February 20th, 2011: Chicken Fried Steak, Beer Bread and Gravy

Ah, this was probably my FAVORITE meal that I have made so far. My Girlfriend, on the other hand, was not too pleased with the meal. Citing the meat as "too tough" and "too chewy." When I tried to explain to her that that's how cube steak is, she didn't believe me. I admit, myself, that I vowed never to buy cube steak after my first encounter with it. I was a foolish college student looking for some meat to make burgers with and I thought that something with the word "steak" instead of "beef" would be tastier. So I made burgers with cube steak. Bad idea. Like a patty of gristle.

This want of making Chicken Fried Steak came about after I watched the Good Eats episode "Cubing Around" and I realized that that stuff looked good when Alton made it, so, why shouldn't it when I make it. I had just received my Alton Brown's Good Eats Volume 2 cookbook earlier in the week and was psyched to start it. This is actually the same recipe from the book and episode. Cube steak is made the way that it is to make a tough cut of meat more palatable by tenderizing it. Chicken fried steak is actually a recipe that came to the US via German immigrants who brought the Wiener Schnitzel recipe with them, only instead of using the traditional veal they used cube steak.

I actually started this meal the day before. While perusing Friar Tuck's (a liquor superstore that's almost competition for Binny's up north) I remembered a recipe I read in another cookbook I got that same week. It was a cookbook of Illinois foods called The Legendary Illinois Cookbook: Historic and Culinary Lore from the Prairie State. That name is a mouth full. I called my mother up (she's like a cooking god that I pray to when things go wrong in my kitchen or I'm confused a little bit) to ask her what kind of beer I should use in my beer bread and her response was simply "You're making beer bread? Really? Why?" which devolved into a conversation regarding my father's attitude that it was a waste of perfectly good beer. Nuts to that, I had already used an entire $40 bottle of Bakon Vodka cooking in the past few months. I settled on a Lagunitas Hop Stoopid ale and then made off to Miejer to make my first baking purchase in a LONG time, some self rising flour.

It was odd to me, going through the Illinois cookbook, that I didn't know any of the recipes from my mother's kitchen, but a few recipes did give me memories of visiting my grandparents in Minooka when I was growing up. I thought about how my mom cooks and how my grandmother cooked. My mother spent most of her time in the kitchen using easy recipes like Chicken and Broccoli Casserole, Chicken Tetrazzini (edit: my mother told me "That wasn't easy, but it was good, right?" to which I replied "yeah, but you always prepared it during your lunch break for us to bake at night." and she replied "well, yes, but it wasn't EASY!" It really was good, I'll have to get that recipe from her.), Baked Mostacolli and Beef and Broccoli. They came from magazines and friends and were designed, mostly, to appease a family of five without much fuss. The way that my grandmother cooked was even more strange compared to this cookbook. My grandmother also used a lot of canned vegetables, sauces and soups. Her bread was always Colonial, which my mother equates to Wonderbread, and a lot of our family holidays were accompanied by Green Bean Casserole and Scalloped Corn, food that I've heard referred to as "Campbell's Recipes." Not once did I see my grandmother cracking oxtail bones or dressing a calf's head to make a Pawn Haas Loaf. But I digress on that regarding my familial history of food.

The recipe for the bread consisted of beer, flour and sugar. While it was baking, it filled the house with the smell of really hoppy beer and fresh bread. It smelled wonderful, unfortunately... it took on the taste of hops. Not just hops, but it was overwhelmingly hoppy. Blair couldn't eat it, as it tasted like beer and she doesn't like beer. (Edit, in the original itteration of this I typed "Hoppes" like the gun cleaner/oil, rather than hops, like what is in beer, kind of funny, I guess. Hoppes #9 smells just as good, just not delicious like beer hops)

The next day she got off of work and arrived home not to find a simple dinner prepared, but a huge mess of the kitchen. Flour was everywhere, my hands were covered in a kludge of milk and flour from dredging the beef and I was in a quickly reaching a state of panic as my oil had started smelling rotten and letting off a black smoke. "What are you doing?" "I'm making chicken fried steak." "Did you have to make such a mess? You have to learn to wipe off the counters when you cook." There really was a crude batter all over the kitchen. This was my first attempt at frying something like this.

After I replaced my oil and let the beef sit I tossed it in the pan and fried it until the breading crisped up. I had to make a makeshift drying rack to drain the steak of excess oil and I plopped that in the oven to keep it warm to serve.

My next task was to make the gravy. I never thought it would be this hard. No matter what I did, I could not get the gravy to cook down. It was always soupy and thin. I couldn't get it to work at all. I was quickly getting frustrated with the situation, a call to my mother was needed. "Make a roux" she said. I just added flour until it thickened. It turned out great. I warmed up the beer bread from last night and plated.


I bit into it and instantly stated "Christ, I made it better than the Colonel could have." Blair let out a sigh, it was too tough. I ate the beer bread up, the gravy made it so much better, she let out a sigh. The gravy was at least good for her. Different strokes for different folks.