Mexican Street Food Sandwiches At Home (Torta De Milanesa)

When we think of the Hall of Fame of great sandwiches, a lot of time it's like fried chicken sandwich, grilled cheese, hamburgers. But there's a crucial one that's missing on that list. This is the torta. To end all tortas, at least to me, crispy, ultra thin, crunchy beef, all sorts of salsa, topping, mayo. I mean, it is the perfect mixture of textures, flavors, and just all the tastes. Like, you know how some of the greatest dishes have all five tastes? It's like sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami. It has it all. That's the beauty of this dish. So let's make it, shall we? So we're gonna start by making a simple chipotle salsa. Then we'll make some refried beans, slice, season, bread, and fry our beef. And then finally, we'll assemble and serve. Always start with the salsa. Just get it out of the way, put it in the fridge. That way you're not like last minute trying to wrap it up while you're cooking and you're like, oh, I made the thing and I don't have the salsa. Not good. So four large Roma tomatoes onto a wire rack set directly over an open flame. What if you don't have an open flame? Get a blowtorch. Blowtorch will speed it up. Yeah. The whole point is to essentially char the skin on these. You don't have any source of a flame? Put them in the broiler, char them that way. You don't have a broiler? Then don't f***ing char them at all. You don't have to. It's just a little extra flavor. There is one other thing this does do though, and that is it helps kind of remove the skins from the tomato, which will slightly improve the texture. Now, once those are charred for the most part all over, pop them into a bowl, and you'll cover those with plastic wrap to kind of steam a little for like five minutes. To finish the salsa, you will need a blender. You can also do this in a food processor. You could also probably do this with a stick blender if you have one. You could just take a knife and chop this up. Another thing you can do is a mortar and pestle. I'm giving you all sorts of ways to do this. You're running out of excuses. One whole can of chipotle peppers in adobo. This is a seven ounce can. You're just gonna dump the whole thing in there. Rinse the can out, a little bit of water, toss that around, get the remnants out of there. Bang, dude. I didn't fill that all the way up. It was like a couple of tablespoons. Then you're gonna add a tablespoon of white distilled vinegar, a teaspoon of sugar, just a little sweetness, and three cloves of peeled garlic. Oh, what about our tomatoes? I'm not against putting a little bit of char in there. I think it adds flavor. I think it looks nice. I'm gonna peel a little bit of it off, but honestly, even if you didn't do that, it's not a big deal. All right, now before I season this with salt, I'm gonna blend it first until as smooth as possible. All right, touch of salt, just a touch. Doesn't need too much. All right, done. Beautiful, spicy, smoky, little bit sweet. I mean, it's really a beautiful bread. That's ready to be used. Now, let's make this torta. Pinto beans. I wanted to make this easy, okay? You don't have to soak beans for this. You can just use canned, it's fine, but we're making a sandwich. I just want them to taste really, really, really good. So one, ideally medium. This is a huge white onion, and you're just going to give that a rough dice. So to do that, you're gonna cut little fingers about half inch wide, make one long incision across the center, and then just cut across the same width as your fingers, except the other way. Again, on the other half, you have a chopped onion. For the garlic, I'm just gonna thinly slice that. That's it, nothing crazy. It doesn't need to be perfect. Just try to keep it relatively even. And then we got two beautiful serranos. I'm leaving the seeds in. You want to take them out, you can take them out. So cut the tops off, and then just slice those a little thinner than your garlic. I prefer to slice these thin just because I don't want a giant chunk of serrano in my bite. I want even little thin bites of spicy serrano throughout my beans. Okay, now we're gonna move over to the stove. We have a large pot. I'm adding two tablespoons of unsalted butter and two tablespoons of lard. You can substitute the lard for all butter and then just do a total of four tablespoons of butter. You could do all lard. I'm doing a 50-50, right? Even keel flavor. Once that's fully melted over medium heat and hot, you'll then add your vegetables. Now you're gonna add a touch of salt and pepper to taste. And you're gonna saute that over medium heat, stirring often for about three to four minutes