One of several major roadfood specialties from Buffalo, New York (see also sponge candy, Charlie Chaplin, loganberry juice, and, of course, Buffalo wings), beef on weck in its proper form always will remain parochial. That is because proper form requires that a roast be expertly hand-carved for every sandwich. Ray Schwabl, whose family tavern may have been the first place to serve beef on weck, well over a hundred years ago, explained that no slicing machine can navigate through the subtle topography of a roast’s fibers with the finesse of a master carver with a good knife. “Beef on weck will never experience the same popularity as Buffalo chicken wings,” he said when we interviewed him about ten years ago. “I could teach a chimp to make wings in twenty minutes, but it takes me a year to train a man to slice roast beef.”
Beyond perfectly cooked and expertly sliced beef, the weck part of the equation cannot be streamlined. From the German word Kummel, meaning “caraway seed,” a kummelweck, or simply weck, looks vaguely like an ordinary hard roll spangled with caraway seeds and coarse salt. But it is not ordinary. A correct weck is delicate, its freshness evanescent. Lightness is crucial because the roll cushions, but must not compete with, the extreme delicacy of the sliced beef. On the other hand, it cannot be too fragile, for the customary way of assembling the sandwich is to immerse the top half in pan juice, just long enough for it to start to soften, before setting it atop the beef.
The salt and caraway seeds on a kummelweck roll are a beautiful match for rare roast beef and its juices.
“It is surprisingly difficult to maintain the kummelweck,” says Dale Eckl of Eckl’s Beef & Weck Restaurant. “You can’t ship them or store them because they stale so fast and the salt crust will break down if is exposed to humidity.”
According to Charlie Roesch, proprietor of Charlie the Butcher’s Kitchen and third-generation Buffalo butcher, it was beer that inspired the invention of beef on weck. He believes that, sometime in the 1880s, a now-forgotten local tavern owner (perhaps a Schwabl) decided to offer a sandwich that would induce a powerful thirst in his patrons. He had plenty of coarse salt on hand for the pretzels he served, so he painted a mixture of the salt and caraway seeds atop some hard rolls, cooked a roast and sliced it thin, and piled the meat inside the rolls. As a condiment, he served hot horseradish. To slake the thirst these sandwiches induced, beer sales soared. And Buffalo’s passion for beef on weck—served with fiery fresh horseradish and accompanied by schooners of cold beer—was born.