Week 13: Meat! - Shooter Sandwich

The internet is a great font of ideas.  Most of them are rubbish, but sometimes a gem comes through.  I was surfing one of my favorite sites and came across the recipe for a sandwich that sounded crazy and delicious; the Shooter.

Not only did the site have directions for how to make it, but it had beautiful step by step pictures as well.  How could I go wrong?

As usual I went overboard to get the best ingredients I could.  If I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it the best I can.  That way if it's fantastic I can try pulling back a bit and seeing if it's still good, and if I don't like it then there's a good chance that it wont get better with worse ingredients and I can leave it be.

I went to the butcher at the Pike Place Market and got two lovely rib eye steaks.  They looked so good I almost felt bad that I was going to put them in a sandwich... almost.  While I was there I got some shallots and mushrooms at one of the vegetable stands.  I opted to stick to the recipe and use standard white mushrooms rather than branch out for more flavorful brands.  I figured the meat didn't need any competition.

I made my own bread to start with. I'm starting to dial in on the proper way to make it.  I've been trying to nail down their "scoop and sweep" method for measuring flour, but my dough always ends up too thick, so I know it's not working well.  I need to figure out the proper weight of flour (ala Alton.)  You can't go much wrong measuring by weight. This time, though, it worked pretty well.  My bread did not end up as dense as it often is.  Besides, you have to scoop it out!  The biggest problem is that the bread wasn't big enough.  Next time I'd do it a bit bigger.

I cooked the shallots and mushrooms with three cloves of garlic in about 2 TBS of butter.  I cooked them until there wasn't much extra liquid left in the pan, but not until they were sticking to it.  It takes a while, so patience is key.

Then I cooked the steaks.  Normally I use a combination stovetop/oven method to cook steaks, but here I wasn't going to be as picky.  The recipe just calls for stovetop, so I did that.

The picture doesn't do much justice to the process, but the next one is great.  Once the steaks were done, I put one of them in the hollowed out bread, straight from the pan.

I spooned on the mushrooms and shallots.

Added THE SECOND STEAK!  Sorry... any recipe with TWO steaks gets me a bit excited.  I put creamy horseradish sauce on and some brown mustard in the top. It didn't fit very well, so I had to trim a few pieces off. I disposed of them properly.

Then I sealed the whole thing up in wax paper and aluminum foil.

I put it in the cupboard and put a breadboard, several heavy glass pans, and two sacks of flower on top of it as a press.  Then I left it over night.  This is the part of the recipe that somewhat worries me.  Leaving cooked meat out over night seems dangerous to someone brought up to fear germs.  Still, it was wrapped up in three layers of wax paper and two of foil, so probably no harm.

The next day I pulled it out and cut it up.

Results:  Honestly, I wasn't that impressed.  Each of the parts tasted great on their own, but they just didn't come together for me.  It could easily be a problem with the ratios of bread to steak to filling, and I might try again with more steak per bite and more horseradish.  It might have been the bread, too.  The middle pieces I pulled out were tasty enough, but I don't think my oven was cooking hot enough and I'm not sure this was the perfect bread for this sandwich.  I may just get a loaf of good bread from a good bakery if I try again.

Overall I'm left with a feeling like I should have just eaten the steaks with the mushrooms and shallots on the side and bread with butter instead of going to all this trouble.

Oh, well.. they can't all work out perfectly. :)