Using a Food Processor to Slice Steak for Cheesesteaks!

How To Slice Steak With A Food Processor
For Authentic Philly Cheesesteaks

Homemade cheesesteaks are probably one of the greatest things I’ve ever made. Cheesesteaks also work well for tailgating. My only gripe with the whole process is that I find the slicing of the meat to be extremely tedious. I use one of the low end Costco meat slicers, which cost about $100, and it has been in use for about 4 years now. The way I normally do it is to freeze a whole ribeye roast (extremely expensive) for about 30 minutes to 1 hour and then slowly slice the meat as thin as possible. After about 6-7 pounds of meat has been sliced you can hear the poor slicer motor struggling to make the final cuts. This process takes at least an hour and afterwards all the raw meat needs to be cleaned out of each component of the meat slicer, most of which aren’t dishwasher safe.

There has to be a better way.

I knew that my Cuisinart food processor had a slicing attachment, but I never thought about using it for meat. I’ve only used it for onions, actually.

Most food processors come with both shredding and slicing attachments. The shredding attachment looks more like a cheese grater and the slicing attachment looks like one big sharp curved blade (see above).

My local grocery store had sirloin steaks on sale. Normally I use whole ribeye roasts for making homemade cheesesteaks. The reason I always go with ribeye is that the real Philly cheesesteak companies, at least Jim’s Steaks (which I consider the best), use ribeye. The only problem with this is that each steak sub roughly costs about $10 when you factor in how much it costs to buy a whole ribeye roast. Even from Costco each roast can be as much as $50-60 each. A cheesesteak tailgate might cost about $120 in meat alone! Craziness!

I put the sirloin steaks in the freezer for about 25 min. This helps with slicing. I used the 2 mm slicing blade and dropped the meat into the top of the food processor. You can use any size blade you like as long as you are happy with the thickness of each slice.

Wow! 20 seconds later all of the meat was sliced almost identically to how the meat turns out after using the meat slicer.

I placed all of the sliced meat on a hot griddle with a few tablespoons of oil and after about 10 minutes I had perfect meat for cheesteaks. Slicing steaks with a food processor is a really easy way to make cheesesteak meat. All of the slicing components of the standard Cuisinart food processor are dishwasher safe, so I put them right in the dishwasher after rinsing them with some hot water to remove the larger pieces of meat that were left behind.

Also of note, this is the first time I made cheesesteaks using cheap sirloin steaks. I was extremely surprised that I could barely tell the difference from the normal ribeye. Ribeye roasts are significantly fatty, which makes the meat taste fantastic when cooked on a griddle. I also end up wasting a lot of the ribeye roast since I usually discard the larger pieces of fat. The sirloin steak was much leaner and to accommodate for this, I simply added oil to the griddle. The meat was also seasoned with salt and pepper.

This was a damn good cheesesteak. Normally I’m all about the “fake cheese” Cheese Whiz, along with thin sliced onions, but for this experiment I went with simple onions and peppers (also sliced on the food processor using the same blade) and provolone cheese. It was a winner! It was also dirt cheap with minimal cleanup.  Using a food processor to slice steak for cheesesteaks is a time saving winner!