Wagyu Corned Beef Reuben Sandwich

it's st patrick's week and you know what that means lots and lots of green clothing tons and tons of beer and most importantly in my book some really really good corned beef and that's why today we're making corned beef from scratch now it's not a terribly difficult thing to make but it's one of those things that takes some time in preparation i guess you can kind of compare it to smoking your own meat really you're not doing much hands-on work to the product itself instead there's just a lot of time that goes by and that time creates flavor and amazing amazing food and that's exactly what we're gonna do with corned beef but we're gonna take it up a notch why not make corned beef with a little bit of wagyu and we're not just gonna stop at corned beef because obviously i could just make some video of me making corned beef slicing a few cuts and holding it up and showing off all that juiciness and then maybe taking a few bites out of it but again we're gonna go a step further than that we're gonna make the most incredible corned beef reuben sandwiches that you have ever seen they're gonna be cheesy they're gonna be juicy they're gonna have an amazing sauce to put it simply they are going to blow your mind and it all starts with this what we have right here is a 13 pound american wagyu brisket if i flip it over here you can see that it's got an enormous fat cap this right here is going to help us make the most incredible wagyu brisket we can possibly make now the first thing you might wonder is why is it american and not japanese and the reason is simple in this case japanese wagyu won't work there's just way too much fat this will have that perfect amount of marbling still allowing us to get that really juicy corned beef while still holding together really nicely for my first order of business i'll try to take this out of the wrapping without puncturing any of the meat you already know that i got this wacky brisket from the wagyu shop and i haven't been shy to tell you that it's my go-to spot when it comes to wagyu to start things off let's get rid of this plastic wrapping here to start we're actually going to let this brine for about a week we want to absolutely pump this thing with flavor and just look at how thick this bad boy is i mean this isn't just thick this is thick with a bunch of k's and cues at the end i'm about to blow your mind with how many spices are going to go into this thing so let's go like i said we're not going to be holding back today when it comes to spices we want so many seasonings to really just pump in as much flavor as we possibly can to this brisket so we'll start by dry toasting off some of these things to really bring out the additional flavor first i'll put a little handful of garlic cloves in there keep in mind the heat's off at this point next i have a few fresh bay leaves if you've never seen fresh bay leaves they're actually not too difficult to find in the market and i find them to be a heck of a lot better than those dried ones next we're going to go in with a few peppers chiles whatever you want for some flavor and perhaps a tiny bit of kick then just a little bit of fresh chopped ginger but we're not done yet not even close these look like peppercorns but they're all spice berries so a little handful of those too then just to confuse you a bunch of peppercorns you'll notice that those are a lot smaller than all spice berries after that a few cardamom pods cardamom pods are so incredibly potent that i keep them in a bag inside the actual spice jar otherwise the rest of your spices are going to smell like cardamom pods i'll sprinkle in only a few of those because they're very potent after this we'll do a few whole cloves which again are quite potent so we don't want to overdo that a sprinkle of fennel seeds which i absolutely love a couple of cinnamon sticks one or two pieces of star anise a tiny touch of cumin seed a few brown mustard seeds a few yellow mustard seeds and to finish it off just a little bit of salt i don't think toasting salt does anything but we're going to put it in there just for good measure for now we'll crank up the heat and just lightly spin these around until they get a little bit aromatic spices can be really easy to burn especially when you're cooking them dry like this so just be careful once you start to hear the crackles like this only let it go for another 30 seconds or so and then your spices are ready to go now because this is gonna sit in the fridge for a while and brine and cure we can actually use an alternative instead of curing salt which most people probably don't have in their kitchen at home if you simply juice your own celery or buy some celery juice you can use a little bit of that instead we're just going to juice off some of these stalks of celery to make this work we only really need a couple of stalks here it's just a nice alternative to have if you can't find pink curing salt anywhere and either way don't worry about it too much because we're going to be slow cooking this meat for several hours so it's going to be cooked one way or another once that celery juice is done reserve this off to the side we're ready to put all the parts together to start here i have a nice big large container that i've cleaned out really well into it i'm gonna drop my massive brisket then i'll follow by filling this about two thirds of the way up with some cold water next