roast beef sandwiches with allspice onion jam

allspice+beef+onions

There are certain ingredients that, based on their most common usage, tend to be pigeonholed by most of us into a sweet or savory only world of recipes. However, the beauty of this is broadening my horizons and I find myself looking for specific flavor combinations for these ingredients that are opposite of what I’m used to. In this case, allspice falls into the sweet category for me – my most frequent applications typically involve holiday baking. Though, I do think this tends to be more an American thinking point of view – allspice is consistently used in savory applications in many different types of cuisines. So much more to explore!

What is allspice? Allspice is a dried, unripe berry of the Pimenta dioica tree, an evergreen native to the Greater Antilles, Southern Mexico, and Central America. It gets the name “allspice” because the flavors it gives are a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.

Fun Fact about Allspice – it was considered such a valuable commodity while the British ruled Jamaica that it was illegal for anyone to export a living allspice plant or it’s seeds outside of Jamaica! However, nature always wins because birds eating the berries spread allspice naturally to other countries they migrated to and the British lost their control over managing the supply of allspice.

this recipe

Grind your spices fresh? Look, I’m not here to be your judgy spice conscience and tell you that you always have to grind your spices right before you use them. Are spices at their most flavorful when a whole spice has just been ground? Yes. Can you still get good flavor from ground spices? Again, yes.

There are a few spices where I actually keep both whole and ground on hand because there are days when I have a few extra minutes and I don’t mind the extra work of washing my spice grinder. There are other days where all I’m trying to do is get food on the table and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Now, I will say that ground spices lose their potency over time so if you’re working off a two year old container of ground allspice, you might need to play with the amounts in this recipe to get the same level of allspice flavor. Whole allspice berries can keep their original potency up to 3 or 4 years so if you’re willing to go the whole berry approach, this will keep them fresher longer!

Guys, I’m now a little obsessed with this allspice onion jam. It’s highly possible this will make another appearance in a future post because I will be studying the rest of the allspice list to figure out what other ingredients pair with this combination! It’s a really simple jam with just a few ingredients but it tastes like a million bucks.

Caramelizing onions – I’ve never been sure why exactly but so many recipes say caramelizing onions takes 10-20 minutes. This is absolutely not true – if someone tells you that truly caramelizing onions takes less than 40 minutes, then they are full of something. Caramelizing onions is a low and slow process – rushing it by trying to cook them at a higher temp will give you cooked onions but not caramelized.

Onions are about 90% water and the caramelization doesn’t start to happen until after you’ve dehydrated them – anyone who has ever used a food dehydrator knows that it is a long cook at a low temp – caramelizing onions uses a similar dehydration process by cooking on low heat.

So yes, the caramelizing onions does take a while but they only require the occasional stir so it’s not an active 40+ minutes. Additionally, I love to make caramelized onions in as big a batch as can fit in my skillet and then freeze small jars of them. That way, I can have caramelized onions on demand without having to cook them each time. You can do the same thing with this jam but the recipe included here is a small batch so you can also keep it in your fridge for around a month.

The crazy thing is that the allspice onion jam played a trick on our taste buds when combined with the beef! In bites where the allspice in the jam was slightly stronger than others, it gave horseradish vibes with the beef. I can’t explain how multiple people tasted horseradish in their sandwiches when there was none in there – flavor pairing MAGIC. Given that horseradish and beef are frequently paired together, this clearly explained to me why allspice and beef were suggested as a pairing, even though my research into those two ingredients wouldn’t indicate that they share anything in common to trigger that kind of flavor trickery.

Annnnnd now let’s build this sandwich.

There’s a few elements here that are crucial to a sandwich but not as crucial to the flavor combination – Bread, cheese and mayo (for me, I know not everyone is a fan). That being said, there are a few notes on what NOT to put with this combo.

Bread – We’ve tried this with a few different bread variations, personally my favorite is just a good hearty white bread. Whole grain sourdough was a close second! Pretzel bread might be a fun option but that tends to be a little on the sweeter slide so may not let the jam shine quite as much. Rye bread – I need to check my bible!

Cheese – I chose havarti for all the tests on this for the reasons that it has a creamy texture without adding too much flavor to the sandwich. Don’t get me wrong, I think havarti cheese has a lovely flavor and it’s one of my favorite cheeses! However, the flavor is more delicate and doesn’t quite stand up to the allspice and beef here, which is exactly what I wanted. If you want to play with how a stronger cheese impacts the flavor, go for it!

Beef – deli sliced roast beef works perfectly here! By all means, if you want to cook your own london broil and slice it for this sandwich, who am I to stop you? But for me, deli sliced fit the bill.

Mayo – Man, I hate a dry sandwich. Absolutely kills a meal for me. The allspice onion jam definitely keeps this from being a dry sandwich but to balance the flavors, I only put it on one side of the sandwich. A light coat of mayo helped keep the dryness of the other piece of bread in check for me – can you leave it off? Yup.

allspice+beef+onions

Now it’s your turn! What would you make with this flavor combination? Tell me in the comments!

Print