How to make a philly cheesesteak sandwich

Please note: what follows in not a recipe, or a how to, for making a cheese steak. If you want one of those, you need to go visit the greater Philadelphia metro area (you should go there any ways, it's a pretty cool, and historic, city). What I write here is simply the best approximate I have found using materials available in my area some 1000 miles from Philadelphia.

First, you start with a source of meat. My brother is correct, Steak-umms create the wrong type of greasy reprocessed meat flavor/texture. If you know a butcher who is willing to finely slice some steak for you, that would be perfect. Unfortunately the minimum wager behind the meat counter at Hy-vee that most of use get our meat product from can't help with this, which is why I am glad that I found Farmland's "philly style shaved beef," the meat comes in an easy to use, pre-potioned format and as the name of the product implies, it is made of strips of shaved beef, not beef puree like Steak-umms.

The second, and harder to find, part of the sandwich is the bread. The bread is also the most important part of the sandwich, it needs fluffy and chewy, and it needs to be able to absorb all of the delecious grease that will come out of your steak bits.

Once again, a compromise has to be found. If you really want an authentic sandwich, you need to find the correct recipe for hoggie rolls and then make it fresh. For those of you that simply want a close approximation, the best substitue I have found are Hy-vee Bakery's brat rolls. They're chewy and fluffy and they're made for brats, so you know they can absorb grease. They're nowhere near the size of the real thing, but once again, this is simply a substitue for the real thing.

Now that you have those two parts, all you just have to do is fry up some onions (I refuse to beleive that you can have too many onions). Throw you meat into the pan, mix it around with the onions. Throw some cheese on top, throw on the bread untill the cheese begins to melt, and then pull off the sandwiches and revel in the awesomeness.