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Hi, I'm Michael Vignola, chef partner here at the 86, an intimate New York City West Village steakhouse. Today, we are talking about the perfect Philly cheesesteak. This cheesesteak is the homage to the original, doing our riff on it, you know, taking that classic, making it approachable yet advanced. Australian Wagyu ribeye. Three Alpine cheeses. Then you have a B&G pepper relish, a creamy caramelized onion spread. Can't forget our house-baked sesame bread with a little bit of Maldon salt. It's going to hit all those classic notes and just be elevated so much further. The beef is a 3-day process. Let me show you how it starts.
So, we're going down to the 126-year-old walk-in box. So, what we have here is a seven-bone 12 by 12 standing rib roast. This is a Westholme Australian Wagyu ribeye. Start with great products and just honor them. First thing we do, we're going to score it lightly. When I say score, I'm just dragging the blade of the knife, creating small channels for the fat to render and continually baste the meat as we slow roast it. Kosher salt, one of my favorite ingredients. Salt is the magnifying glass of flavor.
Everybody tends to under-season. They also go too close to it. You just season this. When you're seasoning, up high, like a shotgun, so it spreads out. You want it to go and cascade down slowly. Next up, coarsely ground Madagascar black pepper. When I say coarsely ground, we grind it in a grain mill so that we can control the crunch and the diameter of the peppercorn. We're going to rub all of this in there. Can feel the fat starting to render on this beautiful Australian Wagyu as it comes up to temp a little bit through under the heat of my hands. Sucking up that salt. Grabbing onto that pepper. Mustard's going to be our aggregate. It's going to help encase
this whole thing. It's got a little bit of tannic properties that are going to cut through the fibers of the meat. It's going to give it a little bit more dexterity, tensile strength, and a little bit help with the chew of the final product. The Philly cheesesteak is really near and dear to my heart. In the summer of '97, my father, Ronald, was called for a lung transplant down at Temple University Hospital. In front of Temple University Hospital, there was this one place called Fat Albert's where this guy would park out front and I would watch him meticulously make his Philly cheesesteaks. I needed his cheesesteak and I needed his hospitality more than I knew. And for that, this cheesesteak is born from it. And
it's really important to me to honor that memory. One of my father and two of that man. After this is on there, we have some beautiful flowering thyme, just lightly picked and chopped. Again, like a shotgun, spreads out. Make it rain. Rosemary. Little Christmasy vibes. Classic rose flavors pairs well with beautiful pieces of beef. It's not going to burn because it's protected by the mustard and it's all just going to add to the crust and the ultimate finished product of our debris. We're going to do the same thing on the underside just without the herbs.
Why Wagyu, right? I like Australian Wagyu as opposed to Japanese Wagyu for this product. Japanese Wagyu is like eating butter, foie gras. Australian Wagyu marries the best of like American prime genetics, steer chew, that great unctuousness with Japanese genetics of fat, beautiful rich marbling. Salting and marinating this meat also does a few things. Pulling out some of that extra water weight, intensifying the marbling, so it's leaving behind the fat. Right? That fat, as it cooks and slowly renders, is going to give you that really delicious, umami rich unctuous bite in this cheesesteak. Don't forget to rub it in. You know, it's like when the Yanks beat the Mets, you got to rub it in. That's for you.
Now that we have this marinated seasoned our herbs, our salt, our pepper, our mustard, we're going to let it dry and marinate for a day, put it in the oven, roast it till it's perfect, let it rest in the walk-in cold till it gets all that juice back into it, and then we're going to slice it nice and chilled. Let's go. Here she is 3 days later. You can see that crust. This is it after it's been rested, roasted, marinated, and cooked. We're almost there. You can see that bark that I developed, right? That crust, it's all over the back here. Let's spin this bad boy around. You can see it's ready to roll.
