NYC’s Most Legendary Roast Beef Sandwich.

That is phenomenal. Tucked away deep in the magical lands of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, lives a New York legend, Brennan and Cars. This place has been there since 1938, making it a bona fide culinary landmark in New York City. When you arrive, you're greeted by a jolly bald man wearing a white coat, who mumbles your order into a microphone as old as the building, which then kicks off a process of thinly slicing their legendary roast beef, topping it with American cheese, putting it inside a bun before aggressively dunking it into a vat of beef drippings. And while it's its own thing, you could argue this is Brooklyn's take on a French dip sandwich. But they have three unique ways that you can order it, but more on that later. This is Brennan and Cars' iconic roast beef sandwich. For this recipe, we need to prep our meat a day or two in advance. And I've got a top round here, about 3 and 1 1⁄2 pounds. You really want a top round or a bottom round. It's just the right shape for roast beef. I'm just going to pat it dry out of its packaging. Keep everything nice and dry. And that's what you're looking for, a nice round piece of meat. First step is to truss it. So I've got some string here, and this is how I do it. To measure it, I pinch some string up here. And I'm just going to loosely wrap it around my arm. I'm looking for about eight strings. Then all you've got to do, cut it. And you've got all your string. That's way too much. Then we're just going to go ahead, take it underneath, go into the center, pull it tight, and then one more knot. Could have given myself a little bit more slack. Here, I've got some roasted garlic oil. You could use regular oil, but we're basically just using this as a binder. I'm going to just coat the whole thing lightly. Then we're going to generously season with salt. Get that bottom down first, and then a lot fresh cracked black pepper. And I want to get that flat side with like a pepper grinder. I grind the board. Then you can just take it, mop it up. Let me hit the top. Get it on a sheet tray. You want to let this sit in the fridge, let that season penetrate for at least a day. You can swing two days, great. Now after a day in the fridge, your roast beef should look nice and dried out. That seasoning should sort of have been adhered to the meat, and it's ready to roast. Got a little thermometer here. This is what we're going to use to track this. Now most thermometers, you stick it right in the middle. This one, though, has different probes, and it will find the core temp. So instead of running it through, I'm just going to run it down. We took this straight out of the fridge. It's about 48 degrees. Now I like a nice medium, maybe touching medium rare. I find closer to medium, you get a more tender beef. So the target temp's going to be 130. And I have my oven preheated 250 degrees. Before we pop it in the oven, I just want to hit it with a little bit more of that garlic oil to moisten it back up. So this is going to go now into the oven. Then along with a kind of unit like this, all these thermometers nowadays come with an app as well. And that's just going to cook low and slow, I would imagine, for about two hours. But once it gets cooking a little bit, it should tell us right on the app. Halfway through the cook, we're just going to rotate the beef and make sure that it cooks nice and evenly. Got about 50 minutes left, and here's the thing about this low temp and why it's going to help us ensure a nice, even cook throughout the center of the beef. That thermometer will also track the surface temperature, as you can see here, which is around 150. Now if a nice medium is going to be 130, 135, you don't want the surface of the meat to be much higher than that. Otherwise, you risk the dreaded gray band. And in roast beef, that gray band can get rather big, often due to, at some point in the cook, blasting it at like 500 degrees. That's why we sacrifice the crust, because it's barely even going to be noticeable once we thinly slice it, in order to get the perfect cook in the center, which is all roast beef is at the end of the day. 40 has hit me like a ton of bricks. And between me and my family, I've seen my share of doctors this year. And in the past, I've always wondered, like, how do you find a good doctor? Is it your mom's doctor? What if she didn't pick a good doctor? One of the best ways I've found to find great doctors is our sponsor today, ZocDoc. I think a lot of reasons people put off going to see a doctor is because they don't know if their doctor is actually a great one. And in my experience, there really isn't a better way right now to find great doctors than ZocDoc. With ZocDoc, you can search and compare local, in-network doctors with more than 150,000 providers within more than 200 specialties across all 50 states. And besides detailed doctor profiles, the best part for me is that I can read through reviews from real patients. And then I can see when there is an appointment available and instantly book a visit. And you don't have to wait weeks. Appointments happen fast, usually within 24 to 72 hours. Sometimes you can even find same-day appointments, which is almost impossible these days. Best part about it is ZocDoc is completely free. Now, as we've grown old together over these last eight years, we all need to start looking after ourselves a little bit better. First step is clicking the link in the description or visit ZocDoc.com backslash not another and get started today. Now, it's been about an hour and a half and the internal temperature is 115. Now, if we were cooking this at a much hotter temperature, let's say 500 degrees, 400 degrees, now would be the time at 115 that I would pull this out. And a piece like this at that temperature would carry over at least 15 degrees pulling it out now. But we're cooking this at 250. Now it's a big piece of meat, but a much lower inertia. And so I'm going to predict this carry over cooks no more than four degrees, maybe as low as two degrees. So I'm aiming to pull this out at 127. 