Recipe Summary
- Prep Time: 10 Minutes
- Cook Time: 15 Minutes
- Total Time: 25 Minutes
Ingredients
- 1lb ground chicken
- 1/3 cup yellow onion
- 2 tomatoes, sliced
- 1 bag shredded iceberg lettuce
- 4 slices white american cheese
- 2 hoagie rolls
- 1tbsp oregano
- 1tbsp salt
- 1tsp pepper
Instructions
- Dice the yellow onion and add to skillet greased with olive oil. Cook on medium heat for 2-3 minutes until onions have caramelized.
- Add in ground chicken, cook until thoroughly cooked, about 4-5 minutes.
- Separate meat into two piles, top each pile with two slices of white american cheese. Cover with lead to let cheese melt, 1 minute
- Once cheese has melted, add bread on on top to steam for about 2 minutes.
- Remove bread from skillet. Using a metal spatula, remove the chicken and melted cheese from the skillet and place each pile on one hoagie roll. Top with lettuce, tomatoes, olive oil, and oregano. Serve immediately.
You can’t get a good cheesesteak in Texas. It just doesn’t exist, not like they make them in Philly.
I lived in New Jersey, south Jersey specifically, for about four years and experienced some of the best italian food of my life. Cheesesteaks are great but I fell in love with chicken cheesesteak hoagies.
It takes the great parts about a cheesesteak, makes them slightly healthier by subsituting chicken for beef, and then adds hoagie ingredients on top.
The key to a good cheesesteak or hoagie is the bread. Just like the key to a good taco is fresh homemade tortillas, the best way to have a cheesesteak is with fresh hoagie roll. In Philly that means Amoroso’s.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get those in Texas, so I picked up a fresh hoagie roll from my local grocery store. It’s not the same but it was the best I could do.
Start by cooking the onion in a skillet before you add in the meat. This helps give the chicken some flavor and ensures the skillet is hot enough for when yoiu add the chicken in.
For the meat we chose ground chicken because it was easy, but to do it right you have to slice your own. There’s a cool trick you can do with a food processor.
Most food processor’s have a slicing attachment, so cook up some chicken and run it through the slicing attachment on your food processor to get that super thinly sliced cut.
That works for making regular cheesesteaks too!
For the cheese I selected Boar’s Head White American Cheese. This is a favorite of mine from when I grew up, there’s nothing better than Boar’s Head. Don’t skimp out on the store brand stuff here, trust me.
The secret is to melt the cheese on top of the meat while it’s in the skillet. We put a lid on top for a minute because it melts really fast!
When that’s done you can put the bread on top and steam that for another minute or two. This is 100% worth it because it makes the inside of the bread soft but the outside stays a little crunchy.
For the lettuce we used bagged shredded iceberg lettuce but you could just as easily shread your own. We grow our own tomatoes in a backyard garden so we used two of those.
You can’t beat homegrown tomatoes!
Our recipe yielded easily enough for 4 sandwiches. We made two for dinner and then kept the leftovers to make another two the next day.
This was a great recipe that brought me back to living in South Jersey again, even if I took a few creative liberties with the recipe now that I live in Texas.