The “Bully Sandwich” served at O’Meara Bros. Brewing Company is built around corned beef — make that tender, oozing, savory corned beef. You want to nick a big hunk of it from their kitchen, scarper off home and spend the rest of the evening wiping juices off your grinning face.
On Valentine’s weekend, the kitchen even sold out of the stuff. That’s right — patrons ditched their significant others for wedges of bread and meat.
“I didn’t realize how much people want corned beef,” chef Roy Iversen said.
His approach is simple. He goes slow and low, cooking the beef for up to five hours in the Lakeport brew pub’s blonde ale, salt and handfuls of subtle, earthy spices. O’Meara’s kitchen staff then cuts it by hand into masculine hunks seemingly too large for its purpose. While some chefs lean heavily on coriander or allspice or cardamom or even anise, Iversen allows the brisket to stride forth. The signature here is not in the pickling flavors, but rather in the delicate texture.
But there’s a curious thing about the sandwich. Leave out the meat and it would be just as engaging.
Slices of sourdough bread, grilled with butter, are spread with mustard and what they call brewhouse sauce then topped with Swiss cheese and sauerkraut. Yeah, it doesn’t sound like a standalone sandwich — until you give it a try.
The sauerkraut carries its signature tangy bite. Yet there’s a caramelized, candied aspect to it, as well. This sweet and sour fandango plays in the foreground, with another act — soothing butter, once acid-tongued mustard mellowed slightly by the addition of beer and that enigmatic sauce — swirling on the edges.
Brewhouse sauce is essentially Thousand Island dressing, only creamier. And sharper, for that matter, as the chef adds more than a splash of ale to this stuff, too. In addition there’s … well …
“I don’t know if I should give you all the ingredients,” Iversen said with a laugh.
The result is a brisk, biting, burnished, caramel candy fanfare — all before the corned beef ever becomes involved.
Yet it is a simple sandwich, one fully aware of corned beef’s humble origins. The name, “bully” alludes to slang applied to tins of preserved meat downed in muddy First World War trenches. The same British soldiers who referred to the Belgian battlefield of Ypres as “Wipers” presumably transformed the French bouilli (or boiled) into a more familiar term.
Before it gained notoriety packed in tin cans, corned beef was simply a form of meat cured in pickling spice and salt — “corned” describing any small kernels or flecks (“powdered” was another popular synonym for packing in salt).
In a world lacking refrigeration, briny cured meat became a working class staple on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fortunately we live in a different world. In the place of necessity, we have chefs fiddling around with corned beef recipes to perfect flavors. And in place of the pedestrian slab of meat and bread, we have a memorable sandwich.
Surprising, somewhat sloppy, sodden with beer and definitely low-brow in intent, but memorable nonetheless.
Even the chef admits to pinching a few bites when he can.
Dave Faries can be reached at 900-2016
