by John Hodgman
An authentic cheesesteak is as simple as meat, cheese, bread, and onions. Or is it?
My mother was from Philadelphia, and I have five aunts and one uncle who still live there. Any one of them can speak for a solid hour on the subject of sandwiches -- which supermarket slices the best lunch meat, which sandwich shop has the best bread, and the key difference between a cheesesteak and a cheesesteak hoagie (the answer -- lettuce and tomatoes). The depth of discourse is justified, for if one sure mark of art is the difficult of re-creating it, then the Philadelphia cheesesteak certainly qualifies.
The ingredients are ordinary and widely available: thin-sliced steak fried in oil, melted cheese, soft roll, fried onions. But the way these elements interact, retaining their distinct flavors but blurring at the border, becoming a continuum of greasy goodness, is unique. The steak-and-cheese sandwich dehyphenates itself, slides together, reorders its parts into a new, greater sum worthy of a new single name: cheesesteak. It's a process that's nearly impossible to replicate outside of the Delaware Valley, so I've made a pilgrimage to some of Philadelphia's steak meccas with the goal of deconstructing the cheesesteak's strange alchemy.
Bread: The hub of the cheesesteak universe is a South Philadelphia triangle where Pat's King of Steaks (est. 1930), birthplace of the cheesesteak, stands in an eternal face-off with across-the-street rival Geno's Steaks (est. 1966). Pat's is now run by its creator's great-nephew Frank E. "Junior" Olivieri. "There's something about the bread," says Junior. "It's the altitude and the humidity of this area, and the dirty water from the Schuylkill River." This may be hard to prove, but it's true that a proper cheesesteak roll is singular. Soft but not gooey, it has a crust that provides some tooth but doesn't interfere with its primary mission of sopping up flavor from the cheese and the steak. Most cheesesteak places order bread from one of two local bakeries, Vilotti-Pisanelli (Pat's supplier) and Amoroso's (Geno's supplier). Neither ships to individuals, but visit Amoroso's website (amorosos.com) to see if a retailer near you carries its bread.
Cheese: Joseph Vento, owner of Geno's, considers an authentic cheesesteak to be one made with provolone or American, and I'm not going to argue with a 62-year-old Harley rider who goes to work every day with two fully clogged arteries. Still, he grudgingly acknowledges "my competitor across the street" and the ascendancy of "Whiz." Pat's was the first to use Cheez Whiz on a steak, in the 1950s -- it melts more quickly under the heavy fire of a lunch rush -- and it has since become nearly synonymous with cheesesteaks. "I think you could use it to hold cinder blocks together." says Joseph. But there isn't a decent steak place in Philadelphia that doesn't offer it, including Geno's.
Steak: Pat's uses thin-sliced rib-eye cow meat. Geno's uses rib-eye steer. The third big name in cheesesteaks, West Philly stalwart Jim's, uses top-round steer. All agree that you should avoid the processed, re-formed steak slices found in your supermarket freezer: instead, pick your cut and ask your butcher to slice it fresh. But the real controversy is chopped versus nonchopped. My grandmother wouldn't eat a cheesesteak in which the steak had been hacked up by the grill man's spatula, but my Aunt Beth prefers a Jim's-style chopped steak. I say, when in doubt, chop. It tenderizes the meat and promotes maximum cheese penetration.
Oil: As superfluous as oil may sound to a fried-meat-and-cheese sandwich, a good cheesesteak begins its life in a quick fry of vegetable oil (Pat's uses soybean oil), and a good cheesesteak grill is maintained with a little stainless-steel pitcher of oil for periodic drizzling on the meat.
Onions: It is a matter of personal taste whether or not you order a cheesesteak with onions. That said, you must order it with onions.
Melting: Late in my one-day visit, I hustle to meet Aunt Beth, who has secretly airlifted in cheesesteaks from two North Philly restaurants. While all the sandwiches I've tried have been wonderful, the cheesesteak that exemplifies the form to me is one of these, an American-cheese non-chopped with onions in a Vilotti-Pisanelli roll, from Frusco's. The reason: perfect cheese saturation. This steak has clearly been cared for in the critical melting process -- fully coated, velvety with cheese but not overpowered by it. This, I realize, is what imitators lack, what Whiz was designed to simulate, that ingredient -- patience -- that even the best-intentioned grill men cannot always afford. But you can. And so, paradoxically, the maxim is reversed: The best cheesesteak is the one you personally oversee. It lives not in Philadelphia, but in your own clogged heart.
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