because it is st patrick's day i'm gonna crack open a beer that's definitely gonna add a little bit of flavor here to our brine and you can use whatever kind you'd like here actually why not just a few more we gotta get in the spirit anyway our next step here is gonna be to add all those spices so let's pour those in that right there is where the real flavor is gonna come from after this we're gonna add in about three cups of salt and i'm actually gonna do a few kinds of salt just to mix it up a little bit here finally to get a little sweetness i'll do a nice little drizzle of honey in there which i always think just adds a nice unique flavor about two-thirds a cup of brown sugar which again will give a little bit of sweetness and either some pink curing salt or this creative alternative of celery juice once that's all set let's mix things around just a little bit in here and shove down that brisket to make sure everything is well submerged you might want to take just any sort of plate or bowl and make sure that the brisket's weighted down so that it's constantly fully submerged by this liquid we're now gonna sit this in the fridge for about five to seven days to let those flavors pump in and create the juiciest most amazing corned beef you have ever seen i'll see you in a couple days and after a whole week we are back take a look at this beautiful brine that we've made our meat's been curing for about seven days and you can actually even leave it up to 10 or so if you want to but i just couldn't wait any longer and if i do st patrick's day is gonna be long gone an easy first step here is gonna be for me to take out this plate at the top that's weighing everything down it's done its job we don't need this anymore i first want to add that this smells incredibly good it's this really deep rich complex beefy stock and i know we never heated it up or anything but we've been sitting it here for so long and as you saw we put in so many beautiful toasted off aromatics and herbs in here floating at the top i see all the fresh bay leaves some of the peppers i know they look like chilies but i think they're peppers then we have our star anise a bunch of peppercorns and our cloves and it looks like down on the bottom we have a lot of those bigger bits like the ginger next time i'd probably toss in a couple lemon hunks too but for now i'm gonna try to pull this big boy out it's funny there's no really good way to grip this thing and the further out of the water i lift it the heavier it gets but it is looking really good for now i'm gonna move this container out of the way then primarily because i just simply can't hold it anymore i'll plop it down the first order of business here is gonna be to rinse off this big piece of meat right here so give me just one second now that we've gotten a nice rinse on this absolute beauty we gotta slice it up because i simply don't have a pan that's big enough to cook this whole thing our first step here is just going to be to cut it in half and actually i think this is a good thing because as you can see this thing is very different in shape throughout the whole piece which means of course that this part's going to cook a lot faster than this part over here so i'm gonna try to make a nice cut right down the middle to really separate this out and give us two nice even pieces which will give us time to mess around and eat this one first then this will be ready because i'm really curious let's just first take a look through the middle if you look really closely on the edges you can see that it's been curing in from the outside and that this part's already starting to get some color but what we really want and what we're happy about is that there's that nice bright red pink meat in the middle here and that's perfect i'm already more excited about this other piece here because while this has a big giant fat hunk of fat right here this section here has a lot better marbling for our corned beef which i'm more excited about now we obviously can't forget about our stock here our curing liquid if you will so at this point i'm going to strain out all the solid bits that are in here because we want to continue that flavor all the way through the rest of the cooking process all these solids look really nice together and we have such a fantastic spread of things here like i said it'd be such a huge shame to waste all of these and just throw it away when we go to cook our corned beef through i really really wish i could describe the smell coming off these but all i can really tell you is that it's fantastic something about just letting those soak for so long with all of that beef seems like the beef and that water even pumped some flavor back into these herbs themselves as in everything collected seasoning from what was next to it which is something i love about cooking now because we're cooking in two pots let's divide this evenly across both before we begin to cook now to start we're gonna divide all these seasonings between the two pots so first i'll sprinkle just a little bit in here trying to make sure i get a nice even spread of them and then i'll do the rest right in here this water just came off the stove and was about boiling but i'm gonna quickly tough it out and grab a few more bay leaves because i know this one needs more once we've done that i can immediately see the colors start to happen in this water right here and that's great but now we