Beef Braciole - The Single Best Italian Comfort Meal

Today, we're going to make beef brazole. I love this recipe. My family loves this recipe. Here are all the ingredients. Let's get into it right now. All right, I always like to go over the ingredients. It helps me make the meal perfectly, but it will help you even more, like getting everything set. So on this side here is the brazole side. This is everything that you need for the brazole. We have top round. Top round beef is a typical beef that's used for brazole. It's very inexpensive. It can be filleted. It can be pounded out thin. You can use other types of beef too, like flank, sirloin, which are more expensive. If you go to Costco, you'll probably be able to find that for about $4 a pound. This place, Meat Farms, that's a local place, you know, they slice it for you. And that, you know, this is part of the reason why you'll know that this is the type of beef that's used for brazole, okay? So it actually says right here, top round brazole. This is the beef of choice for it. It doesn't mean you can't use other beef. You absolutely can. The other ingredients for this, after we fillet this and pound these out really nicely, we're gonna make like a paste basically to put in. We're gonna have a cup of breadcrumbs. I have a quarter cup of pine nuts or pinoli nuts. The recipe says three cloves of garlic. I have five here because I'm gonna grate it so I won't be able to grate it all. So garlic's kind of a personal preference. You can back off if you want. A half a cup of Pecorino Romano, Locatelli, which again would be Sicilian. You know, there wouldn't be Parmesan cheese in this. It just wouldn't, it would never exist in a recipe like this, okay? If you're doing it with the raisins, which we're gonna talk about next. So there's a quarter cup of raisins that are soaked in water. If you don't like them, I'm just gonna say right off the bat, please just omit them, okay? But I do think you should try it. Maybe do a couple with the raisins if you're a little apprehensive. We also have a half a cup of parsley. All of this is just gonna make a paste. It's gonna go in there. We're gonna tie it up. You could toothpick it up or we can use string if you like. All right, let's talk about the sauce. Sauce is gonna be very simple. It's always gonna be simple when you're making Italian food. I have olive oil, just that'll start our sauce. We have medium onion that I diced and then five cloves of garlic that I minced. Two ounces of tomato paste, which is one third of a can. Three 28 ounce cans of plum tomatoes. These are all different types. There's a crushed here, it's a good brand. These are just Italian style peeled and then this is San Marzano here. It doesn't matter, it's gonna be good. It's all gonna be great because we're cooking the brazole in the sauce. I have a little bit of water here. If our sauce is too thick after the braising process, we can just thin it out with a little bit of water. You could also thin it out with a little bit more red wine. So that leads me to this final ingredient, red wine. I have a cup here. We're gonna use a half a cup for deglazing the brazole and then we're also gonna use a half a cup for the sauce itself. So it's a cup here. Let's get into filleting this, pounding it out, rolling it and searing it right now. You can do this either way, but if you wanna just follow me exactly, start making your sauce first. All right, we're gonna heat this up. I have a Dutch oven. This is a six quart Dutch oven. Heat it up to medium heat, maybe a touch less than medium heat. I have olive oil. This is extra virgin, but you can use regular olive oil too. I'm just gonna coat the bottom here. Okay, that's what we're putting in. We're putting in a coat the bottom amount. All right, if you wanna get specific, the recipe says a quarter cup. Here are our onions. And I am using an enamel pot, but you don't have to. You could just use your regular, you know, old school eight quart sauce pot, which is the typical pot that most people will have in their home. Just wanna get these onions soft. So it's gonna take about five, six, seven, maybe eight minutes. I put a little pinch of salt on there just to accelerate the water release. And we'll let these soften up first and then we'll add our other stuff. All right, so while our onions are softening up, let's crush our tomatoes. If you're using all crushed tomatoes, obviously you don't need to do this. I have two that are whole tomatoes. What I do here is I just fished a little piece of basil they put out in the can. Just make sure your hands are clean. All right, you can put gloves on if you want, but you don't need to. And then all you do to crush these is you just use a shield hand and then a crush hand. The shield hand is gonna stop it from going all over your really nice shirt. Okay, so my onions are nice and soft. All right, I really don't wanna put any color on them, so just keep your heat fairly low. And now here is the garlic. All right, so I'm just letting this garlic just get nice and soft just for about a minute or two till it gets fragrant. And then here's our tomato paste, just two ounces, that's it. Can you not use tomato paste? Yeah, of course you can. But you know, since we're making Sicilian style food, I don't think you would ever not use paste, right? They use the most paste of all, of everybody. That's what I've heard. I just always