Description

Learn how to prepare delicious grilled sandwich with this instructional video guide - Rueben

Transcript

Hi! I’m Tom Papoutsis. I’ve been a “Firehouse Chef” for a lot of years. And actually I was a 2004 finalist in a Tabasco Cooking Ladder Competition held in New York City which is a cooking competition for fire fighters nationally. Grilled sandwiches are pretty common in a fire house but also in your home. We’re going to show you some tips or I’m going to show you some tips today as to how you can do this maybe a little better, maybe put a little tweak on. But remember, we’re in the kitchen. We’ve got burners that are hot. We’ve got knives that are sharp, so please remember let’s be safe. If you’re using gas, remember to keep your cooking stuff as far as your hot pads and towels away from the flame. Watch your hair if you have long hair which I don’t have that problem but please, number one is safety in the kitchen. So let’s get started. Right now, we’re going to do a classic Reuben. This is one of those sandwiches either you get it right or you don’t get it right but very simple. We’ve got just a few simple components. I’ve got seeded rye bread. I’ve got some good Swiss cheese. Go to the deli, get them to cut you some good Swiss cheese. I’ve got some imported corned beef, and of course sauerkraut, and Thousand Island dressing. So how we’re going to start this out, we’re going to turn our heat up about medium high. I want to start out putting the sandwich together, it’s kind of easy. I’m going to set this aside for now. But what we’re going to do is we’re going to take our butter, and what I actually want to do is start buttering our bread. So we’re going to butter the outsides of our bread. If here’s your two pieces of bread, we’re going to take and do this side and this side. So, we’re going to start on this side. Put a good coat of butter on there, just like that. My thing is I like to get all the holes filled down. It’s something that I’ve always done, kind of crazy like that. But we’re going to put that down, and then we’re going to flip this one over, get a little bit more butter and we’re going to go ahead and butter this side because essentially what we’re doing here is the same as making a grilled cheese sandwich except for these ingredients in. So we’re going to set this one aside over here. Now, what I’m going to do, I got my corned beef here. I’m going to put my corned beef. Wow! That got a little bit kind of falling apart on me. So, I’ll take my spatula, slide in underneath there and we’re going to slide our corned beef onto there. I kind of got messy on me. Anyway, a lot of times corned beef can kind of get like this, what I’ll do especially when I’m at work making them for the guys at the fire house, what I do is I’ll get a corned beef brisket. I’ll take a corned beef brisket and I’ll bake it and then once I baked the brisket, I’ll take it out, slice it, and that’s typically how we have our Reuben’s at the fire station. So now what we’ll going to do, I’m going to go ahead and take of course I’ll watch my hands up and everything, we’re good as far as that goes. I’m going to take some sauerkraut, little bit of sauerkraut. We’re going to put some sauerkraut in here like this. Now mind you, we’ve got our burner on. I’m going to go ahead and heat up my pan up a little bit. But put as much on as you want. If you like a lot put a lot on, if you don’t, just put a little bit on. I kind of like mine loaded up. So we’re going to put our sauerkraut on, and there we go. Put a nice generous portion of sauerkraut on. Now, let me clean my hands off here real quick, I’ve got some thousand island dressing. Now remember, we got corned beef, we got sauerkraut, we’re going to put just a little bit of thousand island dressing on just like that. And then, our Swiss cheese goes on top of that. Now, I’m going to use a nice jam. This is going to be one of those outstanding sandwiches. There we go, nice amount of cheese. Now we’re going to take this top, put the top on like that. I’m going to take my spatula. I want to give it a rinse here real quick. There we go. Now we’re going to come in underneath, pick it up, and put it on there. We don’t want to go too high on our heat. If we go too high the sandwich is going to burn. We’re not going to get our cheese to melt. It’s not going to turn out all that well. One of those little things that we do at the fire station when we make these is I’ll make these sandwiches and we’ll have them made up and put them in the oven because we can’t make as many as we need for everybody to eat all at once. So we’ll put them in the oven, and then everything really melts and gets really good. But, if you’re making one for yourself, just make sure you get that nice sizzle going as far as your butter on your bread is concerned. We’re going to let that heat up for a couple of minutes, and then we’re going to flip it over, and once we get that flipped then we’ll check the other side and we’ll flip it back and forth a couple of times until that we feel that it’s done and the cheese is melting real good for us.