We have successfully recreated yet another item that I had previously only bought at restaurants: The Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich. A sandwich among sandwiches, the PCS is my second favorite sandwich of all time.

It’s also exceptionally easy to make.

Ingredients
1 Onion
1 Bell Pepper
1lb Steak, Shaved or sliced really thin
Provolone, Sliced
1 t Garlic, minced
1/2 t Salt
1/4 t Black Pepper
Oil
Hoagie Rolls

Those amounts aren’t set in stone by any stretch. This recipe is sort of a piece of string recipe. How many sandwiches do you want? It depends on how much you like your onions or red meat. Me, I love me some caramelized onions. I’ll tell you what I did, and you can do what you want.

Slice up the onions and the bell peppers. Not so much strips like you’d use for fajitas, but not diced, either. Think bite-sized portions at about 1 inch per piece. I use the Texas 1015 onions. I think they have a nice sweetness to them when sautéed, and Vidalia onions aren’t always in good supply around here. I haven’t been disappointed with the 1015s, but your milage may vary.

ProTip: chill the onions first. It helps keep you from crying. So, why do onions make you cry, anyway? Glad you asked.

When you slice the onions, you break cell walls. Breaking cell walls means you end up releasing a volatile sulfur compound that wafts up through the air indiscriminately. The kicker is that when the sulfur hits your eyes, it combines with the moisture on your eyeball to form sulfuric acid. That hurts. It also reminds me of a chemistry rhyme we used to tell:

Johnny was a scientist’s son,
but Johnny is no more.
For what he thought was H₂O
was H₂SO₄.

In case you didn’t know it, I’m a geek. But I digress.

So, acid on the surface of the eyeball will tend to make you cry, but more ready water molecules means more raw materials for the sulfur compound to glom onto. You see where I’m going with this? So, chill your onions.

Get your skillet nice and hot over medium-high. Sure, you can go non-stick with this, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You really need a cast-iron or smooth skillet for this one. To get the heat you need for a good sauté, most manufacturers wouldn’t recommend their teflon pans. Add a couple of tablespoons of the oil to the bottom of the pan, dump in your bell peppers and onions, and immediately turn them around to get them nice and coated with the oil.

Make sure you use a sturdy oil, too. You might be tempted to go with the nice flavor of an olive oil, but olive oil’s relatively low smoke point make it unsuitable for this recipe. Do a standard vegetable oil. We use canola because that’s what you can buy bulk at Sam’s. Remember to stay away from the steam, by the way. Acid, you know.

Turn those veggies over every so often until they get nice and golden and soft. One recipe I found online claimed that you would only need to invest about six minutes to caramelize the veggies. That’s crazy talk. Took me at least fifteen minutes to get the veggies the way I like ‘em. You may like them more crunchy, and that’s okay — I won’t hold it against you. But me, I don’t like onions to crunch. Since we have the time, let’s consider caramelization, shall we?

Caramelization is a wonderful and woefully misunderstood process that has several hundred things going on all at once, but the one part of the process that we’re the most concerned about with this recipe has to do with sugar. Veggies are wonderful things. They store energy from the sun in the form of carbohydrates, among other things. Carbohydrates have another name, you know: polysaccharides. Poly, meaning many, and saccharide, meaning sugar. Still with me? Good. Long carbon-based chains of molecules that are essentially long sugars all hooked together end to end. As such, they don’t taste much like sugar, but there’s a hidden potential there.

Whack these polysaccharides with enough heat, and something interesting happens: they become unstable. Right around the Hydrogen and Oxygen bits. So much so, that when you get them hot enough a polysaccharide will get a whole water molecule knocked right out of them — in our sauté, this will come out with the steam. What’s left behind is a less complex sugar. The process repeats until you’re left with few polysaccharides and many many molecules of glucose and sucrose. This is the sweet stuff. This is the stuff that your body can actually use. Your skillet has pre-digested those carbs for you! Clever skillet.

Of course, if you keep going, you’ll knock the water out of the glucose and sucrose, too, leaving you with nothing but carbon. And that means that you burned it. So, get them dark, but not too dark. Okay, that was about fifteen minutes. Push those veggies to the side of your still-hot skillet, and drizzle a little more oil into the center.

Now take the steak you sliced up. You did keep the meat frozen when you sliced it, didn’t you? Of course you did, because you know that it’s much easier to shave the frozen solid steak than the squishy defrosted meat. Dump the steak right into the middle of your hot oil. Quickly add the salt, black pepper, and minced garlic.

Now the meat’s going to stick a little, yes. That’s okay. You’ll take your metal spatula and scoop it right off the bottom in about a minute. Then turn it over and cook the other side. This is only going to take you a few moments to get he meat done while keeping it a little tender. Scoop your veggies back in the middle and stir it all up.

You can turn off the heat now.

Start toasting your buns, if you like toasted buns. I like mine toasted.

Take your provolone and lay a few slices right on top of the mixture in the skillet. By the time the toaster dings, the cheese will get nice and melty and turn into a bit of a sauce right there in the pan. I added a little more cheese to the bottom half of my bun before I took that same metal spatula and scooped a heaping portion of cheesesteak onto the bread. Then a little more cheese on top, press the top down, and there you have an extremely tasty sandwich.

There is some debate about the proper type of cheese to use on a PCS. I go for the provolone. I like the smoothness of the taste and the good melt over the meat. Others swear that Cheeze Whiz is the way to go, or at the very least, melted American cheese. Let’s get something perfectly clear here. American cheese is “Pasteurized Processed Cheese Food” — Cheese food. It’s what you feed cheese. No thanks. Provolone, please.

These proportions made four hearty sandwiches. On our second round, we made some garlic mayo and spread that on the top buns. Very tasty addition.

For variety, feel free to add some mushrooms to the veggies. Some PCS sandwiches feature those, but I didn’t have any on hand.

Happy sandwiching!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.