like to have a little paste in my sauce. I like it. Okay, so what I'm doing is I'm just gonna fry this paste up for about three, four minutes. Okay, so here it is after about three minutes. Looking nice, smelling great. I'm going to put in a half a cup of dry red wine. What wine is this, Tyra? What is it Merlot, Cabernet? This is a Syrah. Syrah. Yeah. So I'm gonna use half of that right now. We'll save the other half for deglazing after we sear up our bragiole. If you can't use wine, just omit it. Just completely omit it. I'm just gonna turn that heat up a little bit. And then you can just kind of clean the bottom of your pot with the flat edge of a wooden spoon. That's why I always like this type of spoon. Okay, it's completely clear. Now let's get all of our tomatoes in. That's one of the cans from before. This is a crushed one, Scofani. I love this one. It's just very good tomato value price-wise. I don't know the price because we always get them locally, but they're not bad on Amazon. It's in my Amazon shop, the tomatoes. All right, look, I wanted to show you because I didn't crush these. These are the San Marzano ones. So we'll put them in whole. See that huge basil leaf, this one right here? This big thing? I don't want that in there, so I'll take it out. If a little bit gets by, it's okay. You could use your meat masher here. Now this is something I do think is worth it. It's only like six bucks. And I use it for meat all the time, but you can also just put all your plum tomatoes, whole ones in here, and just crush it with this. If you don't want to get your hands like messy. All right, so I'm just gonna bring this up to a simmer, okay? Okay, this is already thick, very thick, I can tell. So I'm just gonna put in my half a cup of water now. If you think it's thin for you, just pull this off till later. Okay, am I going to put in any carrots or baking soda or sugar? No, I'm not. I barely ever do. Number one, we're making brazole with raisins in it today, which is already a lot of sweetness in there. You don't need to do it, but the fixation with always trying to take acid out of this I think is overblown and not needed, provided you're using a quality tomato. But we'll taste it. We'll taste it after it cooks for a while. What I want to do right now is bring this to a simmer. Okay, and I'm gonna do this over here so I can start preparing the brazole. Just heat up the pan. The recipe says medium heat. That assumes you have the paste already. I'm just gonna heat it really low right now so I could just grate the paste over this without it burning. So I'm gonna put olive oil on the bottom of the pan. I don't know how much I have here in the recipe. What does it say? Quarter cup olive oil again. Again, coat the bottom type. Why am I looking at the recipe? Because I don't want you to be like, Jim, you didn't do the same thing in the video here that's in the recipe. Every video we make has a better recipe instructions and process shots on our website, okay? All right, so this is really low here. I'm just gonna grate this garlic in. And the reason I said I took five here is because I don't wanna grate my fingers, so I'm just gonna stop after a certain point, okay? Don't worry, it all gets stuck to the bottom and then you can just take it all out. Okay, I think that's a good amount right there. All right, now I can turn the heat up a touch more to about medium heat, but you gotta be careful. It will burn fast. Let's let this go for about a minute until it gets fragrant. Okay, so nice and fragrant. Here's the pine nuts. It's a quarter cup. I'm just letting these go in the oil for about a minute or two. Okay, so that's how they look, which, you know, it's good. You're not gonna really burn these with the oil, but you do have to watch them. Just don't have your heat too high. Here's our breadcrumbs. This is one cup of breadcrumbs. We're probably gonna make more stuffing than we need, but that's kind of the nice thing about this. You can, you know, say you wanna, instead of two pounds of beef, you wanna use three pounds. It's easy to do. This is a little bit more than a half a cup, so I think that's good. Here's the raisins. I drained them, okay? You don't have to take all the water out of them. You can chop these if you want, if you want smaller pieces of it. Okay, just mix this together. Turn off the heat, okay? Heat's off now. Just taking the back of my spoon and kind of breaking up any large clumps. And then here's the Pecorino Romano. That's a half a cup grated, which, you know, I think we need a little bit more than that, maybe a touch more. So let's mix this together. Let's taste it. Let's get it right. Not adding any salt to this because we will season the beef itself, and Pecorino is quite salty. I think I used too much breadcrumbs. I'm just gonna put a little bit more oil into just to try to stiffen it up a bit. Let's pull this off, and now we're gonna finally get to the point where we pound out the meat. You're gonna have to pound it straight on the board anyway, and we'll use plastic wrap, but you can put your meat straight on your good board. Here's the meat right here. You can see it's about this thick. Unless you have superior knife skills, way better than me, maybe go initially like this, all right? I'm gonna try to do it. We'll see how I do, but there's no way I'm gonna be successful doing this the whole way. All right, so I'm taking my