Arby's Italian beef

chicago's best, arby's style

Hello, clowns!

Davida and I have started watching the second season of The Bear on Hulu, which just dropped last week. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s about a chef that returns home to Chicago to run his family’s sandwich shop after a tragedy strikes.

The first season, released last year, focuses primarily on the activity inside the little stand. This gave the Italian beef, our city’s specialty sandwich, some unexpected time in the spotlight. Much of the country suddenly became interested in them, but the thing is, a lot of people didn’t actually know what an Italian beef was.

If you’ve never had an Italian beef, it’s essentially just a really solid roast beef sandwich. It starts with a large cut of beef, which is seasoned with dry Italian herbs, roasted off in the oven, then shaved paper thin. That meat is subsequently shoved into a French roll, and when you order one, you can choose to have the sandwich splashed with or dunked straight into the jus from the meat. Yup, completely submerged. By nature an Italian beef is a hilariously messy sandwich, but they’re fucking delicious.

In terms of condiments, a good beef doesn’t need too much dressing. You can opt for cooked bell peppers (which we call “sweet”), a spicy pickled vegetable condiment called giardinera (which we call “hot”), or both. Cheese, usually mozzarella, is optional, but not traditional.

There. You’re now all experts on our Italian beef sandwich and I just won every James Beard Award for this explainer.

Now, unfortunately for many of you, Italian beef sandwiches aren’t particularly prevalent outside of Chicago (unless there’s a Portillo’s nearby), which means they can be hard to get. But Davida posed a very important question to me yesterday before we were about to start another binge-watching session of The Bear:

“Could you make an Italian beef using Arby’s?”

We’re about to find out whether or not The Bear shits in the woods, everyone.

Today’s experiment doesn’t start with Italy at all, but rather, France.

That’s because I decided to start with a lesser-discussed beef sandwich on Arby’s menu (Beef ‘N Cheddar for life, dickholes), the French dip.

Yep, Arby’s has a French dip.

It must be the red-headed stepchild of the Arby’s universe, because nobody ever seems to talk about this thing. It’s Arby’s weird emulsified roast beef piled onto a French roll (similar to the one used in a classic Italian beef), and it comes with a small cup of jus on the side for dipping.

By default, these things come with processed Swiss on them, but if you want to make an Arby’s Italian beef, you must ask for the sandwich without it. Besides, if anyone sees you put Swiss cheese on an Italian beef made from a French dip sandwich from Arby’s, you may trigger a three-way war between those countries as well as the entire city of Chicago.

I ordered a few extra dipping cups of jus because I like my Italian beef sandwiches particularly soggy.

I’d never had a French dip from Arby’s, so after I opened the lid to one of the cups, I decided to take a sip of the dipping broth. To my delight, it was fucking terrible. I’m not sure what it was flavored with, but it certainly didn’t taste like beef.

Perhaps that gnarly taste comes from the mouthwatering yeast extract, scrumptious disodium inosinate, or the delectable disodium guanylate that’s included in its ingredients. Man, do I love me some disodium guanyalate! I particularly enjoy sprinkling it on my pillow before I go to sleep every night.

“Hey, this shit tastes terrible,” I said to Davida, handing over the little cup. She took a ginger sip of it and handed it back.

“I think it tastes really good,” she said.

What’s very important in this situation is the giardinera.

My favorite way to order an Italian beef is “wet and hot,” which sounds like the beginning of a yo’ momma joke from The Ancient Times, but all that means is that the sandwich is dunked in jus and served with hot giardinera.

The thing is, giardinera can be relatively difficult to find outside of Chicago. I have seen plenty of grocery stores outside of Chicago stock it in the condiments aisle, but I have also been told it simply doesn’t exist in some areas. So why not make a good approximation with things most people have access to?

So I took pickled jalapeños and green olives, and gave them a rough chop.

The heat in giardinera usually comes from serrano peppers, but those aren’t frequently available pickled (at least in my experience), so jalapeños only made sense to me.

Green olives are one of the more divisive ingredients in giardinera, the other big one being celery. Personally, I love both in my giardinera mixes, but people in Chicago sure do like to complain sometimes.

To finish it off, I added some diced pimiento peppers (you know, for color) and added the next most important ingredient: a shitload of soybean oil.

Oil is truly one of the key ingredients to Chicago’s version of giardinera.

The pickled veggies are always soaking in it, and giardinera oil on an Italian beef sandwich is nothing short of transcendent. It’s never anything fancy like extra virgin olive oil, either. It’s always some cheap neutral veggie or soybean oil that picks up the flavor of the mix plus the spice from the peppers.

Ideally you’d let this mix hang out for a few days in the oil before digging in, but if you’re cobbling together an Italian beef sandwich with ingredients from Arby’s, feel free to live your own life. You’re spiritually a wild horse. Eat fresh mock giardinera if you wish.

The horrible jus needed some nudging in the right direction, however.

While I wasn’t going to be able to fix its terribly artificial flavor, I could make it taste more like Chicago’s by adding cheap Italian seasoning to it. I always keep a mix of Italian seasoning around, which I assume everyone in Italy uses all the time on everything.

I put a fat dash of it in the jus while it reheated on the stove, and once the herbs turned a darker color and stopped floating, I knew it was ready.

Time to “baptize” the sandwich, as some say here!

That’s sort of a fucked up way to describe dunking a sandwich into hot liquid, if you think about it. I’ve been to a few baptisms but none of them involved dropping a human being into scalding hot jus. Apparently we’ve been binding these sandwiches directly to God before we’ve been eating them this entire time.

After the sandwich halves were nice and soggy (Arby’s cuts them in half for you by default, since they are roast beef angels), I applied a bunch of giardinera to them, including some of the oil.

Awww, shit.

For being cobbled together from Arby’s and the grocery store, it wasn’t too shabby-looking, and frankly, it’s visually ballpark accurate. (For comparison’s sake, here’s one from Mr. Beef, which is the Italian beef joint that The Bear was inspired by.)

I took a big bite from one half of the sandwich, and I have to say, it was pretty damn delicious, despite that unusual uniform meat from Arby’s. A roast beef sandwich usually benefits from a hit of acid, and the mock giardinera certainly hit the salty and pickly notes that the now-ethnically transformed sandwich needed. I could taste the Italian seasoning in the jus that was soaked into the bread, and all in all, I thought I did a pretty stellar job.

“This tastes a lot like an Italian beef sandwich,” I said to Davida, beaming. She came over and took a bite.

“This doesn’t really taste like an Italian beef sandwich,” she declared, after enthusiastically devouring most of one half. “But it’s really good.”

Sigh. Oh well. At least I didn’t put fucking parsley on it, like the silly New York Times recently did in their new Italian beef recipe. That parsley detail got Chicagoans all sorts of riled up, waving their digital fists around while shouting on Twitter. In this case, all I did was dress up the greatest weirdest roast beef in the world (Arby’s, sponsor me, I put my life in danger!!!). If I get death threats, I’ll just hold a fully-loaded Chicago-style hot dog hostage and hover a bottle of ketchup over it.

Oh, wait. I guess I better get packing.

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Gimme money, Arby’s. I had to taste that really weird French dip jus and I need money for therapy now. If you enjoyed today’s post, don’t forget to share it with everyone you know. Forward it to your whole family before the reunion, send it to Arby’s corporate, and spam the cast and crew of The Bear with it:

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