Petite Sirloin Sammie

This may be the best steak sandwich I have ever constructed on a budget! Fair warning, this will be a lengthy post so if you don’t have five minutes to read, you better scroll on. My local grocery store had petite sirloin steaks on sale for $3.97 a pound. The normal price was $10.97 a pound. Are you kidding me? This is a lean, tough cut of meat. Who would pay that? After doing some sous vide research, I figured I would give it a try and if I failed I wouldn’t be out that much money. I asked the butcher if I could get a whole roast of petite sirloin instead of the packages of steaks that they had cut that were only about a half inch thick. He said no problem. I took the roast and cut off any visible fat and then heavily salted it and let it rest at room temperature for about an hour and a half. This is one of the best tricks I have learned. Salt your protein well in advance, and it absorbs the salt and flavors the protein throughout. If you salt it shortly before cooking it, all it does is bring the moisture to the surface and evaporates when you are cooking it. Not much flavor. I stuck the whole roast in a bag and did 130° for 4 1/2 hours. Took it out of the water bath and put it in the fridge overnight. Since I was making it for deli roast beef, I did not sear it I just stuck it on the slicer and sliced it very thin. We love rare roast beef, but you can never find it rare at the deli it is always overcooked. This was about a 5 pound hunk of meat. The grain is kind of wonky, part of the roast runs one direction and the other part runs a different direction. I cut it into two pieces and took out the tough sinew (for lack of a correct word, not sure what it’s called). I then put it on the slicer and sliced against the grain. I picked up a Cuisinart slicer at Goodwill for $12. To build the sandwich, I had some freshly baked focaccia. I thinly sliced it horizontally so that I just had the top with all of the yummy seasonings. I buttered the exposed bread with some butter and grilled it on cast-iron to get it nice and toasty. I had some homemade toasted onion dip that I added some extra hot horseradish to and slathered that on the cut side of the focaccia. I sautéed shallots, baby Bella mushrooms, sliced garlic, ground black pepper,and fresh thyme in some beef tallow, and then deglazed the pan with a little soy sauce. I brought the slices of beef to room temperature and piled that on the focaccia that was slathered with the horseradish onion sauce. I topped the beef with the hot mushroom and onion mixture and put slices of fresh mozzarella on top. Stuck that under the broiler for a minute to melt the cheese. Put some fresh arugula on top and drizzled more of the horseradish onion sauce. I made a side salad of fresh mint, tomatoes, cucumbers, with a splash of rice vinegar, olive oil, and salt and pepper. The mint and rice vinegar really cut through the richness of the beef, cheese, and the sweetness of the onions. The beef itself was tender like tenderloin but with a rich beefy flavor. I did not have to add any additional salt, the salt I used prior to the cook had permeated the beef throughout perfectly. I did not enhance any of these photos, the meat is really that red, and maybe the beef is too rare for some of you but if it is just crank up the temperature a few degrees. Another idea to use this beef in an appetizer that I have done before, is to make some really delicious potato salad, some crumbled blue cheese, and roll it up in a slice of beef. Pure heaven!