed out the sides of the sandwich and pooled around the bottom slice of bread. I wiped it up the best I could to keep the bread from getting soggy, but now I had a turkey sandwich that, while nice and hot, with moist turkey and a slightly spicy slaw that would have been a good match for that turkey, was overall fairly dry due to the lack of dressing the sandwich retained. In my experience, a nonstick pan works better for this sandwich, especially if you have a nice tight-fitting lid that will retain steam and allow the insides of the sandwich to heat up faster.

The next version I tried, pictured in the lidded pan above, was the pastrami Reuben style of Rachel, featuring homemade pastrami, Swiss cheese, Russian dressing, and sauerkraut on my sourdough rye.

It’s a good sandwich, and I used proportions that would have worked in a Reuben with corned beef. The thing is, pastrami is not corned beef. Any sandwich with pastrami in it becomes, in essence, a pastrami sandwich. Few things short of a really eyewateringly pungent hot mustard or horseradish can cut through that salty, peppery, smoky, fatty layer of beef. Even this fairly substantial layer of sauerkraut was barely perceptible. Pastrami is powerful stuff.

Turkey, though… turkey is exactly the opposite. Even a turkey as well-made and flavorful as my applewood-smoked version is a relatively mild meat, and when paired with sauerkraut in a “Turkey Reuben” style of Rachel can easily be overwhelmed. This is one situation in which it’s advisable to stack that meat high. And so I did.

I should have gone higher yet. Where the sauerkraut was overwhelmed by the pastrami, here it walked all over the turkey, making this a sauerkraut sandwich (without the toadstool or arsenic sauce).

How about pastrami and coleslaw though? I put some thought into this one, using a combination of the fattier pastrami from the brisket point with the leaner meat from the brisket flat, and loading up on both coleslaw and Russian dressing to compensate for the powerfully-flavored meat.

It’s a good sandwich, maybe even a great one. But mostly it reminds me what a miracle of balance a good Reuben can be. The corned beef, salty like the pastrami but without the additional smoky, peppery flavors of the pastrami, meets its match in the acidic sauerkraut and the creamy/spicy Russian dressing or creamy/sweet Thousand Island. It’s an explosive combination yet leaves room for nuance–the nuttiness of the Swiss cheese gluing the sandwich together, the bright anisey bite of the caraway seeds in the rye.

This is a hot pastrami sandwich by comparison. And don’t get me wrong–I love a good hot pastrami sandwich. But I’ll take it piled high on untoasted rye, some hot brown mustard and a spoonful of horseradish strewn throughout, a good garlicky pickle on the side.

And I have enough pastrami left to make a whole damn lot of them.

@sandwichidiot Rachel sandwiches. #rachelsandwich #smokedturkey #homemadepastrami #reubensandwich ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer