The Secret To REAL Cheesesteaks At Home (2 Ways)

before we jump into making cheesesteaks two ways one way to honor our friends down in philly a cheesesteak whiz wit and another sort of like the philly cheesesteak of my dreams one that just adds a few more elements into it that i think make it maybe a little bit better so we've got one traditional and then one my way but first let's prepare the meat i got a rib eye here it's about one and a half pounds and it's been in the freezer for about three to four hours until it's firm sort of all the way to the center not really bendable at all it's nice and stiff then i'm gonna need a mandolin and if you can find this one which is widely available online and in stores this japanese one's a good one you're gonna need a good one if you don't have a good one this probably is not gonna work as well and you'll have to just use a knife on my setup cut resistant glove put the glove on first i'm gonna go as thin as i can i'm gonna use this but at first i like to hold it upright like this so you're slicing the shortest side of the meat which just sort of makes for easier cuts and you just want to make sure that you're not being timid here when you're going to make the slice you want to make that push forward confidently with your hands safely out of the way and it's going to result in a perfectly thin slice once you get down to the bottom then you can use this guard and finish it up now you got some beautifully thinly sliced steak it's got nice marbling it's got nice fat it's gonna add a ton of flavor to the cheese steak now to me the best cheese steak is one that's kind of chopped up into little bite-sized pieces and cheese gets mixed up all inside so that's what we're gonna aim for for this some people don't think you should use ribeye for something like this i disagree if you disagree with me then use a different cut of meat this isn't uh you know so this should make probably two sandwiches maybe three depending on the roll you use and how stuffed you make them but we can set this off to the side until we're ready to use it now say you don't love your knife skills and you don't have one of those mandolins and you do have an asian market close by you might be in luck because they will take rib eye and slice it real thin along the width of the surface probably closer to what you'd see in a philly cheesesteak restaurant in philly sometimes they'll just slap huge pieces like this sear them either chop it up from there or serve them whole so you've got some options so you can go whichever way you feel most comfortable with so we're just gonna dice up a couple onions you want a good amount of onion now i just roughly chop it along the curvature of the onion no horizontal cuts and then just into sort of a large dice i want them large enough so that they can cook down and still give a little bit of texture to the meat once it's cooked but i don't want them too big it's called around a pound of onions chopped at least more is fine but at least this amount and we're gonna make one with just onions and whiz we're also gonna make one more of my way and that one's gonna require you guessed it broccolini now you can use broccoli rob that's a classic but i love me some broccolini i'm just gonna chop it up into more of like a bite-sized kind of piece something like that so i've got my broccolini and i'm gonna need a little bit of garlic [Music] so we got our garlic and we're gonna add some hot cherry peppers tangy bright spicy adds a nice little flavor to the whole mix and some balance to the richness and the sweetness so for the cheese sauce all we're gonna go in with a little bit of heavy cream or some milk is fine and then i like the contrast of like a high end ingredient and a low end the low end is going to give us this mouth feel and velveeta or american is sort of that thing that is irreplaceable by uh artisanal cheese so we blend that creamy mouth feel that is irreplaceable with a high-end aged cheddar and those two are gonna make up our whiz very simple you could add all sorts of stuff you could steep the milk and garlic and onions and spices to add more flavor to it but at its most basic it's just going to be these three ingredients maybe a little bit of salt and that's going to be a perfect cheese sauce now just roughly dice up about a half pound of that cheddar and then an equal amount of the american cheese and just get them all into a bowl now i can't really move forward in this video without talking about some essential tools that really allow you to execute what somebody might identify visually as a traditional philly cheesesteak with whiz that chopped meat the way it sits in the sub everything about it just needs a few special ingredients that's not to say you can't make it without them but these help make that look and that whole experience of eating a philly cheese steak more attainable and now i like to have two basic tools for actually cooking the steak and that is one of these wall scrapers from like a hardware store this is only designated for cooking i don't do any house work with it so and then i need spatulas and you kind of want a spatula that is a little bit bigger this is the roll i'm gonna use then this spatula basically fits the entire thing so when i go and flip the meat into the sandwich everything stays compact and it doesn't fall out this is a good spatula too but as you can see if i try and flip it like that all this stuff's going to fly out but this is why you have different size utensils for different size jobs this one's going to work perfectly and if you don't have one of these you can obviously use a shorter one this has a sharper edge too so that allows you to have one spatula holding the meat down on the counter so you can chop and scrape the meat to create that really fine coarse texture that is iconic in a philly cheese steak so we've got our utensils and our bread now obviously a flat top is the tool that's used to usually make something like that but most people don't have a flat top if you have a flat top great but if you don't you can obviously use whatever pan you want and you can probably get it done but the best is a cast iron especially a 12 inch cast iron i'm gonna need that pan to easily fit the piece of bread that i'm gonna use because i want the spatula to be able to scrape under there and get all that beautiful caramelized beef before i flip it into the sandwich a wide surface area also allows you to sort of work on different things make sure everything gets nicely caramelized and that cast iron is going to retain heat which we need to make sure the product is as good as it can be and the last thing we need is a double boiler i'm basically going to add a little bit of water to the bottom of this pan just enough to create steam but not enough where the bottom of this pan is going to touch the water and take about a cup or so and then it straight into the double boiler it's going to allow us to melt those cheeses into that sauce and create like a really beautiful cheese sauce that's really gonna look exactly like cheese whiz but it's gonna have flavor which is what we want now the fat we're using is the key to this whenever i roast bones beef bones or make stock i always reserve the beef fat from moments like this because the pure flavor of a philly cheese steak is the grease that's been accumulating on the flat top the entire day that the steaks are being cooked that's where the flavor comes from that is so hard to replicate at home so you use beef tallow or beef fat you can get it at the store or you can reserve it whenever you make stock or you can make it from fat at home or whatever you want there's lots of ways to do it but to get that real philly cheesesteak flavor that depth of beef get yourself some beef fat and use that to make everything in this recipe it's like using butter or bacon fat to make carbonara instead of guanciale that guanchala is the iconic flavor of carbonara so then once that fat's in there and the pan's hot we're gonna add the onions and we really just want to cook them until they've softened and you can see that they're translucent like they've cooked all the way through and they're beginning to brown we're just gonna par cook it for now and it's gonna get more time in with the beef later so we just want to get that out of a pan set that aside add a little bit more of that fat and then get the broccolini and again we're par cooking the broccolini i really kind of just want to get some sear to it i want to get a little bit of color development some caramelization i'm gonna give it a little time to just like sear in the pan untouched to develop some nice color i want to cook it through about halfway and once i see it's about where i want it it's nice bright green still got some texture to it i'm going to add the garlic and some chili flake and once that garlic is beginning to slightly brown i'm going to turn the heat off then i'm gonna get the broccolini into a bowl and then we can work on our cheese sauce now you might be thinking why'd you use cream and not milk i don't hold milk in my house so when i went to go make a cheese sauce all i had was cream for coffee so i used that and it creates like a nice thick cheese sauce but also you can use milk you might just need to use a little bit less or a little bit more cheese it really doesn't matter the dairy is a vehicle to melt the cheese in and so we're just gonna whisk over that simmering double boiler until the cheese sauce melts slowly adding the cheese little by little and the double boiler will not only melt the cheese gently but it'll allow us to keep it warm while we make everything else so we just want to keep melting it and stirring it until we've achieved a cheese sauce that is luscious and it flows in a steady stream and is thick but it's not too thick if it's ever too thick we can add a little bit of heavy cream a little bit of milk and thin it back out until it's the right consistency you want to thicken enough to really coat a spoon but also thin enough to flow lusciously off that spoon now let's talk about the roll it's a very typical roll you might see in new york for a hero a hoagie roll but something that's not like spongy soft on the outside like a potato bun but has like a little bit of a little bit of a hard exterior for a sandwich like this i always like to toast the whole thing whole uncut so it kind of replicates it's like a freshly baked roll the exterior will have like a nice little crunch of texture and then the inside will be nice and soft and steamed and then we're gonna finish it on top of the meat when it's cooking so we're gonna make two philly cheese steaks the first one we're gonna make is gonna be a shout out to our homies down in philadelphia we're gonna make a classic whiz whip and if you don't know what that means whiz just means with whiz and whit means onions so if you didn't want onions you would say wiz without and i'm not from philly so i'm basing that simply on research if i made a mistake i'm sure you're going to let me know down below first thing we do toast this guy up get the bread in we want a light toast don't go too hard we're gonna check on our cheese it's looking beautiful once the bread is toasted want to give it a slice open and then i cut the edges off the edges always feel like a little bit of no man's land to me so now we got our cast iron hot on the stove we're gonna get some of that beef fat in and we got it on high heat and once that fat is melted and the pan is ripping hot we want to add about a half pound of the beef and we want to take our tools and spread it out across the pan and then season with salt want to give that a moment to sear on that one side and then we want to take it and start to flip it get a little bit of color on that other side and then that's when we're going to start to implement our chopping technique we went over this earlier but as you can see we're just sort of chipping the meat apart from itself creating a finer texture to the meat while also trying to sear it in that hot pan in the fat this is another reason why cast iron is so essential because you can't do this in a non-stick pan the cast iron is the proper vehicle to take the beating that we're giving the pan