127, time to take it out. Smells like that Maillard actually kind of came through a little bit on the outside without even having to blast it. Just gonna wrap it in some foil, try and insulate it a bit until we're at our final temp. There we go. While I don't suspect this will carry over much longer, I'm gonna place this in the fridge and try and stop the momentum. But now we can start working on the beef jus. This is a vital part. They've got a lot of it. Every sandwich is dipped through it depending on how you order it. And so now we didn't get a lot of browning, a lot of fond on the pan. And so we're not gonna get like crazy beef jus out of it. So we're going to use a good beef stock or beef broth to get started. We're gonna fortify that with various flavors. So we're gonna start with garlic and shallots. Just gonna smash the cloves. I'm just gonna slice up the shallots. Now, one of the tricks I'm sure a place like this uses, we used it on the food truck when we braised our short ribs, is a version of like a perpetual stock or broth. When I tested this recipe, this is the residual of the broth that we used. While I'm gonna make a new one, I'm going to add the old one back into it. And if you do a process of that where you save a little bit, add it back in, that adds that sort of deep flavor that only like a place like Brennan & Carr's kind of gives you just from age and quantity of what they're cooking. So I'm gonna get my little saucier on medium high heat, and I'm gonna add a little bit of that garlic oil I have left over. You could use regular olive oil. Once we've got it hot, I'm gonna add in the garlic and the shallots and begin to brown them. Try to build some flavor on the bottom of the pan just to add some depth to the stock. Hit them with a little salt. And all you're looking for is developing a little color, getting them nice and aromatic. You're basically just looking for that amazing smell you smell when you caramelize garlic and onions. Once we got some nice color developing on the pan, I'm gonna go ahead and add in the beef broth. Add in about two capfuls of Worcestershire sauce and then a couple of dashes of soy sauce. And despite having added fresh garlic and fresh onion, I'm also going to add dried minced garlic and dried minced onion. They both add a different distinct flavor that's going to sort of steep into the broth and they'll get strained out later. Then we're gonna add the old stock. Now we're just gonna bring that up to a boil, drop that down to a simmer and just allow all that flavor to marry roughly just until the beef fully cools down. Now did you see that? Peaked at 132, which is not bad, I told you. I was off by a degree. I should have pulled it at 125 if I wanted to land square at 130. Now we wanna completely let this cool down before we wrap it. We're gonna strain the broth and then we can make sandwiches the next day. Patience, I know it's cooked. You could eat this now, it's just harder to slice thin when it's still warm. Once it's firmed up overnight and chilled, you're gonna see you can get a deli slice, albeit slightly thicker than paper thin, once it's chilled and then we'll warm it back up in the broth. Cool to the touch, almost down, a little above room temp. Gonna take my roast beef, I'm gonna wrap it up. Place it in the fridge to firm up overnight. Now in our roasting pan, we've got some cooking juices. So I'm gonna take some of the liquid, clean up the sheet tray, get it back into the pan. Then we're gonna strain out our broth. Now this, for all intents and purposes, is going to be our vat. This is gonna be what we dip and serve the sandwich with. This, we can place in the fridge to cool. Now imagine you did this over the weekend, you wake up tomorrow, it's Monday, you're set up to be making sandwiches all week. And that's what we're gonna be doing tomorrow, so I'll see you then. So now is the fun part. First thing we gotta do is set our vat up. So I'm gonna take our broth, I'm just gonna bring that up to temperature. Just get that out of its plastic, pat the bottom dry. And let's see how we did. Juicy, nice medium, maybe a little medium rare. That's how you want it. Now to cut it, I'm just gonna remove the string, but you wanna use your thinnest blade. And this is how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna cut it in half first, so that's against the grain. Now I've got a smaller piece of meat that I have more control of to shave thin. Moist, thin, easy to slice. See how tender it makes it when you do it nice and thin. On top of that, we're gonna add our cheese, our American cheese. I don't know the rolls that they use, but I've got this roll, it's actually a Portuguese roll. Now there's three ways you could order. The first one's the dingle dangle, and that is just taking the meat, or the meat and the cheese, and dipping it into the hot broth, then placing it on the bun. Next one's called the double dip. So the double dip takes the bottom bun, then we're gonna place it right down. Then we're gonna take the meat, and then we're gonna dip it. Dip the top bun, close it up, and that's your double dip. And then finally, the knife and fork job, which is essentially them drowning the sandwich in broth. That is phenomenal. When you get the right bread, it holds up to all of that juice. And the roast beef is on point. Never gonna buy it from the store again. And the broth adds that final bouquet of flavor to the whole thing. It just gets all soaked up. You don't gotta go down to Brooklyn anymore. It's just roast beef and cheese. Full recipe for this is gonna be down in the description. That's all that I have today. I'll see you next time. Until then, take care of yourself, and go feed yourself.