The Ultimate Steak Sandwich

This recipe came to me from Caz, who had spotted it while enjoying the new found delights of google reader. I am always up for trying new ways with steak and this professed to be the ultimate so it had to be done.  Friend Jonny tried the recipe first and thoroughly enjoyed it so we figured it was worth a shot.  Right off the bat things were going downhill: I don't really have much time in the mornings to prepare things for dinner what with breakfast, showering,  getting myself ready and taking the little Mr. for a walk - and I already get up before 6am, so I had to do my prep the night before.  This meant that rather than marinading for several hours our steak wallowed in garlic, onion, parsley and wine for almost 24 hours which was kind of a bit much. 

I then set about trying to get myself some ciabatta. It's times like these I miss Wild Wheat, my local baker back home in NZ. I tried several bakeries specialising in organic loaves with no luck. The closest I was offered was some sifted spelt from Wildfire which was described as a white loaf but didn't really come close. The earthyness of the spelt was delicious but took away from the steak in a way that I don't think ciabatta would. The over-marinading meant that most of the juices had soaked up into the meat, which meant that the onions didn't quite caramelise as I would have liked. Oh yeah, and no grocery stores around were stocking cos lettuce this week. 

So all in all this did not resemble the recipe really and neither of us was overly impressed. Wil reckons that his ultimate steak sandwich has some kind of creamy mayo-based sauce, I think my ultimate steak sandwiches includes mushrooms. I think this has the potential to be a great sandwich, maybe even someone else's favourite but just not ours. We also only ended up using one steak to make our sandwiches, and about half of the onions. So we have enough for lunches too!

2 sirloin steaks

2 ciabatta rolls

2 tbs olive oil

2 Cos lettuce leaves

Salt

 

1 onion

1 garlic clove

1 tb parsley

1 tsp dried oregano

4 tb red wine

3 tb olive oil

Black pepper

Finely slice the onion and crush the garlic then mix all the ingredients together for the marinade. Rub over the steaks and leave to marinade for a few hours. 

Remove steaks from the marinade and then strain the marinade and set aside.  Heat the oven to 180C and warm the ciabatta rolls in it.  Heat a grill pan or BBQ until it is very hot and then add the steaks. Cook the steaks for two to three minutes on each side for rare or four minutes for medium rare.  Remove the steaks from the grill pan or BBQ and cover in foil to keep them warm while they rest.  Add the dry ingredients from the marinade to a frying pan and cook over a low heat until the onions start to caramalise. Then add the strained marinade liquid to the frying pan and let it bubble and reduce a little. 

Cut the rolls in half and arrange the Cos lettuce and then steaks on the rolls. Pour the marinade over the steak and then pop the top on the sandwich.

Serves two.