knife, flat edge of my knife here, and I'm going like this. Now, your knife has to be very, very sharp. So see, I'm opening it up like a book here, but it already kinda disconnects here, the meat itself, so I don't know how successful I'm gonna be. So this is definitely the thicker side here, so I will turn this into little ones, and I just wanna show you. We'll do a big one, and we will do a little one. Set it up right next to your cutting board here like this, and then you can pull. Here's our meat, just like that. Boom. We are now gonna pound the beef, all right? We're just gonna take this, not the sharp side here, this side here. Okay, I did a little bit more. It's this little tail here. Don't worry, we'll use that for another piece. This is what we have. So basically, if you wanna square this up here, this piece is probably gonna break off anyway. You could cut this little part off, make a little one. Same thing here. You can make a littler one. All right, so what I'll do is right about here, will be there, right about there. So same thing. I'll just put plastic under here. I'm gonna make it just a touch bigger, and then we'll do the little ones, and then we're gonna do the rest of them. It was 1.7 pounds of top round London broil that I made really thin, okay, into all these thin pieces. You could secure them with either string, butcher string, or toothpicks. Toothpicks are good for the smaller ones. I prefer the smaller ones. Basically, the bigger one is kind of when you're making just fragile, but the smaller ones are like you add them with your meatballs, your sausage, in your massive pot of sauce. Stuffing. Put it in kind of like the middle area. It's been about 20 minutes, so the stuffing's cool now. So I kind of like leave at least a half an inch around the sides. And you could put more if you want to. Like, you don't have to do a little bit. For the bigger ones, I'll do more. And again, if you want prosciutto, you put a nice slice of prosciutto there now. And then to roll it, it's very simple. Just roll it up tightly, just like that. Three strings on this one. Okay, one time around, two time around. And now my knot will hold. It won't go anywhere. And then now I can just secure it with that. I think I probably will need to use a couple more here. This is a big one. So like leave about that much, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so these are really small ones. Now, the meat, like, can you cut this a little bit, do a little bit of surgery here? You can. If you have the meat, you could just throw this right in your sauce, a little piece of it, which'll be fine. Now I got two picks. Can go right through, through again. Make them parallel to the piece, to the length. If you make them perpendicular, they're gonna get in the way when you're trying to sear it. So you can do it either way you like. All right, I'm gonna finish. I have one more large one, and then I have two more small ones. So a two pound piece of meat's gonna get you about eight to 10 small ones, or like three large ones. Our meat is right here. These are all done. These are all tied up, ready to go. I actually used a little bit of the other pack that I had, so I had some more stuffing. Here's our sauce right now. So I had it simmering for about 45 minutes with the lid cracked. You can see how this looks, the consistency. There's a lot of water on top of here right now. All right, so I'm just gonna stir it. Just keep stirring it occasionally. And honestly, if it's too loose, like this is very loose right now, when you cook it, you can just keep it cracked a tiny bit more, more evaporation will occur. And that's good. Just feel the bottom if you're using an electric stove. We can season up a little bit right now, but you don't need to go overboard. And this is basically like just sauce we have right now. There's no meat has gone in it yet. Tastes delicious. Each brand of tomatoes has a little bit different sodium level, so you always have to kind of test it. You know, if you follow a recipe, and unless they tell you the brand, it's gonna be different. All right, so I'm gonna leave it more cracked now like this while I leave it over here, while we sear the beef. So when you heat up a stainless pan, you gotta let it heat up first. Heat it on medium heat. And then when we put our oil down and then our Brasiole, it won't stick. If we don't do that, everything will stick. We don't want that. All right, let it heat up for three minutes. I like to address these things on this channel. I make mistakes. You're supposed to season the inside of the beef with salt and pepper before you put the stuffing in. I didn't do that. I'm gonna season the outside of the beef now to try to make amends, but it won't be as good, all right? We make mistakes here. If you look at the written printable recipe, you look at the site, you will see me doing the seasoning. Maybe just season the ones right now that you're gonna sear right away because they're gonna start releasing more moisture and you won't get as good of a sear. I'm gonna put down a little bit of olive oil here. If you don't think you could use olive oil, if you're saying, Jim, you're making a cardinal sin here, then use vegetable oil or whatever you want, all right? We're just gonna sear these until they get brown. How much per side? Maybe two minutes. Doesn't really matter. Just get them brown on most of the sides. If my