The other issue I had to face was how to cut the meat. As I remembered from my visit to Al's #1, the beef should be shaved as thinly as possible. Al's used an huge deli slicer, which I obviously didn't have. Saveur recommended just tossing the meat in the freezer for 2 hours before serving and then slicing it as thinly as possible with a chef's knife. Some recipes recommended taking th...
The mystery is that while the sandwich's meat is incredibly tender, it isn't made from some expensive cut of beef. From the research that I've done, most Italian beef recipes call for round or the sirloin tip, which are both tough and lean cuts. The use of a cheap, neglected cut really interested me.
At first glance, the sandwich looks a lot like a cheese-less Philly cheesesteak. But I've b...
It sounds like an easy question to answer, but sometimes even I have a hard time remembering where Blake is half the time (Don't even get me started on what time zone he lives in). I can only imagine what casual readers might think. In the past three years we've both lived in a combined total of 9 or so apartments, which doesn't include Blake's month of couch surfing, which might bring...
One of the things we've talked about on this site from time to time is a British fellow named Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, mostly in spurts of unmitigated, gushing exaltation: this man is some kind of food messiah. When we live-blogged last year's James Beard Awards --which is the most fun we've had in ages, standing ten feet from Jacques Pepin (who was surrounded by young women), watching...
Though last year we boasted of writing well over 140 articles at places besides this blog, that turned out to be nothing. This year that total was well over the 250 mark. Nearly all of those were for the Dinner Tonight column at Serious Eats , which, as the name suggests, is updated every weekday night. That's a lot of recipes, and a hell of a lot to keep straight. Abby has to o...
Since the beginning of the site, Blake and I have had an unabashed love affair with the burger. Though often neglected for more highfalutin fare, we've found inspiration in the ground meat patty. Perhaps we loved it so much because ground beef was cheapest kind of meat in the grocery store when we were poor and living in Manhattan. There was hardly a week that went by that we didn't have...
Welcome to our Perpetually Late Year-End Roundup. It's a tradition here at The Paupered Chef that we tend to pull off sometime in January or February. Maybe we only put this thing together for our own amusement, because when you're constantly writing and thinking about new things, you sometimes forget where you've been. It's illuminating, to see what captured one's imagination over...
Diced instead of Ground Meat
I had stopped using ground beef a few years back, after watching a Good Eats episode. The reasoning makes sense. When ground beef is used, the fat either needs to be drained off immediately, or needs to be skimmed off the day after when all the fat has accumulated at the top. But if you use chunks a lot of the juices stay inside, leaving both the chili less...
That meant forgoing the blend I had in my spice rack and picking up a load of dried chilies from the local Mexican market. I needed to create my own blend, something that was completely unique to me, but where do I start? There honestly aren't that many recipes for chili powder out there. My only real resources were Homesick Texan (great site) and Alton Brown .
Thanks to the larg...
When I arrived in Buenos Aires, "Ojo de Bife" ("eye of beef") was at the top of most steak menus, giving the blessed ribeye its appropriate place in the steak pantheon. It reminded me of a Jeffrey Steingarten passage from his essay in Men's Vogue about a search across Spain for great steak--which has led me to order ribeye almost exclusively since reading it:
...the most del...
Blake and Nick live in Chicago and have written for The Paupered Chef and other publications since 2006.