or until the vegetables are softened and for the most part cooked through. All right, that's done. All right, now we have two cans of drained pinto beans going in. I prefer to use dried beans that are rehydrated, but they take a long time. This is a quick and easy way to do it. Now carefully toss those together and then let that just cook, stirring occasionally until heated through. Take like one to two minutes. Now I'm going to add them to our blender, woo! This could hypothetically also be done in a food processor, although I do think a blender will get it much finer. Blend that on high speed, using a tamper if necessary until as smooth as possible. Some people like theirs a little bit more rustic and chunky. If you want to do that, that's fine, but I like mine silky smooth. At this stage, you do need to taste it, make sure that it's seasoned to your liking. Pinto beans are almost a little bit on the sweeter side, so you might need a little more salt than you think. I'm adding a little bit of chicken bouillon. That is Knorr, but you can also use really any chicken powder. So add salt at this stage if needed. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. First of all, what is that? Second of all, where the hell do I get that? Really, all you need is beef top round that has been sliced thin and pounded out. You're gonna do one of two things. Either buy a top round. This is an entire one from Pullman Market. Our friends at Pullman Market really hooked us up, okay? We asked for a top round. They gave us this. So this is a whole top round. Most of the time, you'll get a small piece. Just slice it thin and pound it out, but if your butcher has Milanese de ray, get that. It's already prepped for you. You can actually skip this entire part. That said, let's break this thing down. So you'll notice it's actually made up of really three pieces. I'm gonna split those off. So I'm gonna split off this outside bit, and I'm gonna split off this outside bit. So I'm left with this beautiful, almost perfectly even center cut piece. These two pieces we'll use for something else, but not part of this recipe. Now, for the actual Milanese, you need to sort of look at the way the grains run. We're gonna cut against the grains. I'm gonna cut this part off actually as well, so we get even slices. Look at that. That is some of the craziest top round marbling I've ever seen. Sorry, I had to. So we're gonna cut these into about half inch thick slices, and you're gonna want six half inch thick slices, and then of these slices, we're gonna pound them out to a quarter of an inch thick. Again, if your butcher can do this for you, just look for six slices of Milanese de ring. Now, let's pound these out. So to pound these out, it's actually very simple. You can take a slice, lay it on a sheet of parchment paper, and then fold that parchment paper over, or you can put another sheet on top, whatever. Okay, using the flat side of a meat mallet, you're just gonna lightly pound that out, making sure that you're giving it even pressure. I don't want you to hit one spot over and over. Go evenly over the whole piece of meat. Take your stress out on it, but not too much, because we only want to pound this to a quarter inch thin. Actually, technically you can go as thin as you want. Some places actually will pound them as thin as paper, which in many cases is optimal, especially if your beef is much leaner than mine. We happen to have a very fatty piece, which I love. So choose your own adventure. If you prefer to go extra thin, go extra thin. I wanted mine thicker to really enjoy the quality of the marbling in this. Look at that, dude. I'm gonna season this on both sides with kosher salt. We're seasoning this all the way at this stage, so don't go light. You're not really gonna season it that much again. You can also add spices to this, but I just want to taste the beef. We got a lot of other toppings on here. I'm just going just salt. Set to the side, and repeat with the rest of your beef. All right, now once that's done, we're gonna pop this in the fridge while we finish up the rest of our breading station. We're essentially using a three-step breading system. Flour, egg wash, bread crumb, but it's very specific. For the flour, I want just a little bit of something in it, right? So we have one cup of all-purpose flour. You could just do all-purpose, or you could add a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of MSG, one teaspoon of garlic powder, half a teaspoon of onion powder, a teaspoon of black pepper, and one teaspoon of Knorr chicken bouillon powder. Whisk together until thoroughly combined, and then you'll dump that onto a plate or onto a quarter