need to do what we've all been waiting for and add in that meat oh clearly not one of the smartest things i've ever done when cooking but not a mistake that we can't fix let me try that again the reason i have so much water in these is because i really want it to be covered all the way up with that water so if i need to pour a little bit off at the end that's okay for the second one we should be better prepared since we just learned the hard way i'll drop that piece of meat right into that water almost everything you're ever gonna learn about cooking is gonna strongly suggest that you never wanna boil beef or any meat at all for that matter it just goes so far against everything that you learn when it comes to getting that nice perfect sear or a crust on something who doesn't love that golden brown crispiness but this is how you make corned beef so for the first 20 minutes we're gonna let these boil off right behind me after that for about three and a half hours they're gonna cook on low and just slowly get those nice juices flowing so we'll see you guys in a little bit to start off with our rye bread because for a good reuben sandwich you've gotta have rye bread we'll do about two and a half cups of lukewarm water i like to take the temperature so it's just about 110 degrees fahrenheit but as long as it's slightly warm to the touch you're pretty good here it's just gotta be warm enough that it's gonna wake up your yeast i'm sitting here trying to measure out my molasses and now i understand why people say slow as molasses this is just about one of the slowest things i've ever washed pour out you freaking kidding me it can't go any faster than that now about 10 minutes later and hopefully our water's still warm we'll slowly drizzle in about two-thirds cup of molasses we always put some sort of sugar when we wake up yeast and because this is pretty much just burnt sugar that'll do exactly the trick and it also goes along with that unique darker rye bread type vibes that we need for the spray once we put that in first whisk it up just a little bit to let that kind of dissolve in that water then just so that the water's still warm slowly sprinkle in about two packets or four and a half teaspoons of active dry yeast i'm using platinum yeast here to really take it up a notch i figure for that small difference in price it can get you a lot better final product than bread after we've whisked this around a little bit let it sit for about five to ten minutes we want that yeast to wake up now once we've given that a chance to wake up a little bit we're gonna add about two tablespoons of caraway seeds a small little pinch of salt one quarter cup of vegetable oil one quarter cup of unsweetened cocoa powder again to give some of that darker color for our rye bread and then i'll attach my dough hook and then slowly mix in five cups of bread flour and two cups of rye flour which you can either order online or find at some place like whole foods at times slowly let this mix as you continue to add in some of those flowers it's really exciting watching everything come together but make sure you have some additional flour handy in case you need to add a little bit more once that dough is all set we'll lift up our mixing bowl and by now it should be in the nice big clump that we can just take out we'll knead our dough just a tad bit more here really trying to shape it into a nice ball form if we can this dark color on here is amazing and i'm really hoping it holds like this all the way through the cooking process once we've kneaded this for about five to seven minutes including that time in our mixer get it into the roundest shape you possibly can lightly grease a large glass bowl and then drop in that dough now we'll cover it up for about an hour and a half and let it rise now obviously we can't have any good reuben sandwich without some sauerkraut and i'll admit it i'm not the biggest fan of sauerkraut but when you combine it with all these amazing things that we're going to be putting together it's quite good it gives that acid it gives that punch so first with our head of cabbage i always like to peel off the outer layers this is actually one of the few things in the kitchen that i feel like i don't really clean it's almost a self-cleaning vegetable you peel off those layers and it is good to go now if you want you can definitely use some sort of equipment to help you shred it but i'm just gonna try to do this on my own first i'll chop it right in half the only thing inside the cabbage that we don't want is these two little stems right in the middle here so i'll take my knife and cut it at an angle to take those out once we've wedged out that piece right through the middle you can see that the rest of the cabbage is perfectly good to eat this is just a little bit too tough now i'll rest my cabbage face down and i'll chop slowly going back to get these really nice thin bits you can see when i lift these up and then break them apart that they're perfectly shredded cabbage if you're not very comfortable in the kitchen this is one of those things where it's a really great time to work on those knife skills put your hands forward in a claw like this and then let it guide you back as you go across the whole thing your thumb in the back can also be used to push this slowly forward as you go i like to think of my hand as an inchworm here it sort of goes back and forth like this as i slide