Thursday, November 23, 2017

Happy Thanksgiving!

The turkey roulade was a success. I have other pictures, but I think my cell-phone camera's lens was smudged, so the images all look fuzzy. Here are two pics of the roulade, followed by a pic of yours truly. The pic below looks a lot like a vomiting larva.


Making the roulade was actually kind of fun. I took the turkey-burger patties, mushed them together, mixed them with salt and pepper, then laid out the meat in the bottom of a large, rectangular baking dish lined with cling film. On top of that, I layered the prosciutto, followed by the roulade's filling, which was a mixture of spinach, mushrooms, crushed pine nuts (crushed in my mortar and pestle! my first time using it!), crushed garlic (mortar and pestle strike again!), sea salt, pepper, shredded Gouda, some thyme, and a good quantity of olive oil. Because white-meat turkey has a dangerous tendency to dry out in the oven, I deliberately included the above ingredients to up the fat content of the roulade. This turned out to be a good move: everyone at the office thought the turkey was tender and juicy. I also layered the outside with bacon, thereby adding another source of moisture. I didn't have a clear idea as to baking time, but for a one-kilo roulade, the baking time turned out to be around an hour at 200°C, with the final 20 minutes spent using the top burners of my oven to broil the bacon.

I based the roulade on several porchetta recipes I had encountered on various recipe websites and on YouTube, but in the end, the creation was my own. Below is a pretty decent shot of the roulade's cross section:


I brought too much food, of course, but everyone got stuffed, and the turkey—all 2 kg of it—is almost gone. This was my first roulade; it wasn't perfect, but it was pretty damn good, and I'm now inspired to try making other roulade-ish dishes in the future.


UPDATE: almost all of the food sold out when two-thirds of the staffers told me they wanted to take some food home with them. I have very little left—just some gravy and some choux rouge, and that's it. Today was amazing: this was the largest amount of food I've ever cooked at one time. It took two trips to bring all the food to the office, but in the end, all that effort paid off, and my reputation as the office's resident cook remains secure.





2 comments:

  1. Looks tasty!

    (And the photos didn't look all that fuzzy to me.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well done! The effort involved paid off. Best part is you enjoyed doing it. Win-Win for everyone!

    ReplyDelete

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