Recreating the Most Famous Sandwich in London

In 1974, East London's famous Bagel Bake opened its doors. Their iconic salt beef bagel is a London legend. But today, we are going to ask the impossible. Can we remake this classic sandwich from scratch and maybe make it even better? If you're ever doing like recommendations for someone in London, this is probably the main foodie tourist attraction you would say. And it is one of the best sandwiches in London, but I think all the elements are there to make it so much better. The meat was cut a bit thinner. The bagel is perfect because it holds itself up. Yeah, it's the dense crumb. But it could almost have a bit more flavour. I do like the fact that you don't skimp on the mustard. Let's get back to Fallow and try and make our own. Now traditionally for salt beef, the cut of beef we're going to use is brisket. Now brisket is a fantastic cut. It comes from the forequarter of the beef, from the lower chest sort of area. I'm just going to take our beef and cut it in two. It's a lot of fat and a lot of connective tissue in brisket. Now this is vital for the roll of salt beef because if you try to cut this into a steak and eat it, it'd be way too tough. But through the process of firstly the brining, it's going to help to tenderise, it's going to remove all the water from the beef, replace it with the brine salty solution. And that's going to help to tenderise and help the meat retain the juice while it's cooking. All this fat and all this connective tissue is going to break down and almost melt in your mouth once it's been fully cooked and brined. So this step is the brining process for the salt beef. So we're going to start off taking our water. We're going to place half of it into a pan and we're going to place the other half into our container. So we've got light brown sugar and we've got salt. We want to use sugar and salt because we want to balance the flavour slightly and the sugar in the brine is going to help to caramelise the meat later on. Coriander seeds, mustard seeds, black peppercorns, star anise. Which I'm just going to break up slightly with my hand just to get maximum flavour out of them. Nitrate salt or pink salt. What that's going to do is it's going to penetrate into the meat and it's going to help us to keep a nice natural pinkness to our beef once we cut into it. It's going to have that on a medium heat. You don't need to boil it, all we need to do is just dissolve the sugar and the salt and once the liquid is warm that will really help with the spices to infuse. So we'll just leave it on a low heat. Got some ginger, I've got some bay leaves which are going to go in now and then I've got some garlic. We're not going to peel the garlic either, we're just going to smash it up. We're just going to roughly chop our ginger. So that's our brine. The salt in the beef is obviously helping to kill any unwanted bacteria and helping preserve the shelf life, hence why this process came about. So we're going to place this into our brine. Now we're going to leave this in the fridge covered for seven days. Fast forward seven days. We're not going to rinse off all these like spices on the outside, we're just going to add a bit of flavour while we're cooking it. I'm just going to brush off the excess but we're going to leave most of them on there. You can already sort of see the changes that are starting to happen on the beef. It almost looks like, almost like slightly ham-like in texture. The fat is a little bit more pronounced. This is a home blend mix of barbecue absinthe, paprika, coriander seeds, a little bit of cumin, sugar, salt, a few other little spices but we're just going to put that on for a little bit of flavour. So we're going to mix a tiny bit of this black treacle. Next step is to cook our beef. Almost like a molasses, sort of like rich stickiness to it. So the next stage of this cooking process is to break down the collagen in the salt beef. Slow cooking at low temperatures really is the process that transforms the collagen in the brisket into gelatin. This process is super, super key to the actual, the, of turning the beef from just brisket into salt beef. Without that process you end up with a really tough, just dry meat but so it's very, very, very important that we're turning the collagen into the gelatin. You've probably had it or seen like very dry brisket which is, which is hot and they cover it in sauce but actually the meat itself is, can be quite dry and not very nice. The breakdown of this collagen into gelatin is the real science element of actually making, making salt beef and making it well. So our beef is now ready to go into our oven. So we put our beef in here, 120 degrees. We have a steam function on our professional ovens. So we've got 100% steam, 120 degrees. It's going to take eight hours. If you were doing this at home you could put it, your oven set to 120 on a wire rack. Underneath you put a tray of water that would just lightly steam throughout the whole cooking process. You just need to top it up throughout the eight hours. So we are going to make our version of the bagel from Bagel Bake. So firstly we've got some room temp water. So 30, 32 degrees here and we're going to add our yeast into this water. So this is fresh yeast. Now bagels were introduced to London in the 19th century by Eastern European Jewish immigrants and workers. They were traditionally baked