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Illinois Horseshoe Sandwich
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a warm current of chile, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 4 thick slices Texas toast
- 4 hamburger patties or fried pork cutlets
- 500g thick-cut fries, fried crisp
- For the cheese sauce: 55g butter, 55g flour, 500ml milk, 300g sharp cheddar, 1 tsp mustard, 1 tsp Worcestershire, dash of beer, cayenne
- Paprika
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · fish · mustard · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Make the cheese sauce: cook a roux with the butter and flour, whisk in the milk, and simmer to a thick sauce. Off the heat stir in the cheddar, mustard, Worcestershire, beer, and cayenne.
- Toast the bread and lay it in a shallow dish or plate.
- Set the cooked meat patties on the toast.
- Pile the crisp fries on top of the meat.
- Smother the whole thing in the hot cheese sauce and dust with paprika. Eat with a fork.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Making a roux 32 recipes
- Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
- It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
- No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
- Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.
Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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