Experiment 13 - Stuffed Steak Florentine - The Results

Ingredients list

I'll just go ahead and mention that my weekend started out OK and went rapidly downhill.  By noon on Saturday, I was ready to throw in the towel on everything.  I did manage to get to the store and pick up the required steak and other ingredients by late afternoon, but actually taking the time to follow a recipe after that?  That was most definitely not in the cards.

The steak I picked up was labeled as a "London Broil" and also said it was top round, so I was good to go there.  I never actually measured the thickness, but I think I got at least the 1 1/2 inch lower limit. Nothing else in the ingredients list was out of the ordinary.

Although I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, the instructions did call for using a boning knife to cut a pocket in the steak.  The knife I used is in the picture above.  Is that a boning knife?  I don't have the foggiest idea. But let's start at the very beginning.  I hear it's a very good place to start.  Actually, upon review, I see tht cutting a pocket in the steak is the very beginning.  Mr. Ellis said to make a small cut with a boning kinfe "in the center of the side without the fat cover" and then to pivot the knife around to make a pocket.  I think I did OK, although the stuffing part did cause a little problem.  But we'll get to that.

Once the cutting was done, I sauted the spinach and green onions in the olive oil "until softened", then added the sour cream, dill, egg, cheese, salt and pepper.  I immediately took it off the heat to cool a bit.

After a few minutes, I started to spoon the stuffing into the previously prepared pocket. As you can see below, there seemed to be more stuffing than pocket, but I did what I could.  The next fun part was tying everything up with toothpicks and twine.  There's a line drawing in my clipping that looks a lot better than what I ened up with, but I seemed to have a fairly well-tied package (not shown).

This got tossed under the broiler for a while, turning occasionally until cooked to the desired lever - "10 to 12 minutes for medium rare"

Here is the cooked result.

I served it with a loaded baked potato (except the chives haven't come up yet, so those were missing).  At about 7 o'clock on the plate you can see a spoonful of sauted mushrooms and onion.  Since the theme of the article was adding flavor to steaks, I thought I'd add some help of my own.

Verdict: I liked the stuffing, but I still ended up tossing a bit of Pick-A-Peppa sauce (it's like A-1, but a billion times better) onto the steak.  I'd probably just go ahead and buy a better cut of meat in most cases.

Lessons Learned - nothing new this week.
Tools needed - nothing specifically, although I need to study up on my knives so I know the names of what I have.  Maybe that's a lesson learned, not a tool needed.
Skills needed - nothing new this week.