How Do You Prepare Beef Roulades?

As the epitome of hearty home cooking, roulades are often served as a Sunday meat dish. If you want to prepare beef roulades, you should use the tender meat from the top side. Not quite as delicate, but also well suited are cuts from the lower shell and the hips. Other basic ingredients include bacon, pickles, onions, and spices. For six 180-gram beef roulades, you need three medium-sized pickles, two onions, 12 slices of streaky bacon, and three teaspoons of medium-hot mustard.

Start preparing the roulades by flattening the meat between two layers of cling film. Then quarter the gherkins lengthways and cut the onions into small strips. Next, season one side of the roulade slices with salt and pepper and brush them with mustard. Then place two strips of streaky bacon on each roulade. Put the gherkin sticks on the wide end of each beef roulade, cover the rest of the meat tongue with onion strips and then start to roll up the roulade tightly from the wide end.

There are various methods of fixing the roll: either wrap the roulades with kitchen twine or fasten them with wooden skewers (toothpicks). There are also special metal roulade needles or roulade clamps that are closed around the meat. The fixed beef roulades are now heavily salted and peppered on the outside and rolled in flour. The excess flour is knocked off.

For a flavorful roulade sauce, dice the carrots, celery, onions, and leeks into bite-sized pieces. Then put the roulades in a roasting pan and fry them once on all sides in heated oil. Then lift the roulades out of the roaster, add more oil and briefly roast the diced vegetables with tomato paste and spices while stirring. Deglaze the vegetable mixture with wine and let it boil down briefly. Now the roulades are put back into the roaster, and the sauce is filled with a little water or broth and seasoned again with pepper and salt.

Finally, the beef roulades have to cook in the covered roaster in an oven preheated to 180 degrees for around one and a half hours. When the meat is well cooked, pour the sauce through a sieve into a saucepan or puree the sauce with the vegetables. Boil the sauce again and then taste it with spices. If the sauce is not thick enough, thicken it with cornstarch dissolved in cold water before serving the roulades.