Adventures in Cheese Steak Making

Despite being a native Philadelphian, or perhaps because of, I don’t have a strong opinion about what a Philadelphia cheese steak is. I know many people have a very strict idea about what ingredients go into a cheese steak, but I have encountered so many variations over the years that I know that variety is a good thing.

I’ve made cheese steaks at home in the past but have not done so in many years. Last week at the Fitler Square Farmers’ Market, we saw that one of the vendors had steak sandwich meat. We already had our cooking plans for last weekend, but we decided that this weekend we would make cheese steaks.

Luckily, that vendor was there and had the meat. We decided to keep things simple this time, with the thought that we’d get the basics down this first time and be more daring in the future. We already had onions on hand from our CSA and mushrooms from last week’s visit to the Rittenhouse Square Farmers’ Market. After getting our meat at the Farmer’s Market, we went to Di Bruno Bros. to get good Provolone. They also carry excellent bread baked at Sarcone’s Bakery.

Making the sandwich is pretty straight-forward. We started by frying the onions and adding the mushrooms after a few minutes.

The chip steak was pretty thin, so we waited until we felt the onions and mushrooms were close to being done before adding the steak. We didn’t season it with anything more than salt and pepper.

There was more meat than we had anticipated and the balance between the onions and mushrooms and the steak wasn’t quite what we had planned for.

We cut the bread into sandwich sized portions and then layered the cheese.

Since the meat was thin, it didn’t take long for it to be done. We quickly transferred the mixture to the rolls. Our hope was that the heat from cooking would melt the cheese, but it didn’t. In the future, we might want to pop the bread and cheese into the oven for a couple of minutes to get the melting started.

We had it with a salad and paired it with The Lost Abbey Serpent’s Stout.

Overall, the sandwiches were quite good if slightly bland. A better balance of onions and mushrooms certainly would have helped as would having the cheese melted. Garlic, of course, never hurts anything. Even thought the meat was nicely done, it might have been a bit on the cold side when we added it to the pan and the initial sizzle died quickly. A hotter pan and/or more room temperature meat could also help. We also talked about marinating the meat in, perhaps, beer.

We had some of the meat, onion and mushroom mixture leftover, so the next morning, we made cheese steak omelets. We jazzed it up by frying up more onions, adding red bell pepper, garlic, and spinach. We pan toasted some of the leftover Sarcone’s bread and had some locally roasted Green Street Organic French Roast coffee.