TH Cooks: Creamed Chipped Beef
A family tradition, a local favorite, a breakfast staple, all in one.
In case you haven’t noticed, I like breakfast food. To wit, I am a believer that any food can be breakfast food, from traditional to leftover to whatever. For the sake of conversation though, breakfast food has its own niche, its own genre. Among that genre is the local diner staple, creamed chipped beef, which is easy to make:
THE RECIPE FIRST
Ingredients:
· 4 tbsp. butter
· 4 tbsp. flour
· 1 quart whole or two-percent milk
· ½ lb. dried beef
· Black pepper to taste
Instructions: In a large skillet, melt butter. Slowly whisk in flour to make a roux. Slowly mix in milk, being sure to whisk continually so as not to have clumps of roux floating about in the mixture. Chop/shred/tear beef into smaller pieces and fold into the bechamel sauce. Season with black pepper. Cook on high heat until a boil and then reduce down to low and simmer until sauce is thick. Serve over starch of choice.
Creamed chipped beef, or shit on a shingle if you’re army folk, is a staple of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and thus a fixture on local diner menus in the Philadelphia area. The military grew fond of it because of how portable the materials are. Dried beef keeps for a good long time, and if you’re in an area where refrigeration is scarce and you need reliable protein, you will learn to love a dish that can be made with shelf-stable, virtually nonperishable ingredients. For as much of a bad rap as it gets from army brats, however, the creamed chipped beef I grew up with was rich, flavorful, almost decadent if you can believe it. I guess the difference comes when you’re able to use fresh ingredients and not shit like powdered milk or margarine.
Success at creating this dish starts with the ingredients. Methodology is interchangeable. My parents, for example, like to start off by sautéing the beef in the butter with the pepper first and then adding the flour and milk. My brain works in slightly different ways than nearly anyone else in my blood-related family, so I start off by carefully making a bechamel sauce and then adding in the beef and pepper afterwards. Their creamed chipped beef is incredible, and if you allow me to indulge my ego a bit, I think mine is too. The key is not trying to cut corners on the fat content. There’s absolutely no way you can make this dish “healthy” without compromising its integrity. Skim milk will not save you. The beef itself is already fatty and engorged with sodium. Make peace with yourself that you are treating yourself for one small meal.
Basically, once you get the ingredients down pat, everything else is a variable that you can set. Your simmer time will dictate how loose or thick the sauce becomes. What you put it over is wholly up to you. Some people prefer potatoes, a beautiful marriage of two breakfast plate staples. Other prefer their shingle to look like a shingle and stick to toast. I’ve seen this stuff put over bagels, pierogi, English muffins, and croissants. My wife likes it on a waffle. I’ve had it over glazed donuts before. That’s why this shit is so beautiful. It melds with and improves anything over which you wish to slather.
When I made it this past weekend, I my weapon of choice was the biscuit. I’ve made homemade biscuits before, and they came out alright. I prefer to do things as “from scratch” as possible, but sometimes, you want to let the factory do the work for you. The Lidl store brand version of those Pillsbury biscuits will certainly do the trick for those who either can’t bake or who choose not to. One word of advice though – you should definitely rub some butter on the baking pan before you lay them biscuits down so they don’t end up sticking.
Obviously, I like my creamed chipped beef. My wife likes it too. The big test was to see if the kids liked it. Both my son and daughter had a taste test before I served it up to them, and they gave me a big thumbs up and ate their entire plates after. My son made it a point to let me know he licked the plate clean. Passing down traditions is a big part of parenthood. The drive to have traditions embedded in the family is the portion of our species’ animal desire to pass down genetic material that got civilized and gentrified. I guess that’s where the euphoria at having your kids love what you cook, something you learned from your parents, comes from, and why it’s so indelibly strong.
For my family, creamed chipped beef is an intersection of so many different avenues of emotional response: the gussying up of a dish with ill-repute, the idea that it was passed down from my own parents, the local ties, and the sheer simplicity of its creation. I’m sure if I made a beef wellington that it would be just as satisfying, but while you can have beef wellington for breakfast, who in their right minds would want to go through all that work to make it first thing in the morning? That’s a fancy dinner dish. Breakfast is built to be made by groggy-eyed dads slurping coffee and doing as little work possible to give you as much flavor as possible. Maybe that’s the criterion for what makes something a breakfast food after all.
Photo Credits: Me, TH!