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When you’re making roast beef at home, it always seems like the goal is to make it taste “restaurant quality” instead of just homemade. If you’re not a professional chef, it can be difficult to make food at home that rivals the taste of a restaurant dish. Even the local deli counter at your grocery store or corner store always seems to get roast beef right in a way that’s hard to place. What’s the secret to making your deli sandwiches, or even just any roast beef, taste like it comes from the deli?
There are certain things which are difficult to control: deli counters often have access to fresher meats and pricey, professional quality slicing equipment which might be out of your reach. There are things you can control, however, such as the cut of beef you’re using and how you cook it. The roast beef cuts you need for the absolute best sandwiches are usually lean cuts such as top rounds. You can still succeed with a slightly fattier cut like top loins, so long as you slice those small pieces of fat away. Then, there’s the matter of how you cook that lean beef: a common deli-style method is to sear the beef on a skillet until each side is browned, then slow roast the beef to keep the insides pink.
Lean cuts make for good deli beef
Lean cuts of beef are considered healthier than fatty cuts, but there’s another reason why lean cuts are favored for deli meats. It’s because deli meat is often served cold, primarily when it’s on a deli sandwich. Roast beef designed to be served hot benefits from having lots of fat, which adds texture and flavor. When cooking restaurant-quality ribeye steak at home, you want there to be melted fat. Deli meat is different, and beef fat tends to be harder and unappetizing when it’s cold. Fattier beef cuts also don’t taste as good when reheated because of the exposure to oxygen. You can avoid all of that by choosing a round beef cut of beef, or trimming what little fat is there, to get something more deli-quality.
Finally, to recreate that deli style, you want to slice the roast beef as thinly across the grain (or opposite the direction of the muscle fibers) as you can. You can do this using a sharp enough knife, but there are electric meat slicers – such as the SUPER DEAL Premium Meat slicer — meant for home use as well, if you’re planning to be serious about making deli-quality roast beef on a regular basis. Once it’s ready, you can combine the roast beef with some spices and under-the-radar deli meats for Italian sandwiches (like mortadella or bresaola) and create a really complicated, textured sandwich that looks like it should be wrapped in tinfoil at a deli.
