While restaurants across the country have shamelessly co-opted the fiery hot chicken that carries this city’s moniker–making the Buffalo wing as ubiquitous as the cheeseburger–western New Yorkers have managed to keep an equally popular delicacy nicely under wraps.
It’s called a beef on weck, and the fact that Buffalonians have hidden this sumptuous creation from the rest of America for more than a century seems nothing short of a culinary crime.
To the uninitiated, the first obvious question is, “What is a `weck,’ and why would someone place beef on it?”
Weck is short for kummelweck, a kaiser-like roll with pretzel salt and a smattering of caraway seeds baked onto the top, soft and chewy on the inside, firm on the outside. It’s a roll created to perfectly hold a heaping pile of rare, juicy, thin-sliced roast beef. Add a dollop of fresh, clear-the-sinuses horseradish and you’ve got a sandwich few could ever forget.
“It’s got a long history,” said Charles “Charlie the Butcher” Roesch, owner of one of Buffalo’s better-known beef on weck establishments. “It’s been around a long time, a lot longer than the wings.”
Buffalo wings, according to local lore, were created in 1964 by Anchor Bar owner Teressa Bellissimo. Some of her son’s friends came in late one night hungry and she, having limited supplies on hand, used chicken wings, hot sauce, celery and blue cheese dressing to create the now-famous dish.
The origin of the beef on weck is less certain. What’s generally accepted is that in the late 1800s, a baker named William Wahr came from the Black Forest of Germany to Buffalo and brought with him a recipe for the salty kummelweck roll.
A local pub owner looking for a simple way to feed his customers seized on the roll, figuring the salt would make his patrons even thirstier. He split the roll, heaped on roast beef au jus and horseradish and a sandwich was born.
No one’s exactly sure who that pub owner was. Some say it was the founder of one of western New York’s oldest restaurants — Schwabl’s. But even the restaurant’s current owner, Gene Staychock, won’t make that claim definitively.
“There’s no documentation to prove it,” he said.
What’s certain is that people who live here–or natives who occasionally return–can’t imagine life without their weck-wrapped comfort food.
“It’s our own little specialty,” said Mary Elizabeth Myers, a local who lunched recently at Charlie the Butcher’s. “It’s not a glamor thing with food here, you just go with a sandwich and a beer.”
So why is it that hot wings can be had at nearly every bar and truck stop from Buffalo to Burbank, Calif., while the beef on weck–recently ranked one of the top 10 sandwiches in America by Maxim magazine–remains almost exclusively regional?
Apparently it’s the roll. Restaurant owners such as Staychock describe kummelweck as being “indigenous” to western New York, as though the bread inhabited Buffalo long before humans.
For inexplicable reasons, people outside the area seem incapable of re-creating the salty roll.
“I don’t care where you go in the country, no matter how good the bakery, they just can’t get it,” Staychock said. “You just can’t find them outside western New York.”
There’s at least one restaurant in downtown Chicago that makes a beef on weck–Keefer’s Kaffe. But while the sandwich–one of its best sellers–is tasty in its own right, it’s just not the same as the Buffalo version.
The main problem? Naturally, it’s the roll–a little too soft, not quite salty enough. A nice attempt, but it’s at best a distant cousin to the true kummelweck.
And rather than a straight-up shot of fresh and feisty horseradish, the Chicago beef on weck comes with a “horseradish creme fraiche,” which sounds awfully fancy for a meal meant to be served on a sheet of wax paper.
Clearly there’s no quick solution to the kummelweck conundrum. The rolls can’t be shipped from Buffalo bakeries–they last only a day, at best.
“They turn hard as rocks,” Staychock said. “You could drive a nail with ’em.”
So the true beef on weck appears destined to remain a creation enjoyed only by western New Yorkers and tourists passing through. A pity, but also, perhaps, appropriate.
With the widespread theft of the region’s Buffalo wings, outsiders’ inability to copy a sandwich of such stature is, to say the least, a fitting bit of kummelweckian karma.
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rhuppke@tribune.com
