It’s a big day for Chicago foodies. Saturday is National Italian Beef Day.
The juicy roast beef sandwich has certainly been enjoying the national spotlight in recent years, thanks to the television series The Bear.
Here to answer all our beef-based questions is Louisa Chu, food critic at the Chicago Tribune.
Transcript
Speaker 1: You're listening to WBEZ. It's a big day for Chicago foodies. Today is National Italian Beef Day. The Juicy roast beef sandwich has certainly been enjoying the national spotlight in recent years. Thanks to the television series The Bear. But what are the origins of this classic Chicago dish? Where can you get the best Italian beef in the city? And what's better our sweet peppers here to answer all of our beef based questions is Louisa Chu food critic at the Chicago Tribune. Welcome.
Speaker 2: Hi, Claire. Thank you.
Speaker 1: So, Louisa, tell us about the history of Italian beef. This might be a tall order. When was it created? How did it then emerge as this sort of classic Chicago food?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So like some of the best food, the origins are not quite precise, you know, it's probably served in Chicago in the early 19 hundreds. First at home or special events, you know, the so called peanut weddings in the Italian immigrant community where they made a piece of beef go a long way for a special occasion by roasting it with spices that are familiar to the culture. My mouth is watering, thinking about it with lots of juice, you know, the gravy and then thinly slicing it and then serving it in sandwiches. But it's so much more than roast beef. You kind of need all of that. You know, the beef, the bread, the juice and the peppers sweet and hot to really make it Italian beef.
Speaker 1: Certainly. And then you could always add a sausage and make it a combo, I imagine, as a food critic at the Tribune, you've tried a fair number of Italian beef sandwiches in different ways over the years. Kind of like, you know, in Chicago, it's how do you take your coffee? How do you take your Italian beef? And can you give us a couple of recommendations where to find the best beef?
Speaker 2: For sure. So I like my beef dipped but not super wet and then with hot peppers, not sweet. I'm not a big fan of sweet peppers and my first beef was at Al's on Taylor in Little Italy. That May have been the first restaurant that served Italian beef in Chicago, which if you talk to Chris Pelli, whose grandfather's recipe he still uses about 100 years old. He used to be very hesitant to talk about the history. He started out as what he described as a bookie front, an illicit betting operation and then they served Italian beef sandwiches, you know, as a cover. So that's my first beef and still one of my favorites, but specifically only the location on Taylor. I actually really, also like the Italian beef list at Buona beef where they use a vegan beef that is made by Upton's in Chicago. And that's really great because they've got a great mushroom based gravy and then they also have some of the best jardin. Really chunky, the whole pieces of olive. Really terrific. So, I really love those two kind of extremes. Really old school and really modern.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, Buona sells beef at Sox Park. I'm sure you know this and when you're ordering you've got a couple of options for how juicy you want it. And the most juicy is they call it baptizing your beef.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, that is definitely the extreme and it creates what I like to call sort of almost like a savory bread pudding where you're almost better coming in with a spoon than necessarily trying to pick that up and eating it as a sandwich.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You certainly will need napkins. Uh, people outside of Chicago might have only learned about Italian beef from the FX Show. The Bear, which follows Cary, a chef managing a Chicago sandwich shop. But is there anything that you think that show gets wrong about Italian beef or maybe something it really gets right spot on.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, one of the, you know, Magic Hollywood elements is that they bake their own bread. That's one of the things I hear about most from our Italian beef makers in and around Chicago, you know, they say like, you know, do you know how big of a stand you need to bake your own bread? So that definitely is a fantastical element of the Bears. Italian beef.
Speaker 1: I've been speaking with Louisa Chu food critic at the Chicago Tribune. Thank you so much and Happy Italian Beef Day. Thank
Speaker 2: you Claire. Happy Italian Beef Day.
Speaker 1: This is WBEZ.
WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.