baking sheet, whatever you have. Now, that's that one. The next one is gonna be a egg wash consisting of three whole eggs. You can also add a little splash of water, just a little to help with volume, and then just whisk those together until completely mixed and homogenous. All right, dump that into our other plate or quarter baking sheet, spread that out, and then the final one, bread crumb. Now, look, you could do panko, you could do regular bread crumb. This is pan molido. It's finer, and it also will look a little more traditional like the standard torta milanesa, but that's up to you. All right, we have our three-step breading set up. To bread these, remember, wet hand, dry hand. My left hand is my wet hand, my right hand is my dry hand. So first, we're gonna go into the flour. Make sure to coat it evenly. Onto the other side, shake off the excess, and then into your egg mixture. Back to your wet hand, flip, coat thoroughly. Make sure there's no dry spots at all, please. As much as you can avoid, at least. Any dry spot will basically become a bald spot when you fry it. Now, finally, into the bread crumb, and back to dry hand, sprinkle some of that on, and coat completely, every single nook and cranny. Don't be like, oh, I don't care about that one. No, you have to care about every spot. Care about every layer of surface area in this. Pat that out so it adheres, shake off the excess, and then again, I like to get the other side, sprinkle this well, just to make sure we're hitting it on all angles. Make sure the edges are coated. I also like to sprinkle my landing zone with a little bit of bread crumb, just so that it has something dry up against it that when this does begin to rehydrate naturally, it'll absorb more bread crumb. Shake off the excess. Now repeat the rest of your milanesa. In a large cast iron skill, heat a one-inch layer of neutral oil to 350 Fahrenheit. Lay in your breaded beef away from you, right? You don't wanna splash yourself and have an imprint of the time you made tortas on you for the rest of your life. And you're gonna fry it about one to two minutes till golden brown. Flip and continue cooking until evenly browned. On the second side, about another two minutes. You may need to flip and toss a couple times in the oil. Just make sure that the internal temperature of the beef is at least 145, 150. I actually tend to cook my beef all the way through, though. Then remove, drain on a paper towel-lined sheet, and repeat with the rest of your beef. There's no need to season this at this point because the beef has already been seasoned. These three items will be our toppings. You may include all of them. You may also include none of them. It's really up to you. You might be thinking, should I add lettuce to this? No! Because I was gonna add lettuce to this, and my dear friend Gabby said, no. No ******* lettuce. So, tomato. I think this is a contentious choice because if you add tomato, it does kind of add a wateriness that takes away from the flavor. So, choose wisely. Make sure it's a very flavorful and sweet tomato. If it's not tomato season, maybe don't use a tomato at all. Now, if you do use a tomato, I want you to cut it as thinly as you can. It doesn't have to be like paper, but I do not want one-inch thick slices of tomato. There's nothing that annoys me more than seeing a watery-ass tomato the size of Mount Olympus on my sandwich. It's like, what, is this a tomato ******* sandwich? All right, we have our tomato. Now, this is just me being very anal. You're gonna season every single tomato lightly with salt on both sides, okay? And then when you're done with these, take a paper towel and lay your tomatoes on that paper towel. Doing that will grab all the water that's about to be pulled out of that tomato. They're very, very watery fruits. Again, very anal, not a necessity, personal preference. For the onion, I want this sliced very, very thinly into rings. So just remove the top, leave the stem attached, and then you're going to just remove that first layer of skin along with the first layer of onion. The first layer of onion always kind of sucks, so I just take it off. Now, from there, you can cut them very thinly into rings with your knife. If you have a mandolin, this is the time to crack it out. And you're gonna cut this pretty much as thinly as you can get it without it falling apart. I still want singular rings, so let that be your guide as you're getting it thinner. The second it stops holding its shape, you know you've kind of gone a bit too far in terms of thinness. Oh yeah, that's nice. Okay, probably never use a whole onion for this recipe because it's just so much onion, but that looks very