The Jack Reuben
I’ve eaten a lot of salt beef sandwiches in my life: fat heavy numbers from Baker Street cafés that I could barely get my sizeable jaw around, midnight bagels in taxis passing through Brick Lane, New York food trucks, and supermarket pretenders that didn’t quite hit the spot, but were better than not having one at all. My life would not be complete without this, the undisputed king of all sandwiches, so I set about trying to create a vegan version that would be just as delicious in its own right, while staying as faithful as possible to the original. This took a few tries; I marinated in beer, in powdered mushroom stock, in dark hoppy ales and Bisto granules, before I decided to just let the flavours speak for themselves and stop trying to imitate the actual beef. The result is crisp but tender, dry enough, but with a juicy bite and a tangy, salty, peppery familiarity, something that’s equally at home in a toasted white bagel as a hunk of dark, sweet rye bread.