Reuben Bowls
This is one of my favorite sandwiches on the planet so I was a little hesitant when I was asked to make this no-bread Reuben alternative. I’m glad I did, it was fantastic, and it must be pretty popular because I started seeing people “like” the original post several times on the Facebook. I’ll rundown my take on this classic sandwich.
First off, we decided to do this for a weekend and we had an extremely busy day planned so I actually prepped all my ingredients while sipping on some coffee that same morning. When it came time to make and eat dinner after a really busy day it took me all of 20 minutes to throw this together. It was really great to have a home cooked meal that felt like it took a lot longer than it actually did. We had so much leftover that I put some of it into the meal containers for weekday lunches too.
Here is the recipe that I generally followed as a guideline.
This is what I would call a hot dish, aka, casserole. Its a bunch of ingredients thrown together in a pan and served with a large spoon onto your plate. I would normally say lets pair this with a rye bread stick but at that point your defeating the purpose and might as well just eat the sandwich. If your looking for low carb, this is a really great alternative to a Reuben sandwich.
As I stated earlier, I grabbed all of my ingredients from the fridge one morning and had a very large stainless steel bowl I used as a staging area for the prepped items. I also used several ceramic ramekins for the smaller items.
I purchased deli corned beef as I didn’t want to spend the day slow cooking a whole corned beef. If you have the time I would recommend this method as I am sure that would send this recipe right over the top in tastiness. I just had the butcher give me thick slices for this recipe. I then cut it into 1/2″ strips and placed it in the bowl.
For all of the veg I followed the recipe pretty closely and chopped and prepped as directed. Just use small pickles. . . if you can find cornichon more power to you but its not going to make much difference; I used little pickles.
Lightly toast your seeds on the stove top in a small saute pan. Keep an eye on them, you don’t want to burn them up. The seeds are a pretty important aspect of this dish. They provide that rye flavor without the carb heavy bread being included.
I wish that I would have taken a picture of my prep bowl. it was literaly one large stainless bowl with the veg and met in the bottom, and then on top of all of that were several different ramakens with other small ingredients in them. I then wrapped the top of the bowl with some plastic wrap and placed it into he refrigerator for the evening meal.
The dressing was pretty straight forward. I used a plastic squeeze bottle so that I could just squeeze the dressing on the dish after it was cooked.
Later that day I simply pulled the bowl out of the fridge and used a cast iron pan to cook the ingredients on my stove as directed. It took me 20 minutes to cook dinner and tasted like I had spent hours on it.
Conclusion
I was not optimistic about a bread-less Reuben sandwich but I was proven wrong. This provides all the same flavor as the sandwich without the carbs. The entire family loved it and is already being requested as a favorite. Its likely going to hit the rotation again. I think next time I will definitely spend the time to slow cook a brisket as the protein source.