What Types Of Bread Hold Up Best With Roast Beef Sandwiches?

Hearty, flavorful, and absolutely packed with protein, roast beef sandwiches are beloved around the world. However, all types of roast beef sandwiches have one thing in common: sturdy bread.

If you pick the wrong bread, you risk your sandwich falling apart before you've gotten the chance to enjoy it. It must be thick enough to hold up the ingredients, dense enough to not grow soggy from meat juices or sauces, but also have a flavor profile compatible with your protein's flavor. As such, there's one bread that stands above the others: the baguette. Its chewy crust acts as a shell, preventing the bread from falling apart under the weight of your meat or oversaturating from excess liquid. It's firm enough to support a T-bone's worth of beef, but has a fluffy interior that won't make chewing a chore.

A baguette's shape also offers customization options that traditional loaves may lack. You can slice it, leaving one side intact, to create something similar to a classic Italian beef sandwich, which helps prevent fillings from slipping out. Alternatively, you can cut it all the way through to make a grinder-style sandwich. Regardless of how you slice it, the baguette's neutral flavor, fluffy interior, and chewy exterior make it compatible with a wide range of toppings and condiments.

Since you don't have to worry about a baguette becoming soggy, feel free to sauce up your sandwich to your heart's content. You can even transform pot roast into a flavorful sandwich by spooning leftover juices onto the bread or creating a variation of Chicago-style gravy bread.

Baguettes also withstand short bursts of high heat well, so you can add an extra layer of protection against excess juices and sauces by melting cheese directly onto the sliced bread. Cheddar, provolone, and havarti all have the right moisture levels to melt properly, blanketing the interior of the baguette. While still hot, the cheese mingles with the roast beef juices and additional sauces, creating a thick, cheesy condiment that soaks into every nook and cranny of the bread's airy interior.

Cheese and beef make for a rich combination, so you may want to add something sharp to balance the flavors. Giardiniera, an Italian medley of pickled vegetables, is a staple in many beef sandwiches in Chicago and the Eastern United States. It's a dynamite combination with the neutral, wheaty flavor of a baguette that adds plenty of salt, acid, and clean vegetable taste that pairs beautifully with the savoriness of roast beef.