You see a trunk down inside? You can see the bones now. So, as that [snorts] fat rendered and basted this meat, it just shrank down slowly. Remember, we're going to use everything here, including this beautiful crust. But, I don't want to lose any of this beautiful fat crust intramuscular beef that we talked about. Just slowly going against these bones, freeing them up one at a time, making sure to preserve that beautiful rested meat in every piece of it. So, now the bones, the ribs are off. Then you have this tronche of ribeye. Next up, we're going to take it, we're going to square it up, and get it ready for our slicer. And you ask, "Why Wagyu?" You can tell, just look at my board, this beautiful fat that has been rendered.
That fat is really going to melt in your mouth. It's not going to be left on the griddle like at, you know, those other places, you know, south of here. We're going to cut it into half to make it more manageable on our slicer. But, just look at this beautiful cook on this. Perfectly rosé, beautiful intramuscular fat. You can see the veining of that for the Australian Wagyu. Oh. It's time to slice it paper thin. I'm rotating through so that everybody gets a piece of the same area in each bite, ultimately eating the entire ribeye. So, you get a piece of that cap, a little bit of the eye, and some of that beautiful unctuous fat.
We will continue this till we build our piles. Our Philly cheesesteaks are 6 oz of thinly sliced Australian Wagyu and about an oz and a half of our debris. We're going to take these and let them chill while we work on our debris next. What is debris and why do we do it? I call it debris cuz it's all this leftover bitter ends and all the unctuous bits and parts, the nasty bits that aren't quite beautiful and pristine. The traditional Philly cheesesteak is done on a flat top. It's kind of griddled and almost chopped cheese-ish like. So, you got a little bit of Maillard. Maillard is the caramelization of the natural sugars in the meat.
That gives you that great steak flavor, that little bit of that griddly taste, that sear is what you crave. To make our version of that, we are going to take all this Maillard, all this beautiful fat, and make our version of debris. First thing we're going to start with, beautiful rib cap, my favorite. Easiest way to do this, straight down. Cut that bone off. Once you have them all broken down, is where the work begins. What we're going to do is start to clean all of this beautiful meat off. No waste. Every little bit is going somewhere. Even these bones will go to my beverage director Lucas's dog, Zena.
Yes, the warrior princess. All of these bones even get used. We're going to save them, roast them, and add them to our mushroom au jus. All these beautiful bits and pieces cooked down and chopped up and whipped with their own fats. Think of it as a spreadable beef pâté. Crushed fat, Wagyu, mustard, all the herbs, the salt, the pepper, goes into the Robo Coupe or a food processor. Pulse this.
You can see this beautiful fatty chopped beef. After you have this beautiful Wagyu rillette, I put it in a pot and then I, you know, yada, do a bunch of stuff or witchcraft, as my daughter Mia says, and it turns into this amazing debris. I'd love to show you more, but a girl needs her secrets. What it really adds is the secret sauce of it all, that hidden surprise that you just can't quite put your finger on. It gives you that mouth-watering, lip-smacking secret sauce deliciousness. This is one of the aspects that I think sets us apart from the traditional Philly cheesesteak, while still honoring the flavor profile that is achieved downtown. Now, how do we reheat this slowly, cook it, but not overcook it?
All right. First thing we're going to do, take about an ounce of debris, 6 oz of thinly sliced meat. We then take a Ziploc bag, open up one per order, take our thinly sliced meat and our debris. And we are going to recirculate or sous vide cook this gently. So, what sous vide does for us is allow us to control the cooking temperature and time. It's gently heating proteins in a water bath through a controlled environment. Right? So, think of it as a Jacuzzi, if you will, set at a perfect temperature where proteins cook at certain specific temperatures. It's a little bit of science, it takes away the guesswork, cuz again, the key to greatness is consistency. So, our meat's slowly hanging out in the Jacuzzi. Let's talk
Whiz, cheese spread, whatever you want to call it. Provolone, cheddar, American, cheese Whiz, they all have one thing in common, whether it's our Alpine blend or not, it's an aggregate. Kind of blankets the whole beef and cloaks it, keeps it moist, rich, unctuous, juicy, delicious. We make our version of Whiz, if you will, with three Alpine cheeses. So, harder, funkier, earthy cheeses. We start with Comté. 3-year-old Comté from France, delicious, funky, semi-soft, kind of creamy Alpine cheese. Next up is Hornbacher. Hornbacher from upstate New York is a local cheese to us, brought in by Murray's. Again, hard, semi-soft cheese.