nice, I'm happy with that. Now, for the avo, you're gonna cut that in half lengthwise, roll your knife around so you meet with your previous cut line, and then just twist, separate, okay? Now, you can split this again and quarter it, and then just honestly split the quarter again and you have an eighth and you can throw those on if you want them really thick, or you can slice it very thin, it's up to you. I will actually quarter it though just to make it easier to peel. Quarter! Take the skin off. So now we're gonna take our knife and just cut nice, thin, not too thin, little slices. And I would say for six sandwiches, you probably won't need more than about two large avocados. You could get three to get a backup if you want. I like having backups. Somehow I almost never end up using them though. Also, little peeling tip is if you quarter the avocado, always peel from this longer end here, not the shorter end. The longer end has more leverage and it also tends to peel off. See, the bottom edge for some reason always sticks. I don't know why, but the top does not. The top makes it a lot easier to just kind of like rip that thing off. Look at that, dude. Clean pull, love that. Now, once those are done, I would recommend that you line them up. And before you even start plating them, just get some flaky salt or kosher salt and just give them a light sprinkling of salt. Get yourself a lime and drizzle some lime juice. Try to hit every little piece. So first of all, you're seasoning the avocado. Second of all, you're preserving that beautiful green color, keeping these fresh from oxidizing while you get set up. Now, bread. Some people will use bolillo, some people will use telera bread. This is my choice. This is telera. You can get this at a local panaderia. You could get this online. You could also make it yourself. I have a recipe for it on the, actually the main channel. We're not making it today. No need to make it. Honestly, most bakeries would probably make it better than most of us, if we're being honest. So get that bread and you're gonna split it in half so that it may be adorned with your delicious torta toppings, see? Just like that. You're gonna do that with six of these bad boys. Now, to assemble. You're gonna toast your buns in butter until golden and warm. On your bottom bun, generously spread your refried beans, a touch of full-fat mayo, followed by your sliced avocado, tomato, onion. Then next, lay down your beautiful milanesa beef. And optionally, if you want, you can take a few pieces of chipped ham or spam and sear them in a pan. Place that on top. Slather on a little bit of your salsa. And this is optional. You don't have to do this, but you can take a little bit of shredded Oaxaca cheese, sprinkle it into a nonstick pan or a nicely seasoned griddle over medium heat. And then just let that cook until melted. Then add your top bun for one of your tortas. Scrape and remove so that the cheese sticks to your bun. Again, totally optional. You don't have to do this cheese part. And then crown with your cheese-topped bun. You can serve this with whatever you want. Pickled jalapenos, pickled carrots, escabeche. You could also do no pickles, but who wants a sandwich with no pickles? You can even do dill pickles. I won't judge. And then we have our salsa. I only put a little on the sandwich because I think there's already a lot going on here. And I think salsa is more of an accompaniment. You can kind of dunk it in there. You could drizzle it on. You'll have a lot of leftover salsa. And I think that's a good thing. But dude, look at this. Looks incredible. A beautiful cross section. There's a lot of stuff that goes in here. So how does it taste? If there were a sandwich hall of fame, that's the first one going in there. I don't mean mine specifically. I just mean the holistic concept of torta Milanese. It's the crispiness of the beef, the softness of the bread, and then all the nice toppings. You can put whatever you want in here, but this combo is what I want. No lettuce, nothing that's diluting the flavor. Even the tomatoes. They add something here because we drain them a little bit. The avocado is creamy. I mean, God, there's so much in here. I don't even know if I can describe it all, but the beef is really the star here. The edges are so crisp and crunchy, but the inside is so just tender and fatty and delicious. This is a sandwich. We've all had our fried chicken sandwich. We've all had our turkey club BLT. Get those out of here, man. I mean, look, they're in the hall of fame too, but this, if you've not had before, you need to add to your list right now. And you got a recipe. The link's in the description. Love you, subscribe.