back over the top of whatever i might be cutting now let's finish chopping this up you can see once this is all done that we have a beautiful mound of this really well shredded cabbage this is gonna make some damn good coleslaw now in a pan we'll do one cup of vinegar one cup of water and about a half an onion which i like to put into nice little strips just like the cabbage then once it starts to bubble we'll add in our whole head of cabbage but keep in mind you may have to add it slowly and stir because at the start this is gonna have quite a bit of volume to it as quickly as you can press that down and stir it around a little bit let it start soaking in that acidic water once we're all set here let's add a nice little sprinkle of salt which would help to kind of mush down that cabbage and draw even more water out to give it that nice texture that we're ultimately looking for then we'll go in with just a little bit of fresh cracked pepper then after that a little bit of onion powder a little bit of garlic powder and to finish it off a little bit of celery seed or in this case a little bit of celery salt you should immediately get a burst of amazing flavor mix it up to make sure everything is well combined i'd also recommend giving it a nice taste to make sure it's well seasoned place down a lid and cook this for about 10 to 15 minutes over low heat this is where we let those flavors merge once our sauerkraut is nice and tender i'll lift it out and put it into a nice glass mason jar at this point i'm going to go ahead and sit it in the fridge all really nicely packed together and let it kind of blend together for a few more hours then when it comes time to make our sandwich we'll have a beautiful well-marinated sauerkraut just look at that so incredibly easy to make but we already know it's going to be so much better than anything we could have ever bought at the store now of course we need our russian dressing probably one of my favorite parts about a reuben sandwich first i'll go in with about a cup of sour cream keep in mind you can really start playing around with the mounts here when you make this recipe you don't have to be perfect with every single amount here just have a little fun with it next i'm gonna go in with about a cup of mayonnaise as usual i'm using japanese mayonnaise just because i think that provides a little bit of extra acidic and unique flavor next i'm gonna go in with about a half a cup of ketchup ketchup will give us that nice lighter orangey color that you get in russian dressing after this i'll do about a third cup of chopped up dill pickles and then out of that same pickle jar just a tiny bit of our pickle juice and then we'll bring in a really cool ingredient some fresh horseradish yes it's oddly shaped but it's fine to use and for me here i'm going to grate in a little bit less than a tablespoon but i would say that depending on your tolerance for spice you can up or down this as much as you want i highly prefer fresh horseradish to the ones that are in a jar to finish it off i'll give it a nice little squeeze of lemon a little bit of fresh cracked pepper and a nice little sprinkle of salt mix this all together to combine it really well then just give it a nice little taste to make sure that it's seasoned properly this dressing is fantastic so i'll toss it in the fridge with the sauerkraut to bring this back out later when we assemble our sandwich now at this point it's time we can return to our bread and get that all sorted as you can see it's risen quite a bit and i can actually tell by some of the cracks in there that it's actually fallen back down a little bit which happens after a while when you let bread rise for a long long time eventually it just can't hold itself up anymore to start just give it a little tap the second you do that you're gonna see it shrink down a bunch and that's okay because we're gonna let it rise again onto our work surface i'll toss down a bunch of flour and then gently lift off my rye bread now i sort of want to make one giant loaf so i'm going to start shaping this into a nice big loaf really just tuck it under itself and make that nice perfect log shape just keep in mind that at the end we want to be able to cut into this and get some really nice slices of bread so as you shape it here to however you might desire really keep that in mind once we've gotten this into a nice loaf shape like i have here i'll bring in my baking tray with a silicate liner on here and lay down my loaf now again we'll place our towel over the top and let it rest for about 45 more minutes after that we'll be ready to bake once our rye bread has finally had time to sit and rest we can go and bake this beautiful thing i'm gonna lightly dampen the outside of the whole thing first and you can use a mister for this if you have one and now once i've dampened this just a little bit this will go into the oven at about 350 fahrenheit for 40-50 minutes or so just keep a nice eye on it and if you can for the first 10 minutes or so mist it a few times again just to get a little bit of water on there you want to keep everything nice and moist while still getting that really hard crust in the end let's let this baby cook well finally after four hours of waiting this is complete yes i know we've all been waiting for this corned beef and trust me i have quite literally been sitting here the entire day smelling everything so it's been even