And the third one, yeah, I'm not going to tell you what it is. We take these cheeses, we melt them down. We slowly incorporate them till we get this beautiful gloppy, natural cheese Whiz, if you will. One of the other hallmarks of a great Philly cheesesteak is onions. Here at the 86, we start with Vidalia onions, slowly cooked down in a little bit of white wine, some spices, some bay laurel, some thyme, and we just really keep them slow and low cooking down here on the flat top until they turn into this beautiful caramelized, oniony not jam, but just component. It's going to add a little bit of bite, that rich griddle texture to the final product. One more hallmark
we have to talk about is the bread. Can't forget the bread. We bake this bread in-house. These were baked very early this morning. They're super soft. They're delicious. We're going to cut it in half. And by half, it's a little bit higher towards the top than it is the bottom. I want that bottom to really hold it and build that barrier. That's also why we toast it. Nobody wants soggy, wet bread, except for the birds. Small amount of salted, melted butter. And I just kind of mop it in there, right? This is going to help in even browning or Maillard. Make sure you do both sides. Right?
Nobody wants to go around bottomless. We're not Donald Duck for Christ's sakes. And we're going to toast this on our plancha now. It's just a low temp kind of griddle. Provides a nice even beautiful toast. Do you notice that I'm pressing down on it? I want to make sure I get a nice even brown, which is important. You don't want it to be all loose and like mushy cuz you want that bite. The moment we've all been waiting for. Now we build the 86 cheesesteak. Step one. We're going to take our beef out of the bath. Next up, we're going to add a little bit of our au jus made from the bones of our wagyu.
Some of our caramelized white wine onions. See how the acidity from the white wine helps cut through the unctuousness of the meat. Just want to separate the layers a little bit and make sure we're getting all of those flavors mixed in. This is essentially what you'd be doing on the griddle when you're chopping it up and getting that myard. Next, our bread. Beautifully toasted. Our caramelized onion and black pepper spread. This is going to add a little bit of richness to it. It's going to give you a little more depth of flavor. It's going to keep that bite nice and wet. After our black pepper onion spread, we put our B&G inspired relish on top. This is B&G peppers, the hot cherry Italian cherry peppers ground
down, and then we add a little bit of love from the 86 in there. The spiciness kind of cuts through the richness of the Alpine cheese spread. Gives you that lacto fermenting tang of it all. Beautiful bad boy here. Put it right on there. Then take our beautiful hot whiz. Don't be shy with it. You kind of let it go where it wants to. Then our topper. Oh, look at this bad boy. We're going to cut into thirds. Believe it or not, this is a mid course here nine out of 10 times here at the 86. So that reason we cut into thirds so you can share with your guest. Put it on to a nice antique silver tray. And there
you have it, the 86 cheesesteak. Hope you've enjoyed it. I have. I always go for the end. I like the push of the bread. Look at that bite. You get the crunch of the bread. You get the unctuousness of the meat, the sweet acidity of the onions, the spice pepper pickle of the relish, then that Alpine cheese that doesn't mask the chew of the bread, the spiciness. The salinity in the meat contains the herbs, unctuous and then breathe. So you have layers of balance where it pushes and pulls you to places. Sorry, Geno, Pat, you guys just don't go there. This is my homage to Fat Albert's. It's a
little nod to my pops. It is a little bit of me and my history and my journey through it all in this sandwich. I wanted to honor the past and elevate it for the future.
