Saturday, October 3, 2015 – So a little bit of backstory: As far as cooking practice goes, I’ve invented my own recipes, cooked random episodes from Good Eats, cooked a chapter from Chef Watson, and practiced my knife skills. But what do these all have in common? I decided all those things. So I decided it was time to push myself out of my comfort zone and do things that I wouldn’t otherwise do.
I took some inspiration Chopped and pantry challenges. The game was my friends would pick 5 ingredients, and then I would pick 5 ingredients, and then I’d see what I can make with all of those ingredients and only those ingredients.
JJ got first pick (by being the first person to respond), and he picked bacon, sausage, beef, cheese, and BBQ sauce. My first thought was one of the “crustless pizzas” he’d been making, but I didn’t want to copy him. My second thought was to choose bread as one of my ingredients and make a sandwich, but that was too obvious. So I took a page from bacon mania and decided to make something crazy, but prolly wasn’t all that crazy.
The not-so-crazy idea I had was to wrap sausage in bacon in beef. Which as it turns out isn’t so crazy. After searching the internet for a few minutes, I quickly discovered rouladen, which was exactly what I was looking for. Then, after web searching some recipes, I figured out the basic structure. And then it was time to convert these recipes into something that would work with my ingredient list.
For my first three ingredients, olive oil, salt, and pepper were a must. How else would I season the meat before I sear it? My fourth ingredient, I decided to add a little bit of acid to help break down the meat (as is the standard technique for braising that I learned), so I decided to add some red wine vinegar. (I’m not sure how effective this was. More on this later.) For my last ingredient, I decided to use parsley as a garnish. I consider water to be a free ingredient.
Before I get to the recipe, I should warn you, this was the recipe I synthesized and the cooked. There are a few changes that I want to make to the recipe that I leave as notes at the end of my recipe, but they’re untested so I didn’t incorporate them into the actual recipe.
Ingredients
1 lb round steak (beef)
1/4 lb pork sausage
4 slices bacon
olive oil
salt
black pepper
1/2 cup water
1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
bbq sauce
shredded cheddar cheese
parsley, chopped
Instructions
- Pound beef out until it’s about 1/4 inch thick. Slice into two sheets.
- Shape sausage into long, thin roll. Roll sausage into one sheet of beef.
- Wrap beef rolls in bacon. Roll bacon-wrapped beef rolls into remaining sheet of beef. Secure
with toothpicks or string. - Preheat oven to 350 F.
- Cover beef rolls in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Briefly brown beef rolls in a saute pan over
high heat. Remove from heat. - Add water and vinegar. Cover and bake for 1.5-2 hours, or until beef is tender.
- Top with bbq sauce and cheese. Return to oven, uncovered, for 2 minutes, or until cheese is
melted. - Remove from oven. Let cool for 15-30 min.
- Garnish with chopped parsley and serve.
Serves 2-4
Notes
- The rouladen was kind of dry. Next time, I should use more liquid, less cooking time, wrap it in foil to get a better braise, or some combination of the above.
- The second layer of beef was a little excessive. Next time, I should do sausage, bacon, beef. For this, I think 9 oz of round steak would be about right.
- The rouladen could use more flavor on the inside. Maybe I should forgo the vinegar or the parsley garnish and add more herbs to the sausage. Sage seems to be classic. Fennel is distinctive Italian sausage flavor. Maybe also put some BBQ sauce on the inside layers.
The first try was a bit lacking. Like I said above, the rouladen was dry, and the inside layers were a bit bland. Still, it showed a lot of promise. I think if I make the adjustments in the notes, I’ll have some pretty delicious rouladen. Also, Good Eats had an episode about this, which I should prolly watch.
I won’t have time to do this anytime soon though, since I have 4 more ingredient challenges to do. But someday!
