the French Dip sandwich - the name tells you it's not foreign

Nothing says, "I wasn't invented in the country that my name says I was invented in" like writing a country's name into the title of a recipe. The history behind the French Dip goes way back to America in 1908. Or maybe it was 1918. It's hard to say, since the exact date is debated. The reason for this shroud of mystery lays in a double-claim over who originally invented the sandwich - Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet, or Philippe The Original. Both restaurants are long-standing establishments in the Los Angeles area.

Not only the restaurant, but the claims themselves also change quite a bit. Some say it was a police officer, while some say a fireman, who came in for a bite. While hastily trying to get this customer a sandwich, according to some, the cook accidentally dropped the sandwich into a pan of meat drippings. Alternatively, the customer asked if the sandwich could be dipped because of a problem with soar gums. Whatever the case, all the stories agree that the result was so popular that patrons were back for more in no time at all. Nowadays, you can find these slightly soggy, beefy wonders just about anywhere, at diners or even at fast food chains.

To my mind, French Dips are the quintessential soup and sandwich combo - simple, hearty, and filling. Despite its name, this is old school American fair. This isn't something I'd want to overdo by getting too complex. Meat, onions, and a nice spread on a French roll is as far as I want to go with this. Don't be fooled by my picture there, those tomatoes and that spring of dill were only needed for the photo-shoot. Not that they were bad, but they were definitely superfluous.

One thing I like to do, as you'll see in the video, is poach the beef in water for a minute or two. This does two things for me. It gets the meat tender and starts it off cooking, while also flavoring the water and making the start of a nice beef stock. The next step is to slowly simmer a bunch of onions in there and complete the soup.

In the video, I used a homemade barbeque sauce that was great, but feel free to use whatever is handy. Simple mustard, as long as it's good mustard, would work fine for the spread too, but when I'm really feeling fancy I like to upper class it a bit by mixing it with some cream cheese and maybe a little oil. You could easily start adding things like garlic or spices, and they would be delicious, but refrain from doing so. We're keeping this one simple, it's a lesson in restraint. Let the meat speak. After all, this sandwich was born with the idea of dipping meat into meat juice.

chicken stock for the soul

If chicken soup is for the soul, then a good chicken stock is the basis of that spiritual healing. Another on the list of things that are a million times better fresh but that most of us rarely find time to make, this is one that is just integral to so many ways of cooking, and it’s great to have on hand. If you want to know where that rich, full flavor that you just can’t quite place is coming from in that expensive restaurant dinner, it’s the stock.

I follow the freezer-pack method, in which you freeze all of your stock in ice cube trays and then store the cubes in freezer bags for later use. I like this because you can use the stock cubes as measurements, and you can throw them right into a hot pan for instant satisfaction. Whatever you do – and you are bound to have heard this by now – don’t buy those bouillon cubes. That’s fools’ gold, a cubed kitchen trap hemorrhaging salt that’s sure to make your lovely dish unpleasant. In fact, when making stock let’s just leave salt out of the equation entirely.

Remember, we’re not making broth, it’s stock. It’s an ingredient, like salt is an ingredient. Since you don’t salt things for taste until the end of the cooking process, you want to avoid upping the salinity of your ingredients, which will only cook down and become more concentrated – hopefully not concentrated-ly salty. 

In the video, I use a couple chicken breasts to flavor the stock, but reserve them for another recipe. You can see that recipe here.

There’s an unavoidable part at the end of making a stock when every home chef (professional chefs having long lost their empathy for ingredients) feels bad about throwing out the used up vegetables. As hard as it is to come to terms with, those onions and carrots simply don’t have anything left to give.

If you’re really thrifty, you could use them in compost, but otherwise bite the what-a-waste bullet and toss them. It may seem like a pity, but the soul of that celery has been transferred to that liquid heaven in your pot.