Twenty-five or more years ago, I worked in the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond Virginia - a splendid marble castle of a hotel incongruously sitting amid brownstones and red bricks in a worn-out area of Richmond. I wasn't the chef, just a hungry night auditor coming to the end of my shift when they'd be rolling out the Sunday brunch buffet.
If I remember right, this was always on it. Or was it on the Sunday brunch line at the Madison Hotel in Washington, DC? Or the Berkeley, also in Richmond. Dang, I can't remember.What I do remember is that I was enchanted with the golden dough surrounding a meat center. (This isn't a great picture, but hopefully you get the idea.)
The following dough recipe is adapted from the 1976 Lou Pappas Elegant, Economical Egg cookbook. I recorded my changes so you would know you could use his ingredient list with good results.
Read the recipe all the way through before starting since I offer some variations.
Ingredients for no-knead brioche dough
1 envelope (or 2 1/4 tsp bulk) yeast
1/2 c. milk or almond milk, warmed until it is just above body temperature (Pappas uses water)
2 tbsp. honey (Pappas uses sugar)
2 1/2 c. bread flour (Pappas uses all purpose flour)
a pinch of salt
a teaspoon of garlic (my addition)
3 large eggs
1 stick room temperature butter (A reasonable kosher alternative is coconut oil, which, like butter, firms up when cool and melts when warm. A more frequently used kosher alternative I will not use is hydrogenated oil, which contains trans fats.)
Method for dough
Turn on oven to 100 degrees for a minute or two, then turn off. Using the bowl for your electric mixer (to save bowls), dissolve yeast in water and add honey. Put in the oven for about five or ten minutes to proof.
Mix the flour, salt and garlic together.
Take the bowl out of the oven, put on the mixer stand and add a little of the flour mixture. Add one egg and about a third of the butter. Start mixing on low so you don't spew flour all over the kitchen. Add a little more flour, another egg, more butter and mix some more. Keep doing this until the ingredients are all in the bowl. Then turn the mixer to high and beat the heck out of the dough.
Meanwhile, turn your oven back onto 100 degrees. After five minutes, turn both the mixer and the oven off and cover the dough, which will be too sticky and soft to look like it could ever be rolled out. It will be fine. Trust me on this one. Put it back in your oven with the oven turned off. Leave it in there 45 minutes.
Take dough out of oven, punch it down, recover it and put it in the refrigerator an hour or two. It will rise. Meanwhile, make the filling, below.
Ingredients and Method for Stuffing
A good quality steak, lamb chop or in a pinch, even liver, enough to make about 1 1/2 or 2 cups after slicing thinly. Preferably seared on the outside and very rare on the inside because you don't want it hard and dry after it cooks further inside the bread. A good way to ensure this is to sear a thick cut - 3/4-1" - when it is only very slightly thawed.
(To sear, get a cast iron pan smoking hot on high heat with nothing in it. Coat the steak on both sides with olive or peanut oil. Put steak in the pan, turn the heat down to medium-high, let sear for 2 minutes and then turn over with tongs and cook on the other side for 2 minutes. If the beef didn't get a nice browning on the first cooking, flip it over again for one more minute. Beef should have a crust on the outside but be practically mooing inside if it were still mostly frozen. Ordinarily you want the steak thawed.) Set meat aside to rest until cool before cutting it so you don't lose all the juices. Note that the steak will continue to cook somewhat during the cool-down process.
Sautee in this order in a large pan:
1 large onion, chopped and carmelized in 1 tbsp. each butter and olive oil (use both to get the best combination of browning without burning. Cook on medium low until transparent. Then turn up the heat and stir until they darken but don't stick to the pan)
Then turn down the heat again and add:
Mushrooms, either fresh and sauteed or dried, presoaked, wrung out, sliced and then sauteed in the same pan as the onions - but add another tbsp. of butter. (Use about 1/2 a pound of fresh mushrooms or 2 oz. if dried)
1 red bell pepper, sliced and sauteed (add when the mushrooms are nearly done)
A teaspoon of garlic
Half a teaspoon of paprika
A few pinches of salt and nutmeg
A few grinds of black pepper
After the vegetables are done, mix the meat in with them. Taste for seasonings. Mushrooms soak up a lot of seasonings, so you may want to add more. The nutmeg and pepper are especially important here.
Assembly
Sprinkle a clean counter and your rolling pin with flour. Take dough out of the refrigerator, punch down again and pat it out on the counter, sprinking flour on it, then turning over and sprinking other side with flour. Roll out very thin - maybe a quarter inch, like a thin crust pizza - into a rectangular shape.
Place the dough in a greased rectangular pan before you fill it. Let the edges drape over the side. Place the filling in the dough about 1/3 of the way up and roll up neatly. How much filling you put in depends on how hungry you are and how neat you want the roll. I overstuff it, which means about 4 -5 c. total mixture. It looks better if you use less!
Spread a little butter and olive oil very gently on the top.
Bake it at 400 degrees for 30-35 minutes.
Additional notes and variations because I believe more information is always good:
This meal is a great way to stretch beef. I usually take 2-3 lbs of steak out of the freezer and sear it in 2 cast iron pans. Then we eat half and save the other half for making into something like this. Even though this is stuffed half with vegetables, I still serve a salad and some cooked greens or other veggie on the side.
Greek version:
Add to veggie mixture when add red bell peppers:
Approx 1/4 c. each sliced black olives and sliced sun-dried tomatoes
Juice from half a lemon
1/3 c. coarsely chopped walnuts
Omit nutmeg and paprika. Add 1 tsp. basil and 1/2 tsp. dry mint. Taste after mixing all together. You may wish to double the amount of both.
French/Vietnamese version:
The French did influence Vietnamese food!
Dough:
Use coconut milk (not water, which isn't flavorful enough) in the bread dough and replace garlic with ginger. Use 1/8 c. coconut oil, 1/8 c. butter instead of a stick of butter.
Meat and Veggie Mixture:
Use sliced duck, preferably Muscovy, which is lower in fat and very flavorful in place of beef if possible. If not, use beef. Either way, after slicing, marinate for at least half an hour in juice of half a lime, a splash of vinegar (preferably coconut, but red wine or apple will do fine, a teaspoon each of ginger and garlic, a splash of hot sauce, a tablespoon of honey.
Cook the onions, a carrot and a celery rib in peanut and coconut oil. Remove from heat and put mushrooms in same pan. Dash on some Bragg's liquid aminos and more peanut or coconut oil; cook until browned.
Use garlic, ginger, nutmeg, lime juice, salt and pepper and a tablespoon of sugar or honey as the vegetable flavorings. Add a dash of fish sauce if you have it.
Add some chopped green onions, uncooked, to the vegetable/meat mixture before stuffing.
A note on being kosher: Sometimes I follow kosher laws and sometimes I don't, which will seem ridiculous to probably both ends of the Jewish spectrum - a kind of why bother unless you are going to do it right? I heard a professor of Jewish studies say that it is possible that the prohibition against boiling a kid in his mother's milk was really meant to be against boiling a kid in his mother's fat. This would mean that the prohibition was against killing two generations at once. This seems like a reasonable possibility. I also thought, since there are other references to shooing the mother bird away before taking her eggs or young, or not slaughtering a calf in front of its mother, that there was a prohibition against excessive unkindness towards the mother. Therefore, because I am ambivalent about that particular kosher law, I tend to use butter when butter tastes better. However, because I find meat and cheese undigestible together, I am totally fine with abstaining from mixing meat and cheese! :)
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