00:00 Take a look at this gorgeous concoction of meat and cheese, lettuce, tomato on a
00:08 hero roll. Elbows at 10 and 2 when you eat.
00:13 I just want to be alone with me and my sandwich. It's that good. Hi my name is
00:22 Mr. Foodtastic, Chef Jamoke Jackson, former chef for J. Cole, Lady Gaga, and
00:28 Gayle King and today I'm going to be making a New York style chopped cheese
00:32 sandwich. This is something that I would make for Lady Gaga and crew all the time
00:37 on tour. We all know that Lady Gaga's a New Yorker and so whether we were
00:48 traveling in London or Tokyo this was one of those dishes that gave her and
00:52 crew a little taste of home. It all starts with the bread and that is a hero
00:57 roll. Now you might call it different things where you're from but in New York
01:00 it's called a hero roll. Why? Because it comes to the rescue for all of your
01:06 sandwich needs. We're gonna slit this open so we're not gonna cut it all the
01:13 way through because we want to load this sandwich up so that you can eat it like
01:17 this. All right let's add our butter in to a heated skillet. The more butter the
01:22 better. More butter, more fat, more flavor. Now I'm gonna take it I'm just gonna
01:27 press it down here and you don't need to bother with it just let it work. Let it
01:31 toast, let it brown, give it about three four minutes. Working for Lady Gaga was
01:36 probably one of the most exciting experiences that I've ever had. I got to
01:41 travel around the world. I got to see all parts of the world from Tokyo to
01:46 Australia to Poland. It was a full-on life experience. It's something that I'll
01:51 never forget from sourcing ingredients in Amsterdam to having to figure out
01:58 language translations in Tokyo. It was really an experience that I'll never
02:04 forget from a chef standpoint and from a cultural standpoint. I'm gonna turn this
02:08 butter around a little bit just so we get a nice kind of even toast. So let's
02:12 take a peek and see what we got. Nice. We've got our bread nice and toasted.
02:18 We're gonna start with our lettuce. I like to take the lettuce cut it right
02:22 down the middle. Makes it easy to cut and manage. I turn it on the side and to get
02:28 a nice chop you always want to grip down make sure that we're not cutting our
02:32 fingers. Get a nice shred on it. Turn it back and honestly that's all you need.
02:42 You can use the rest for a salad. So I like to use a serrated knife for my
02:47 tomatoes. It makes for a nice clean cutting and the serrated knives gives a
02:52 nice fluid simple cuts to the tomato. Take about half of a tomato. That should
03:00 fill up one sandwich. This is so therapeutic. Lastly we're going to cut up
03:05 our onion which is going to be cooked with our meat. Take the end off the top
03:10 part and we want to keep the bottom intact because we are going to be dicing
03:14 this onion. So we either if you're doing half you can definitely cut it down the
03:19 middle but keep that core part on. It's gonna be make it easy for our dicing. I'm
03:24 gonna run my knife along the back and pull off the outer skin before I start
03:29 to dice. I remember the first time I met Lady Gaga. She's so humble and she is so
03:35 friendly. Like I really I was kind of nervous to meet her. I don't get nervous
03:40 meeting celebrities very often but she was one of those people that you know
03:44 you kind of love the music and you really you wanted to be as cool as
03:49 possible when you met her. She was very gracious. She greeted me with a hug which
03:54 is wonderful and then she was she was very talkative. She you know asked where
04:00 I was from, what I like to do, why I was a chef. She asked me all these things and
04:05 we probably talked for a good 10-15 minutes when I first met her. Now that
04:09 we've prepped our vegetables we're gonna move over to the star of the show, the
04:14 meat. First we're gonna preheat our pan and then add our butter in. Then we're
04:20 going to form our meat into kind of like a dome shape. We're gonna season it
04:24 generously with salt and pepper. We're gonna put it in. We're gonna press it
04:28 down to get a nice crisp bottom to our meat. I remember one time we were in
04:34 Amsterdam, one of my favorite places that we went on the tour and we had a
04:39 shortage. We would ship in ingredients that we needed sometimes and this
04:44 particular day we didn't have everything that we needed so it was a scavenger
04:48 hunt and this was before you could simply order things on a cell phone. So
04:53 we probably spent a good couple of hours scrambling around much like we were in a
04:58 competition to get food to get back in time because we had an early show that
05:03 day. I happened to finish everything kind of right on time. Gaga got her food.