harder for me to wait for this i've actually taken several spoonfuls of the broth that's a combination of all those aromatics and spices we added in as well as the fat that's dripping off of here part way through cooking i also decided to add a few beets in here to hopefully kind of boost up that color of this just a tad bit more i'll be honest there's going to be no clean way of doing this this is going to be messy one way or the other so i'm just going to apologize to my cutting board and go for it first let's drop down our juicy meat look at that jiggliness now again there's going to be no easy way to do this but i'm just gonna start cutting and let's just see what happens let's take our first nice slice into this as you can see it's just about as juicy as one could possibly get and i know i'm not supposed to squeeze it but i had to let's just take a few more slices of stuff just to see what happens looking at that i'm absolutely blown away we let this thing slow cook literally the entire day so how can you not get excited about all that juice even all of that fat on the top is just pouring out of this corned beef now we can't do any of this without placing down our other juicy boy and as we already know this one was thick as can be so let's slice into it it is just absolutely oozing juice something about this is such an incredible experience to me that's gotta be some of the juiciest meat ever not just corned beef but ever that i have ever come across in all of my cooking now i'm gonna cut a really nice thin slice here to actually start getting pieces that we can put in our corned beef reuben i'm really cutting those bigger thicker slices just for you to be able to see what exactly we achieved and as i cut one of these thin slices i'm going to show you something that we're looking for here when we make corned beef what we're actually looking for is some nice separation between all this meat we don't want it to be so fall apart that it literally falls apart when we cut it but we almost want it to look sort of like an accordion or a slinky when we pull it like this this separation that we see here shows that we achieved perfect corned beef now we don't have quite that reddish color that you might have if you use curing salt and obviously we use celery juice which is said to be somewhat of a healthier alternative when it comes to this but we know that this is fully cooked through to that perfect level and the important part is that it's beautifully tender if i want to i can also shave off some of that fat right off the top and kind of layer it on my meat to make it even fattier that way when i go to lay it in my sandwich it'll have that perfect marbling with every bite at this point i think we're ready to assemble a sandwich so let's do it the second our bread came out of the oven i began resting it on this wire rack take a look at that beauty it's a big hefty loaf of bread most people probably would have divided up the dough we had to start but i just wanted to make a ginormous loaf that'll of course translate to a ginormous reuben sandwich it's been resting long enough now that i'm going to slide it onto my cutting board and try to make a few nice slices first let's come right down the middle now we open it up this bread is exactly what we were looking for while it may not have those massive gaps that you have in something like sourdough that's not what we're going for here we've made more of a dense type of bread here which is perfect because when we go to toast this off a little bit in our pan before adding that sandwich together we'll have a really nice even toasting throughout the whole thing there are no gaping holes for our sauce to fall through so this bread is everything i wanted and more i'll try to get a few nice slices with my knife here noting that as i cut i can smell that really traditional flavor one might find in the traditional rye loaf once we've gotten a few nice slices we're ready to build our sandwich to toast our bread i'll start with one little layer of mayonnaise on the top of the bread i know i know it sounds weird but it's every chef's secret to the perfect grilled cheese so why not use it on everything then after we've covered it in mayonnaise i'll do softened butter so we're looking at equal parts butter and equal parts mayo when that's set i'll place this slice of bread face down now it's gonna be hard to tell whether or not we got a really nice golden brown toasting on a slice that's already darker than even the most perfectly toasted piece of bread but you're just gonna have to trust me if you can't tell here and know that there's a perfect toasting on there if you don't toast your bread in some way before making a sandwich that's just pure laziness come on we'll do the same exact thing with our other slices to start the assembly here let's layer down our fresh corned beef you'll notice i have quite a bit of fat left on here and that's on purpose fat is awesome and we gotta have more people understand that the other thing is when layering a sandwich really try to make sure that everything is nice and level you don't want your sandwich all lopsided and everything falling off and as you can see here unlike most sandwich shops these days i am not holding back on the amount of meat we put on here one bit in fact i'm gonna use a big thick juicy mama for that last slice there because i just know that's gonna be unreal as our next step here