Beef Roulade Stuffed With Spinach and Provolone

During our first visit to our vacation home one of the meals we cooked at home was a deli prepared  stuffed flank steak.  At the time I though this would be a very easy dish to create at home.  The stuffed flank steak is officially called a roulade.  Roulade comes from the French word rouler that translates into roll.  Typically a roulade refers to meat rolled around a filling.

I decided to try my hand at creating a roulade using a round steak with a little help from my husband who insisted on helping.   The first step with a roulade is pounding the meat thin using a mallet (1).  We placed the meat between two sheets of wax paper to pound it thin.  Once the meat was pounded thin we topped with washed fresh spinach and provolone cheese slices (2). We  rolled the meat jelly roll (a sweet cake based roulade) fashion starting with the narrowest end.  The resulting roll (3) was then ready for slicing.  We used toothpicks to secure the slices for cooking (4).  Each slice was cut to about 1 - inch thick.

One rather small round steak was enough for six generous roulade slices.  We placed the roulade slices on a Silpat® lined baking sheet.  The slices looked quite tasty!  Each slice was secured with a toothpick for baking.  We did not use any additional seasonings although sprinkling on something like garlic pepper would be a nice addition. 

We baked the roulade slices at 180ºC (350ºF) until medium well and the cheese was bubbly.  The slices did shrink a little with cooking but that's to be expected.  The cooking time was about 20 minutes.

My gosh this was a lovely meal!  We served the beef roulade with steamed potatoes and rutabaga.  The cooked roulade slices were smaller than those from the flank steak but they were very filling and every bit as tasty!

What I thought was quite interesting is even though this was a round steak that we could have devoured between the two of us, there were left overs!  It's not like the stuffing was particularly filly but the entirety of slices made a huge difference.  There was certainly enough that we could easily have fed four people.  We had leftovers for the following day.  So this is an effective way to reduce meat per serving without noticing the amount of meat has been reduced.