right now and now the texture you want to take it to is up to you and then once it's where you want it you want to check for seasoning and then add the onions once those onions are nicely incorporated into the meat we're going to add a little bit of cheese sauce that we're going to start to incorporate into the beef itself [Music] now we're ready for the bun we want to take the bun and smear some of that cheese sauce directly in it and open and close it a little bit to just disperse it evenly and then place that directly on top of the meat then we want to let that sit and the meat on the surface is going to caramelize almost like a smashed burger would and it's also going to steam the inside of the bun and once you think you've developed enough caramelization on that bottom then you're gonna sort of shimmy that spatula underneath it and scrape it much like you would a smash burger and then grab with one hand and give it a flip it's nice to have a glove on because that cheese is molten hot and you could burn yourself a little bit of cheese sauce on top and you've got a cheesesteak whiz wit [Music] you got that cheese sort of flowing and melting throughout the meat keeping the meat nice and moist it's beautiful now the amount of deliciousness happening here is perfect it's really all you need but tomorrow i want lunch and i maybe want to get some uh different flavors in there some different vegetables and that's where everything we prepped is going to come in handy tomorrow so i'm going to pack everything up tomorrow for lunch we're gonna make ourselves a sandwich just like that we just pack everything up get everything covered and get it all into the fridge so see you tomorrow now it is the next day for today's sandwich let's call it a new york cheesesteak the inspiration is one where i've seen broccoli rob being used we're going to add some provolone which is going to add stringiness and an additional flavor that i think is going to go really nice with all the ingredients and of course we've got the onions the beef the beef fat or the beef tallow and our hot cherry peppers now something cool to note is say you can find the rolls that you like and you want to buy a bunch of them but you may not use them all when i first bought these rolls i brought them home and i wrapped the ones i knew i wasn't going to use in plastic wrap and i threw a bunch in the freezer and when you take them out they take maybe an hour or two to really defrost to room temperature and they are fresh as new this is one i didn't freeze but i wrapped and just by touching i can tell this one is a little bit more stale so don't be afraid to freeze bread so now i don't even have to go to the store to get bread nice and soft and we'll just toast that up and bring it back to life like it was just baked first thing i want to do get my cheese sauce heated back up we're just going to set up our double boiler again and pour in our cheese sauce you could also microwave it i just want to get that warmed up we got cast iron preheating so get your bread toasted get that cheese sauce melted once the bread's toasted you cut the edges off see the bread is crunchy on the outside soft and spongy in the middle slice it down the middle and once the cheese sauce is hot and fully melted and the cast iron pan is ripping hot get some of that beef fat into the pan and we can add the beef and the technique is more or less the same as we did yesterday we're just sort of incorporating more into it spread the beef out let it sear flip it let it sear on that other side and the only difference is i'm gonna get some of the broccolini in and some of the onion in and add them to the corner of the cast iron to heat up and then eventually we'll work them in then start to chip away and break down that beef then you start to work in those onions the broccolini we're going to add the hot cherry peppers and we're just going to start chop it all together we just want to move the broccolini off to the side we can add that to the top after the sandwich is made and we just want to start to sear that beef and marry all the ingredients together you're going to see me add some provolone which i thought would be nice but i think it's a bit overkill because i'll be adding some directly into the bun so i'd omit the provolone in with the meat and just mix the cheese sauce in and then orient that mound of meat the same shape as the roll pointing away from you couple slices of provolone go on top of that mound of meat and then spread that cheese sauce inside the roll then add the bread on top of the meat let the meat caramelize on the pan scrape that caramelized meat and then a nice strong flip to reveal some perfection a little bit more cheese sauce on top and you got another amazing cheese steak sandwich [Music] oh and of course some of that broccolini straight on top i overstuffed this one a little bit but all the flavors together the mix of cheeses the peppers one of my favorites so whether you like the traditional you like this now you got options you can make a proper philly cheesesteak at home don't let anyone tell you otherwise the link to this recipe and more are going to be down below that's all that i have today i'll see you next time until then take care of yourself and go feed yourself [Music] if you like food and home cooking you really like this video i just posted about a sunday supper i hosted in new york city where i served my grandma's sunday supper to 100 people it's one of my favorite videos so if you want more content this is a great watch see you next time

Channel: NOT ANOTHER COOKING SHOW

Views: 1,958,087

Keywords: philly cheesesteak, philly cheese steak recipe, philly cheese steak, best philly cheesesteak, how to make a cheesesteak, cheesesteak sandwich, cheesesteak recipe, easy philly cheesesteak, philly cheesesteak recipe, homemade philly cheesesteak, philly cheesesteak at home, homemade cheese whiz for philly cheesesteak, homemade cheese whiz recipe, how to make a philly cheesesteak at home, the secrets to making cheesesteaks at home

Id: zQ-9H1dclfM

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2022