This is becoming my favorite sandwich. I must be careful not to o.d. It imitates the green chile Phili sandwich sold across the street. It took considerable effort to make and it is expensive but it needn't be either of those.
The meat is sliced thinly and cut into pieces to tenderize tougher cuts of meat and cook it quickly. Tougher cuts tend to be more flavorful. This sandwich is a tender cut already, an unnecessarily expensive cut that is better cooked and enjoyed as a steak. And of course bread is easily purchased in bun or roll and longer forms.
This sandwich uses low-end cheese product that by law cannot even be marketed as cheese. Except when it's government marketing it, the same cheese as the derided government cheese, a joke about a fall-back food for poor people, a handout. Velveeta, other brands individually wrapped for sandwiches, contain cheese that is reprocessed with additional whey, to make use of the whey was the whole point, producers looked to do better than pig farms, later body-building supplements, ricotta is such a whey cheese, but this goes further with emulsifiers and stabilizers so it melts brilliantly, sweetened, flavored with Worchestershire sauce which has interesting things, tamarind and anchovy with vinegar, and the cheese product is colored with anatto also called achiote, a red seed used all over the place especially in Latin food, Spanish and Cuban rice and the like, the red seed stains things yellow to orange. So an odd cheese, highly processed, highly mechanized, the Craft being in the acutely high production and far-flung distribution of the product.
It is delicious.
This cheese and jalapeño are perfect together, a marriage hecho en el cielo por los dios.
This jalapeño is not hot, the end of it isn't. And if it doesn't get hotter then I'm not planting the seeds of any of the similar chiles I bought.
The meat is fried quickly as the sandwiches across the street are, but I do not know what happened to their meat before it was placed on the grill by teenagers. Their buns are delicious, a separate corporate baker, the kids may warm it up, may even bake it, but they obviously do not prepare the dough themselves.
This meat was tenderized further after frying by cooking with onion in pressure, just bringing it up and then letting it down, and that changed the whole thing significantly, all the tougher resistant tissues is loosened, and it occurred to me this is the perfect sandwich for groups. I would put this sandwich on a catering menu.
This bread has cooked white bean mixed in the dough. It did not rise sufficiently for a sandwich. It baked like this with no oven rise so I could not use it.
But is is delicious.
Right then the phone rang. I wrote the wrong thing on a check, would I mind writing another and that gave me a chance to break this in half and take it downstairs and outside nearby and pass it. "Here, try this. It's bread fail. Meant for a sandwich but it's more like a pretzel. I put beans in it."
"You put beans in it?"
"Yeah. In the dough. It's like the yeast ate the beans and died."
That took a whole half minute to sink in. She was thinking on something else, didn't respond, a whole half minute then she cracked up laughing at the thought of death by beans for the yeast.
This also has beans, too much beans. It does not rise sufficiently for a sandwich. Same thing, delicious pretzel.
So another very quick batch of regular dough with sugar for fast food, salt at the beginning, and let 'er rip. The two balls puff up to pillows in no time overtaking the loaf with the beans.
Old English in individually sliced form was my all-time favorite convenient sandwich cheese then it disappeared from markets. Now I saw this tiny jar. It's too small and too expensive but I bought it anyway for old time's sake.
