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...