book 3 p376 rec# 273 To cook stuffed eggs

            It seems tradition at this point to serve filled eggs of some sort at every feast and who am I to buck a tradition like that. These are definitely a twist on it though. Baked in butter and dressed with a sauce made of orange juice i had my doubts but yet again Scappi did not disappoint me.

            Cook eggs as in the previous recipe [hard boil them], but they should be firmer. Shell the, split them in two lenthtwise, and dig out the yolk. Grind it in a mortar with sugar mixed with raisins, pepper, cinnamon, raw egg yolk, a little salt, orange juice, and beaten mint, marjoram, and burnet. Fill the hollow of the egg white with that mixture, then put the eggs, with their filling upwards, into a shallow, lidded tourte pan with enough butter to half cover them. Cook them with fire under and above them. When the mixture has set, serve them dressed with a sauce made of verjuice, sugar, orange juice, and cooked raisins. Alternatively, when they are slightly undercooked, pour over them a sauce made of ground almonds with a little breadcrumbs and raw egg yolks moistened with verjuice, sugar and cinnamon. Bring everything to a boil together, tasting it to see that it is both bitter and sweet. Then serve it rather hot with the sauce over it and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

            As I am not providing you with the recipe previous to this one (at least not yet) . I have made a note that the eggs should be hard boiled.

My experiment was tasty, even with the absence of the burnet. It is just damned hard to find here and with the weather having set it I didn't get a plant in time but I have a lead on where to get one.

I started with 9 eggs (one didn't survive the boiling and for those outside of Germany, eggs come by the 10). 

I peeled them and cut them, dug out the yolk and placed it in a bowl. My mortar would not have been large enough. I added 3 Tbsp of OJ 2 raw yolks 1-1/2 Tbsp of sugar 1/8 cup of raisins (actually sultanens as I could not find raisins in the store and was out at home) I cut them with a pair of kitchen shears to make them small. I used about 1 tsp each of salt and pepper, 1/2 tsp each of cinnamon and marjoram and only a scant 1/4 tsp of mint (not wanting to overpower anything).

For the size pan we used (not sure how big) we used about 125 gm of butter melted. This was just about enough to half cover them.

Because the oven was occupied by our other experiment we placed the eggs on the middle rach at 180 for about 15 min. When checked we discovered this was not sufficient time at this level in the oven so we switched places of the experiments placing the eggs closer to the bottom. This done they were there 15 more minutes.

We dressed them at the table with plain orange juice as I realized that I left my verjuice at home and had not even remembered to pick up grape juice!

All in all tasty! Will need less time in a hotter oven and I think the burnet will do interesting things for the flavor but like mint will have to be used prudently.



All in all life is good!

Book 2 page 141 rec# 14 To make stuffed bresaola and croquettes from loin of beef

This is my recipe that I thought I had gotten then realized I made a reading error.

Original:
     Get the leanest part of the loin and cut it up into slices a hand in length, four fingers wide and a knife's spine thick. Beat them on both sides with the spine of a knife, splash them with a little vinegar, and sprinkle them with fennel flour, ground salt, pepper and cinnamon, piling them up on top of one another for two hours so that they absorb that mixture better. Cook them on a grill with a slice of fat salted bacon on each one: that is done to keep them from drying out. When they have been turned two or three times and you see them coloring, they are served soft like that with orange juice over them, or else a sauce made of  vinegar, sugar, cinnamon and cloves. If you do not want to cook those brisavoli on the grill, fry them in rendered fat or lard.
     Should you wish to make stuffed croquettes, as mentioned, with a knife pound some of the loin with the same ammount of pork fat and proscuitto, adding in two cloves of garlic, egg yolks, a little cheese, pepper, cinnamon, beaten parsley, mint and wild thyme. With that mixture stuff the bresavoli , rolling them up like waffer coronets and puttinh them on a spit with a thin slice of pork fat and sage leaves between each one. When they are almost done and taking on a little colour, put them into a pot with a little broth, must syrup, verjuice and raisins, and finish cooking them with the pot stopped up. When they are cooked they need to be served with their sauce over them. You can also serve them without stewing them, letting them finish cooking on the spit; but they can also stew in a pot or braise in the oven, and cook in all the ways that the above tenderloin is done.

The underlined passage is the one I am refering to as my "mistake". Somehow when I read it I sort of glanced over it and intrepreted it as to treat the meat the same way as above and that is to beat it with the spike of the knife. When I got to the eggs I did wonder why and how. How would raw yolks work in this recipe. I didn't need to bind anything together. The fat would bind the proscuitto and that would be fine. Then I remembered an English recipe that had called for hard boiled egg yolk and that made sense so I went with it. At that time I mixed pork fat (bacon grease) with the hard boiled egg yolk and spices to create the "stuffing", I layed the proscuitto thinly cut onto the meat and rolled it up. They wrere tasty! People loved them and I never knew anything was wrong. Until...

I re read the recipe to prepare for the upcoming feast, just to refresh my memory and there is was like huge neon letters! I was an idiot! At least in my mind. What I had missed was that you chop up someof the loin, which is lean so you add fat and use the egg yolk to bind it. It made so much sense and was so much clearer! So of course I had to try it out.

What I did was to take 500 gm of ground beef from the store this already contains fat so I did not add extra. I bought 2 packages of rouladen with 3 in each package. I mixed the beef with the spices and divided the mixture into 4 portions. To two of them I added mozzerella just cutting a fresh ball into quarters and using 1/4 of a ball in 2 of the portions. To the other 2 portions I added Parmesan cheese 1 Tbsp per portion. I set rolled 2 rouladen with the mozzarella and 2 with the parmesan (I was cooking for someone who is jewish so no proscuitto). With the other 2 portions (1 mozzerella, 1 parmesan) i added in proscuitto. we used toothpicks to mark what was what for tasing.

Results:
They all tasted pretty good. With Proscuitto was better than without and the consensus was that the parmesan was better than the mozzerella. Another note was that they did need more fat so I will try with a higher fat content ground beef.

So my next try at the recipe will look like this.

For 8 rolls
500 gm high fat ground beef (85%)
4 Tbsp grated Parmesan cheese
2-3 cloves of garlic crushed
1 tsp ground pepper
1 tsp salt
2 Tbsp parsley                                                                 All spices are to taste
1/4 - 1/2 tsp crushed mint
1/2 tsp thyme
6 thin slices of proscuitto chopped small

place 1/8 of mixture onto the roulade, patting it down even and flat.
roll.
use a toothpuck to hold it shut or place seam side down.
place in a pre heated (180 deg celcius) oven
cook for about 20 - 25 min depending on thickness of the rolls.

I am still just "winging " the sauce :)

The second recipe later...

Can't belive I missed THAT!

OK, while reviewing my recipes for the upcoming event I was re reading and transcribing and making a shopping list when a lightening bolt struck. I had read something completely wrong! lol... In my recipe for the bresaola (which I have not yet posted), I read a sentence that led me to believe that I needed to use hard boiled egg yolks in my filling. Upon re reading the passage I realized that I needed to stuff them with meat and raw yolks where the binding agent! lol... So, off to the drawing board. I hope to bust out a batch of them tomorrow night so I can see how they taste! Wish me luck.