05:09 Which was probably about 10 minutes late but it was still on time and we they
05:15 proceeded to have I think one of the better shows that they've ever had. It
05:18 was a, this was right around Thanksgiving so we're kind of ending the year
05:23 because we took a nice little break around the holidays. It was one of my
05:27 most memorable and challenging experiences as chef. I often call chefs
05:32 problem solvers and to solve that problem and to keep the tour running
05:36 is one of my favorite experiences. So next we're gonna flip the meat over.
05:40 We're gonna dump the onions in and we're going to start chopping. This is one of
05:46 the most fun parts, the chopping. This absolutely comes together very fast. One
05:51 of the things you don't want to do is overcook the meat. This is why I actually
05:54 use butter because I want to keep it nice and rich, full of fat and I like to
05:59 go until it's just starting to be completely brown. A little drop of pink
06:04 in it is totally fine but you bring your onions together until they're
06:08 translucent, give it three or four minutes and then you're done and ready
06:12 to add the cheese. Also often on tour after the show they would have these
06:18 kind of meetups. This is where the band and the back of the house got to kind of
06:22 mingle together. The only times that they kind of interacted the most was either
06:27 after the show or when they were eating. So this was like a great opportunity for
06:33 everybody to kind of come together. You either have your favorite people that
06:37 you hang out with. Gaga would also join, come to the after parties when she had the
06:42 energies. We'd go all over to different places. This is where they're kind of red
06:47 carpet treatment would come out because all you had to say was you were part of
06:50 the Monster Bar Tour and you would get kind of the VIP treatment. It's a very
06:54 fun experience. You got to see a lot of kind of local spots or even spots that I
06:59 think the local people didn't have access to because they would set it up
07:03 special for her and the crew. So now it's time to add the cheese and get the
07:08 melty magic going. I'm gonna add the cheese right on top, turn the heat off
07:12 and let it melt down. Then we're going to add it to our hero roll. So first we're
07:17 going to add our mayo. We're going to slather both sides of the hero roll.
07:22 After that we're going to add our ketchup same way on both sides. After our
07:28 ketchup we are going to add in our meat with our cheese. Then we're going to add
07:33 our lettuce. Finally we're going to top it with our tomatoes. As we wrap up one
07:38 of the things that I love so much about the tour was just kind of the access
07:43 that it gave me. I remember having this pass that I would flash in front of all
07:48 the security people and just be able to watch the tour after a long day of
07:53 cooking. I saw the tour everywhere. I saw it expand. I saw the set go from 45
08:00 minutes to over an hour and a half. It was kind of one of the most magical
08:04 things ever from a concert standpoint and having an appreciation for music and
08:09 food. This was an all-encompassing event and I loved it.
08:14 This thing is huge. I can't eat it all so I'm going to cut off a little piece to
08:22 enjoy now. Take a look at this gorgeous concoction of meat and cheese, lettuce,
08:30 tomato on a hero roll. Elbows at 10 and 2 when you eat.
08:37 I just want to be alone with me and my sandwich. It's that good. The cheese, the
08:46 meat, everything is perfect. Perfectly balanced. The sauce complements it well.
08:51 I'm happy. And you could see why after being on Lady Gaga's tour, the Monster
08:56 Ball tour, after months of traveling to have this dish, meat, cheese, the
09:01 quintessential New York dish, how this is the perfect taste of home. I love this
09:07 sandwich. I really hope you guys give this a shot at home. It's a super simple
09:11 sandwich to make. You can find recipes like this and others at delish.com. You
09:17 can find me at Mr. Foodtastic on all social media. I hope to catch you in the
09:21 kitchen again soon.
09:24 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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