Polish · Main
Zrazy Zawijane
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, on a drift of smoke.
Ingredients
- 800 g beef topside, in 8 slices about 1 cm thick
- 3 tbsp sharp brown mustard, musztarda sarepska for preference
- 150 g smoked bacon, in thin strips
- 2 ogórki kiszone, salt fermented cucumbers, in batons
- 2 onions, halved and thinly sliced
- 30 g plain flour for dusting
- 60 g lard or clarified butter
- 700 ml beef stock
- 2 bay leaves and 4 allspice berries
- 1 tsp dried marjoram
- 150 ml soured cream
- Salt and black pepper
The skills inside
FermentationKeeping the cooking liquidKnife cuts: dice, julienne, biasThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Beat each slice between sheets of plastic out to 5 mm, working from the centre outward so the fibres stretch instead of tearing.
- Spread with mustard, season, lay on bacon, cucumber batons and a little raw onion, then roll along the grain and tie or pin closed.
- Dust the rolls in flour and brown them hard in the lard on every side, lift them out, and soften the rest of the onion in the same fat until sweet and tan.
- Return the rolls, pour in stock to come two thirds up, add bay and allspice, cover, and hold at 90C (194F) in the oven for 2 hours until a skewer meets no resistance. 120 min
- Lift the rolls out, reduce the liquor by a third, whisk in the soured cream and marjoram off the boil, and slide the rolls back to warm through.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Zinfandel (old-vine)
- Also Right
- Shiraz or Malbec
- From the Taps
- Smoked porter
- Zero-Proof
- Cherry cola, honestly
Barbecue’s sweet-smoke wants jammy fruit that shakes hands with the sauce; dry austere reds argue with sugar and lose.
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