All the nice Arby’s dudes were standing around the test kitchen and watching me as corporate executive chef Neville Craw placed two fat, stacked-to-the-rafters roast beef sandwiches in front of me. One was naked on its King’s Hawaiian bun, the other loaded with cheese, sauce and pickles.
I had to ask the question that I hadn’t considered in years: What exactly is this stuff? Is it roast beef?
“You taste it and tell me!” said Len Van Popering, the chipper and smiling senior vice president of product development and innovation.
That answer didn’t reassure me. That answer is what you say to someone to whom you’re trying to feed a plate of soylent green.
I opened up one of the sandwiches and examined one of the slick, thin slices. It seemed to have some recognizable meat fibers at one end, a bologna-like smoothness on the other and an edge that was darker and studded with bubbles, as if some liquid protein had coagulated.
I needed to know. Is this some sort of composite? Does it have any emulsifiers in it?
“It’s 100 percent beef!” Van Popering assured me. Behind him stood an old stainless steel machine with one red button on its surface, marked “Cheddar.”
I took a bite.
I should backtrack a bit. I was at the Arby’s corporate headquarters in Dunwoody to sample these sandwiches along with the Smokehouse Brisket — a limited-time offering that was just winding up a three-month guest role on American menus. (The company operates 3,400 restaurants in the U.S., Canada, Turkey and Qatar.) It might come back as a regular menu item. I suspect the occasional bozo such as myself trudges through the test kitchen as part of their market research.
The brisket was a surprisingly delicious business. I don’t know how it tastes prepared by franchise operators, but when Craw makes one by hand, you get nicely fat-streaked ribbons of 13 hour-smoked brisket piled with smoked gouda cheese and crisp fried onions between two sides of a toasted “brioche-like” eggy bun. One side was slathered with sweet barbecue sauce and the other with mayo.
“We used our consumer research to get those layers of smoky flavor,” Van Popering said. “We looked at dozens of different ways to bring it to life.”
Different cheeses, sauces and buns were tested before the company decided the layers of smokiness were just right. The meat, whole USDA Choice brisket flaps, is smoked at a single facility in Texas until it emerges with a pink smoke ring. It then ships out to the restaurants, where workers slice it and hold it warm. This isn’t the barbecue you’d go searching out, but if you stumbled upon it, say, along the interstate during a road trip or in a supermarket, you wouldn’t be at all displeased. I’d eat this again.
But then came the “roast beef” and an awkward moment. I’m not a “stick it in the pie hole and see how it tastes” kind of guy, but more of a “what precisely is this?” diner. I suppose I took the “it’s 100 percent beef” to mean it’s 99 44/100 percent cow, and without a bit more explanation about its fabrication, I wasn’t keen on taking more than one bite. It was salty, had a weird texture, and didn’t taste anything like roast beef.
I’m guessing half of the people reading this article are now in high dudgeon over my pulling the foodie snotbag card — particularly if you get the jones for an Arby’s roast beef sandwich once in a while. What right do I have to go all high and mighty on Arby’s? I can understand. I need a Sabrett’s hot dog from a cart once in a while, and it isn’t that different. But I’ve come to queasy terms with the occasional mass-market dog. This product, I don’t know.
I asked the good folks at Arby’s if they’d tell me more about the beef. They promised to follow up.
Still, I wanted to find out what I could. My first Internet search — “What is Arby’s roast beef” — pulled up this alarming definition from Ask.com:
“At Arby’s, the roast beef is delivered in a liquid form in a bag. Then employees will squirt the liquid onto a flat tray and bake at 350 degrees for a specified amount of time, which turns the liquid into a solid … made into a sandwich.”
That seemed worse than imagined. It also didn’t seem true. Sure enough, the “liquid meat” postulation has been long claimed and long refuted. While the company apparently remains tight-lipped, there were a few nonsourced claims that the roast beef is indeed constituted of chunks of whole meat held together with a beef paste and packed in a liquid baste in a bag. The product is then cooked in the bag at each restaurant.
There is one guerrilla video that appears to have been taken by an Arby’s employee and loaded onto YouTube. In it, the videographer shows that the product is actually soft enough to mold with your finger before it cooks.
After poking around the Internet for a couple of hours and not really coming up with anything definitive, I did get my answer from a communications and public relations manager at Arby’s:
“Arby’s classic Roast Beef is 100 percent beef, marinated with no vegetable or grain fillers. Our Roast Beef is slow roasted for about 3 hours in our restaurants every day, and then thinly sliced to order.”
In conclusion, it is all beef, which in the post “pink slime” era can mean a lot of things. So, good people of Arby’s, either invite me back to see how your roast beef is actually made or keep the Smokehouse Brisket on the menu. (It was gone from the Hammond Drive location.) That sandwich rocks.
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