let's add on some of that homemade sauerkraut again that was one of the easiest steps to make and a lot of people would just say hey let's go buy some sauerkraut but people come on you know we don't buy things like that we make them from scratch once we put on a ridiculous boatload of sauerkraut it's time for one of the best parts our swiss cheese on this i'm gonna do four nice big slices of swiss we're gonna really let that melt down and go over the side of this thing and you know how we're gonna melt it right our little culinary torch slowly go back and forth and let that cheese fall down over the sides the key here is we wanna hold it far enough away that we don't get it too golden brown but that it gets that residual heat and essentially starts melting off the edges once the cheese begins to really curl around the sandwich is when we know we're doing a good job and towards the end here also give it a little bit of that golden brown color that actually provides a ton of flavor too but at least at the start we just want to be really careful here the other thing we can do is hit some of this fat here those crackles will mean we're rendering off some of that fat which provides again more flavor and a little bit of crispiness on there too after just a few more moments here our cheese melting process should be complete just look at that bubbling incredible goodness now the last thing we have to do here of course is finish it off with a little bit of our sauce that russian dressing is something amazing now to complete the sandwich we'll place down the top piece of bread and that right there is our reuben about as homemade as you could possibly get for a reuben other than actually growing the cow before slaughtering it let's say we give it a try for those of you that don't believe me first i want to show you how crispy that top is pretty crispy right now let's slice through this baby but of course very very gently fortunately it was actually quite the clean cut now let's look at the middle of this thing at this point i don't really have any words to say i'm just gonna stare at it for a little while and again please don't yell at me for this but i just want to show you how juicy this thing is to be perfectly honest i'd have no shot at biting into this thing regardless if i didn't squeeze it down a little bit so let's give it a try as they say here goes nothing you know it's funny every time i come into this kitchen i'm never sure if we can top what we did before there's always so many cool things that come through here and i feel like i've probably said this before i feel like i've probably had this monologue before but what i'll say is this at this very point in time when i took a bite into this sandwich i knew right away that we could always keep topping what we're doing each and every time we're gonna make something even crazier from scratch you know next time we're gonna go to the farm where this cow came from and we're gonna lug that meat ourselves back into this kitchen before we cure it or we're gonna go search and find all of those different little herbs and spices and we're gonna take them bread ourselves out of the wild that's really the only way i can see that we can step something like this up at this point this is fabulous let me go through what i'm tasting first because i've marbled so much fat and meat in there that has to be the star and it is the fat permeates your whole mouth as soon as you bite into this thing and it's this extremely flavorful but gentle fat then of course you get the meat that meat breaks and falls apart so incredibly easily when you bite it it just crumbles in your mouth smothered on top of that as some of our russian dressing which is so so amazing yet simple there's a little bit of acid in there but that acid is overwhelmed in a great way by the homemade sauerkraut which traditionally wouldn't be fresh at all in fact sauerkraut is one of those things that sits there in a jar forever it's preserved yet this has that same punch without tasting so old and so wilted it's this fresh crisp sauerkraut with a really uplifting type of acid in it then of course that rye bread sure i'll be honest it's a bit more dense than typical bread that i really really love i'm more of a lighter fluffier sourdough type of person i like that really nice hard crust on the outside which we have but i like the inside to be a little bit better spaced out somewhat like the marbling you might like in a steak that nice blend between fat and meat i like that same kind of thing in bread with air and bread and then of course that cheese on top this is a home run i hope you love this video and even more so i really hope you'll toss a like if you enjoyed watching it because it took over a week to make it's a lot of time to spend on one video but i'll do it every time for you in the meantime if you want to make this whole thing or even any elements from it go for it also make sure to toss a comment below and most of all don't forget to subscribe if you're already subscribed thank you but you gotta make sure you join that notifications gang too cause that list grows faster and faster every day and for now it looks like i've got a sandwich to finish i'll see you next time

Channel: Nick DiGiovanni

Views: 1,704,199

Rating: 4.9180403 out of 5

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Id: Eiv-Ai28UQM

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021