in sort of like wood-fired ovens and sold on the streets as sort of like a very accessible, portable food that could be eaten by, you know, by all the workers. So into our bowl we've got some malt powder, which most of the recipes we've seen has in it. This is primarily just for sort of for flavour. I've got some salt and we've got some strong white bread flour. So this is a very, this is a very strong hearty dough. So it needs a really good kneading. Lucky enough we now have machines that can do this for us but in the old days they would have had to do this all by hand. So we're going to knead this for about 10 to 12 minutes. So after your dough is kneaded, we're going to remove it, bring it together by hand and then place it into our bowl to prove. So turn your dough out onto your table. Give it a little, bring it together slightly. You're just pulling it away from you with the heel of your, with the heel of your palm and then folding it round like so. Pull, push like so into a nice dough ball. Cover it with a damp cloth and then we're going to set this in a side in a warm place until it's doubled in size. So this should hopefully take around 45 to 60 minutes. It's now doubled in size, been proving for 60 minutes. Now it's time to shape these bad boys. So we're going to make, shape this into 120 gram balls. Bagels ring shape is more than just for its look. It also serves a purpose as well. Basically what it does is increases the surface area of the bagel. It's going to make the bagel dry quicker, help the development of the crust of the bagel. It's also going to allow the bagel to bake a little bit more evenly while it's cooking because the inside, the airflow around the bagel is going to be increased and there's less, less opportunity for the middle to be sort of raw and under baked and the crust developing too quickly. The dough is lovely and bouncy. We're then just with our thumb going to place a hole directly into the centre of the bagel and then just shape the bagel like so. I don't know if this is traditional but it's quite fun. We're going to slice the beef warm and it's going to go directly onto the bagel and if you were using a more traditional sort of like a simpler white loaf, that loaf would just completely disintegrate with the hot beef. So we're going to cover our bagels with a, with a tray. Just make sure the tray has enough, enough of a gap so as the bagels prove it's not going to hit the roof. I'm going to place this into the fridge to, to cold prove and that, this, this secondary proving process is going to help develop the flavour and then we'll bake them tomorrow. So we've got some water here. So we're going to go in with two tablespoons of bicarb. So we're adding some barley malt and some bicarb to our water. Now the barley malt is for flavour and also for a little bit of colour and the bicarb is going to help our bagels rise and also help them develop a nice crust. So we're going to go in with our first bagel. So we're going to give these bagels 30 seconds on each side. So after 30 seconds we're just going to flip the bagel and then 30 seconds on the other side. So the bagels have just slightly puffed. Let them steam dry. So you can see they've got a little brown twins. That's sort of come from the malt extract that we put in the water. It's going to give it a really nice colour when it's finished baking. 10 minutes, 220 degrees centigrade. So you can see you've got beautiful crispy outside. Not bad, not bad. Right so our beef has been cooking for eight hours. Oh money! You can see it's got this beautiful pink colour. That's from the nitrate salt. The fat is all broken down. It's super juicy. You can see in there like all this fat is broken down. The fat on top is beautifully soft. Carves like a dream. It's going to be beautiful in our sandwich. See how the colour is lovely and pink and not like grey and knackered and overcooked. Right let's get assembling our sandwiches now. So as you can see there we've got a lovely beautiful crust. The inside is nice and dense but perfectly soft. Just in time chef. We're going to build our bagels now. We've got our mustard. We've got some better pickles this time. So ours are thicker, crunchier. We've just dressed them in a little bit of oil. Give them a little shine. It's going to give a bit more bite to our to our bagel. We're going to go a lot more of them. We've got our beef. So we've got this lovely pink colour. We're just going to try and cut it almost as thin as we can. Catsy style. Yes the smell of the all the spice brine is delicious. So we're going to go a little hit of mustard. How much mustard for you chef? Plenty mate. And then we're going to pile on our beef. We've got all this lovely cooking liquid. Just going to dress the top of the beef with that. And lucky as we discussed earlier the bagel because it's got that dense structure can really stand up to plenty of juice. Finally we're going to load up all our pickles. Our version of London's best sandwich. Oh look how juicy it is. I like it's neat. It's juicy and it's full but it's edible. The meat is 10 times better. It's softer. It's thinner. So it doesn't all just fall out whilst you're eating it. Pickles sweeter and got more substance and texture. I think it's a chefy bagel. If I was going to do it again I would actually probably toast the bagel. Exactly what a bagel bake delivers but with just a little bit more finesse.