 Meat Boy is back. Today we are going to make a chopped cheese, a sandwich specific to some of New York's bodegas which is kind of like a deli except you can get a bunch of household goods you might need. Classically the chopped cheese is just beef, onions and cheese on a roll with mayo and ketchup. You might see some people adding lettuce and tomatoes but realistically for some bodegas they can't have large volumes of fresh produce every day and there's also less of a margin of error on quality control for things like mayo and ketchup and this reminds me a little bit of a bacon egg and cheese with ketchup. That's what I used to always go to the bodegas for although I've never actually had a chopped cheese. Since we want to make a healthy high quality version of this we have to improve the nutrition of each individual ingredient therefore we have to make pretty much everything from scratch. That includes a mayonnaise and I saw some decent looking tomatoes and lettuce at the market so we might try a sandwich with that as well. For the chopped cheese component we have the best quality bread you can find in your supermarket or you can make it yourself. This isn't like a classic roll or hero that you'll see in the deli but bread alone which is an upstate New York bakery makes the best quality bread I've ever seen. It's literally just organic wheat flour water and salt which is a natural fermentation. Most other bread has additives and you certainly want to go organic on everything to remove the agrochemical the herbicide and pesticide concerns. So you know this is more like Italian bread but since it is the highest quality bread we have access to this is what I'm going to be using. The only thing we're not making from scratch is the ketchup which you can make it yourself but to me it's not really worth the effort and I don't really eat stuff like this. We have all purpose seasoning this is kind of like the little secret that they always put on the chopped cheese while they're making it. Of course we have an organic onion to chop up. Salt season the meat. We have some cheddar from Frankie's here aged meat raw milk cheese. Higher quality more nutrient dense tastes a little better. You have to grade it and do a little prep work but it's totally worth it and then I just have a tiny bit of finlandia butter to saute the onions and burgers and main component the beef we have grass-fed local ground beef from Frankie's for your aged meat. I'm going to form this into burger patties. This is two pounds so what I did was I cut this in half and then I cut this into quarters and then I had some nice four ounce patties that I just you know formed into balls and flattened out. Onto the mayonnaise we're using Wagyu beef tallow as the fat component which again we have on Frankie's aged meat. We're going to have some nice labels for this in the upcoming weeks. I have a local farm egg corn-free soy-free that's what you want. Tiny bit of mustard I don't really like this brand but someone recommends it and I still have a lot of it and for vinegar we're going to use apple cider vinegar and of course a little salt. So all we need to do for this mayonnaise is whip it up in the blender and then the tomato and the lettuce which again is optional. So I'm going to do all the prep work and then we will form the chopped cheese so that prep work involves forming the burgers into patties, grating some cheese, chopping up the onions, making the mayonnaise and slicing the tomatoes and lettuce. For the mayo we have to melt the tallow and if you guys haven't had our Wagyu tallow on Frankie's aged meat as you can tell it's really soft, it melts really easily, it has this deep nutty flavor and the reason for that is because the grass-fed Wagyu cattle have more mono unsaturated fat. While the tallow is melting we can add our other components so we want about half a teaspoon of mustard and most mayonnaise recipes call for a whole tablespoon of mustard which I think is way too much. One tablespoon of vinegar and one whole egg, hefty pinch of salt, tallow is melted. Alright so there we have our mayonnaise and if you have a hard time getting your mayonnaise to emulsify like if it keeps separating what you could do is just keep some tallow in the fridge or freezer or you could just even add some frozen or cold butter and that'll kind of bring it back together. So I got my pan on high heat, about a tablespoon of butter, get the onions going, well that's enough I'll put the mayo and ketchup on the spread, any organic ketchup from the supermarket's fine. Onions are starting to brown a little bit and we just want to sweat them so the pan's hot enough and you want to put in the dry burger patties. You want the patties to be dry and thin so it cooks quickly and that you get a nice brown crust on each side. Usually at the delis they'll have these big metal spatulas. That would make this a lot easier but I'm using a spoon. So flip this over so you got that nice brown crust for a flavor. I'm going to put a pinch of salt on the onions. Now I'm going to cut up the burger, press it down a bit and we'll season that with some salt and our all-purpose seasoning. If you don't want to buy this or make this it's onion, pepper, garlic, parsley, celery, seed, tomato powder, guar gum, basil, thyme, sage, oregano, coriander. So you know you could just take whatever spices you have in your cabinet, throw a little bit of each of them on this. Now sometimes they also use like chicken bouillon but what you could do instead of chicken bouillon is take a little bit of organic beef broth. That'll add a lot of flavor here and that'll also help us deglaze this pan. You got nice brown crust on that meat, nice caramelized onions. Now we'll lower the heat, take our raw American cheddar, a little more broth just to steam it up and then we'll cover this for maybe two or three minutes to melt the cheese. So that was maybe a minute and 30 seconds. I'm gonna kind of like cut this in half down the middle just so it separates a little easier and then we'll put this on to our bread. Nice thing about this it's messy you know you don't have to worry about the presentation being nice, you don't have to worry about getting a super nice caramelized crust on a burger patty or a steak which is kind of hard to do. Just get a little crust, chop it up, melt the cheese, throw it on the bread. While these cool off I'm gonna make two more sandwiches that we can use for the lettuce and tomato. One thing that makes these bodega special is the caramelization on their griddles so this second batch is probably gonna taste a little bit better. You can see we have you know all that brown crust and flavor on the burger and on the onions. So the second one has so much more flavor look at that deep brown caramelized juice at the bottom there. So I expect these to taste fairly different. No ketchup on the second one just mayonnaise because we're gonna do the tomato. I'll let this cool off for like two or three minutes then I'll put the toppings on. A couple slices of tomato, tiny bit of lettuce. Now I made four of these because this is gonna be my sister's lunch for like a week but let's try each of them. See how they turned out. Some of you might be wondering why I didn't toast the bread and I think just with the mayo and all the fat and the flavors you don't really have to toast the bread and you know in these bodegas in these delis they they don't toast the roll. Maybe they'll warm it up a little bit on the flat top but kind of if you want to. I'll tell you guys right out this was way too much work to make a bunch of sandwiches. It's taken me like two hours between the prep, the cooking, the cleaning, the ingredients but let's see how this tastes if it was worth it. I'm gonna go with the classic first with the ketchup and mayonnaise and I mean this is obviously way more meat than a typical chopped cheese but you know towards towards the back there's not as much meat but you know I think most of the time you'll see you know 60 70% bread as opposed to all this meat. I mean it's a cheeseburger. It's a good cheeseburger. I guess it's about as good as a sandwich it's gonna get but let's try the the lettuce and tomato. Now this looks a little more balanced and there's less meat on this one so this might be better. These are both very good sandwiches. I prefer the classic one with just the ketchup and mayo but only by a slight bit both very very very good. The adjustments I would make would be adjusting the ratios of meat to cheese to bread mainly less meat more cheese and on the tomato and lettuce you could also slice the tomatoes a bit thinner but overall very very very good. I think the only reason that I almost liked the lettuce and tomato one more was because we had all those flavors and that caramelization in the pan. So definitely try this out. I think this would be great to give to your family you know to introduce them to really really high quality ingredients and the difference that they can make in something like a New York Bodega classic and it's kind of funny because you know this sandwich you can charge $15- $20 for but those regular chopped cheese would be like three four or five dollars. So thank you guys for joining me today. Definitely let me know if you have any questions or suggestions down in the comments below. We'll be doing a live stream later on the channel Frank Tufano some live vegan critiques so I'm excited to join you guys there. Outside of that I'll see you guys for tomorrow's video.