Makes 8 servings

A “rouleau de viande” is a meat roll.

Think of it as a stuffed meat loaf. You could make something like this with traditional meat loaf ingredients, but this boldly flavorful “Racine” version is made with pork.

Ingredients

Directions

1. Grease a jellyroll pan with olive oil. Set aside. Rip the bread into roughly 1″ chunks and toss it into a food processor. Process until fine crumbs form, about 10 seconds; throw it into a large mixing bowl and set aside. Add onion, celery, garlic, egg, water, and seasonings to the processor; process until smooth, about 10 seconds. Stir into the bread crumbs. Crumble pork over bread crumb mixture and git up in there with your two big fists and mix it all together well. 2. For this next step, you’ll need a large (20″ x 15″) cutting board or flexible cutting sheet (15″ x 11½″). You’ll also want a Silpat^[5] (16½″ x 11½″) to place on top of the cutting board/sheet; you can substitute a double thickness of wax paper. You’re going to use strips of bacon to form the exterior of your meat roll. You can make it look as fancy or as rustic as you want, depending on how much work you want to put into it. The most awesome way would be to create a bacon weave^[6]. A less fancy way would be to lay the bacon strips out side by side, snuggling them in nice and tight so there are no (or few) gaps between any of the slices: you can arrange them so that they will eventually run the length of your meat, or so that they’ll wrap around the circumference of it. It just takes a little planning. The side-by-side method requires about 1 lb of bacon; you’ll need twice that to create a weave. Note: you want uniform slices of bacon. Cheap bacon may look uniform in the package, but the individual pieces may vary once you pull them apart from one another – you might be shocked, actually, at how much – and this can make things frustrating. So, you’ll want a mid-price-range-or-higher bacon. I’ve tried Hormel Black Label Original, and found it to be uneven but workable. No matter which method you’ve chosen, you want to wind up with a 18-19″ x 12″ bacon rectangle .

Ready-to-Roll “Leland” Variation (see below)

3. Preheat oven to 350°F. Pinch out golf ball-sized pieces of pork and distribute them over the bacon. Press it down to an even thickness. Horizontally, you want to cover the entire length of the bacon rectangle. Vertically, however, you should allow about ½″ of bacon to remain uncovered at both the top and bottom of the rectangle. Distribute the jerky over the pork mixture. If your jerky is rectangular, make sure the long ends of the jerky are parallel with the short sides of the pork rectangle – otherwise, you’ll have a bitch of a time rolling this thing up. Cover the whole thing with cheese, to within ½-inch of edge. 4. Starting with one of the short sides of the rectangle, roll the meat up like a jellyroll. Use the Silpat to assist you. Roll the meat right to the end of the Silpat, but don’t roll it off the Silpat. Carry the meat roll via the Silpat to the baking pan and slide/roll it off the Silpat and into the pan, seam-side down. That ½-inch of bacon you left uncovered, you can now fold it into the ends of the roll – but before you do, reach into the meat roll and pinch the pork to seal the ends as best you can. Do a very, very good job of pinching. Try to get the ends completely sealed, otherwise once it gets really hot it will spurt out cheese. 5. Bake meat roll, uncovered, at 350°F for 1-1¼ hours, or until a temperature probe reads 167°F. Make sure the probe is lodged in the center of the roll, and once the roll comes out of the oven, don’t remove the probe until the roll has rested. Let stand for 10 minutes before serving.^[7] Serve with mushroom gravy or whatever.

As you can see, I like to serve this with mashed potatoes and green beans. Mashed cauliflower would be a good alternative to the potatoes, and any green vegetable would stand in well for the beans. Rouleau tastes great leftover – in fact, seems to improve with age. Even five days later, you’ll be deliriously happy with how great it tastes. Slice your leftover roll into 1″ thick slabs and refrigerate. Nuke individual slices, with gravy if desired, for 3 minutes at 60% power. To freeze, wrap in plastic, then in foil, and place in freezer-appropriate container.

Notes:

See Also: Rouleau de viande Leland

This variation uses ingredients that are more like a traditional meatloaf. Check it out.

Rouleau Leland