A great Australian lunch dish
The Steak Sandwich has a long history in Australia. It belongs to the country pub, the truck stop, and the corner cafe with butcher's paper menus and a tomato sauce bottle on every table. It's stayed on menus for half a century because the idea is so good: hot bread, hot meat, something soft and sweet in between. Done well, it's one of the best lunches you can buy.
What's changed is what "done well" means. The modern cafe Steak Sandwich is more carefully made than the pub version. Better bread. A compound butter where there used to be plain butter. Onions caramelised low and slow. Truffle mayo. Shoestring fries instead of chunky chips. The bones of the dish haven't changed, but it's made with more care.
The cook chill technique
The reason more cafes don't serve a Steak Sandwich is practical. Cooking a steak from raw to medium rare, resting it and slicing it takes about ten minutes. That's too long for a lunch service running ticket times of six to eight minutes.
Kitchens that do serve it have solved this with a technique chefs know well and most other people don't. It's called cook chill, and it's one of the more satisfying bits of kitchen craft a cafe can run.
The method is straightforward. Season the steaks, sear them on all sides in a very hot pan, then finish them in a 200 degree oven until the internal temperature reaches 50 degrees, which is medium rare. As soon as they come out, put them in an ice bath for five to ten minutes. That's the secret: the ice bath stops the carryover cooking dead, so a steak that goes in at 50 degrees stays at 50 degrees and the medium rare is locked in. Pat the chilled steaks dry, label them and hold them in the cold room for the next day's service.
To order, put a chilled steak on a hot flat grill for one to two minutes a side. It comes back up to temperature, picks up some fresh char and is ready to slice. From order to plate takes about three minutes, about the same as a Bacon and Egg Roll.
Done properly, you can't tell it from a steak cooked to order. Most customers won't pick the difference. What changes is that the kitchen can serve it at lunch volume without slowing everything else down.
What lifts a Steak Sandwich
With the technique sorted, it comes down to four small things that decide whether a Steak Sandwich is good or great.
The steak. Sirloin is the usual cafe choice. It has more flavour than rump, costs less than scotch fillet and slices beautifully into thin pink layers. Portion it at 160 to 180 grams, which fills the sandwich generously without making it impossible to eat.
The butter. This is where a great Steak Sandwich starts. Use a compound butter. The classic Café de Paris is butter, dijon, lemon, paprika, garlic, parsley, capers and a hint of anchovy, rolled into a log, chilled and sliced into discs to order. Two or three discs sit on the hot steak and melt into the bread as the customer eats. It's the best part of the sandwich.
The bread. A baguette, toasted on the cut side. It's strong enough to take the juices from the steak and butter, you can pick it up and eat it, and the crisp toast against soft meat is exactly the contrast the dish needs. Twenty centimetres feels right. Any shorter feels stingy, and any longer is too much bread.
The sides. Shoestring fries, salted straight out of the fryer. They're light enough to share the plate without taking over, they crisp in the time the steak takes to reheat, and they're easy to plate next to the sandwich. They also give the customer something to pick at while they take the first bite, which matters more than it should.
A profitable plate, well priced
A sirloin Steak Sandwich built this way costs around eight to nine dollars in food. On a well judged cafe menu it sells for twenty five to twenty eight dollars. That puts food cost at about 29 to 36%, which is healthy for a cafe and excellent for a premium handheld.
More interesting than its own margin is what it does to the rest of the menu. A Steak Sandwich at the top of the lunch list sets the price point. Customers see the focaccia at sixteen dollars next to the Steak Sandwich at twenty six and quietly decide the focaccia is good value. The Steak Sandwich doesn't need to outsell the focaccia. It just needs to be on the menu, where customers weigh every other price against it.
The dish worth bringing back
The Steak Sandwich is one of the most satisfying things a cafe can serve at lunch. It makes a regular feel looked after and turns a Friday lunch into a small celebration. And with cook chill handling the timing, it runs through service as smoothly as anything else on the menu.
The recipe isn't new and neither is the technique. What's new, in some Australian cafes, is taking both seriously and putting the result on the menu. The cafes doing it well give customers something to look forward to and give themselves a high margin handheld at the top of the lunch list. That's worth a Sunday spent making compound butter.
Make the butter on Sunday. Cook chill the steaks on Monday and again on Thursday. Run the dish all week. The customers who've been waiting for it will find it.