More fake "BBQ".

So my new favorite sandwich comes by way of a bit of culinary necessity. My stepfather had cooked up a large batch of boneless beef rib strips, or rather, overcooked. They were reasonably well seasoned, but extremely tough, almost like jerky.

I decided to try and experiment with some ways of bringing some life and some tenderness back into them. The first, largely failed, experiment, was to reheat them slowly in an oven inside a foil pouch with some sauce, sliced onion, and garlic, and then wrap the result up in a warm tortilla with some cheese. The ribs wound up still tough though, which made eating them whole in a wrap an overly difficult proposition. I also wound up with some very undercooked, but potent garlic, as I'd left it whole, underestimating the amount of time and heat it would need to cook it through in that state.

So, thinking back to something I remembered seeing on Alton's show about how toughness is largely the product of the length of the meat fibers. But the grain of the ribs was a bit tough to guage really, especially after fully cooked and then chilled in the fridge. So, I decided to go for a brute force approach.

I took one of the rib strips and cut it into small thin slices, and put that in a small saucepan,
with some BBQ sauce, a little sriracha, and some minced garlic, put a lid on it, and heated it on a medium-high burner for a few minutes. Put that between two pieces of bread with some ranch dressing and shredded cheese.

Damn tasty. The sauce is delicious, and finally the meat is actually chewable. Heating it up helps bring out some of the sweetness in the sauce, which tastes damn good with the spice of the sriracha. It actually reminds me of the garlic chicken I used to get from one of the local Chinese restaurants, so much so that the next day, I actually made a similar meat mixture with tonkatsu sauce in place of the BBQ sauce, and tossed it with ramen noodles. It just seemed like a natural combination.