pan's heated up properly, these won't stick. If it's heated up wrongly, you're not gonna be able to get them off. All right, there you go. Okay, isn't that beautiful? Crust, just turn it over. Okay, same thing here. Ooh, yeah. It's hard to get every side that you got the toothpicks in there, but as long as you get like two sides nice, you're pretty good. Oh, that's stuck a tiny bit. Oh, okay. Right there. Yeah, just let them go. Maybe turn it over a little bit more if you can, and then we will move on to the second batch. Okay, see how black my pan's getting even with a four out of 10? Okay, these are seasoned up. Let's get them right in there. Take the big one, get it right into the center so we can fit in the pan. And then the other one, might need a touch more oil in here. No, listen, these are gonna be braised for like an hour or two. And the longer it cooks, the brajol is also flavoring the sauce. Exactly. So the sauce will just taste better the longer it cooks. That's the whole point of doing this. This is why people put brajol sausage, meatballs, pork neck bones. This is why they put everything in their sauce and let it cook for 12, 14 hours. It just makes this unbelievable tasting sauce. That's why you don't put anything else in it. You don't take your spice cabinet and destroy your sauce. The meat is the flavor of the sauce. Without the meat, it would just be tomatoes. All right, and yeah, I'm just doing like a minute per side. Just keep, I'll just keep turning it as I go. When you serve the big one, you would like cut that into- Nice slices. Slices, right? We're gonna pull these out. My pan is very dark. I'm just gonna turn it off while I do this. Okay, there they all are. So listen, here's the remaining bit of wine. So I don't think I used a full half before. Here's probably more than half. Turn the heat up to high. We deglaze the pan. Problem is that pan was very dark. I've been showing this in multiple videos recently. I've been showing it every time I'm doing this with meat. Say you did 10 batches of frageole and your pan kept getting darker and darker. It's going to be burnt. You deglaze here, this wine, you taste it. It will not taste good. You don't want to put it in your sauce. So what I'm doing is I'm just using the flat edge of the spoon here, and I'm just removing all of the brown bits, okay? Turn it off. I want to taste this before I put this into my unbelievable sauce that I spent a lot of time making already. Sometimes it's hard to detect the burntness when it's very hot, all right? So you might want to let it cool down for a second. I think it's fine. That's going to go in the sauce now. All right, so pull this off. Here's my sauce. So now listen, this is about an hour cooking. You can see how this is thickened up somewhat, all right? There's still some water on top. So if it's too thick at the end, we'll just put a little bit of water in. Here is that delicious deglazed, this is like the meat flavored. So that's in there now. So now we have all the meat flavors from the bottom of the pan, that caramelization. When you put meat on the bottom of a stainless pan, okay, when it gets stuck, the stuff starts changing. The composition, it starts tasting different. All right, so that's actually, that's looking good, but it's going to thicken up more as we cook it. Now, all we have to do is put our brajol back in here with the juices and let it cook. So yeah, if you didn't like the raisins, you could have done some, a few without, and maybe like say like, okay, the raisin ones, non-raisin ones will be tied and the other ones, raisins will be too picked or vice versa. Okay, there's the juices. There's the last brajol, gotta make enough room. Oven, in the middle, let this cook for an hour and then check it for doneness. It could be done in an hour. It's, you can taste it if you like it that way. You can let it go two hours. Sometimes I'll let it go three. It doesn't really matter. You don't want to do it in your oven, do it on your stove top. Very low heat. Occasionally open the lid and feel the bottom so your sauce isn't burning. If you put it in the oven, it will not happen. That's the advantage of putting a Dutch oven like this with a cover in the oven. And that's what I'm gonna do. We'll be back in an hour to check this. This is all fat. You see this? All that right there. So there's a layer of this. So even though this meat isn't, you know, the fattiest meat, there's still plenty that's coming out of here. If we just use a paper towel, see this, all this fat now is going into it. And it's fat that's there, okay? That's not sauce. It's like a tiny bit of sauce, but it's mostly fat. Gonna put the cover back on and I'm going to cook it for another hour. Okay, so here is after two hours and about 10 minutes. The meat is really tender. There's more grease that I took out probably, I don't know, maybe 30 minutes ago. You can do one of two things here. You can take all the meat out, put it into a platter. You can try to degrease it a little bit. If you, after you remove the meat, if it's too little liquidy for you, just put this sauce on a burner, turn up the heat, and then you can just thicken it to however you like. If your sauce is too thick, you can just add a touch of water, a couple ounces until you get it right. Or you could even put some red wine in, some dry red wine. Whatever you use, be a little careful so it doesn't break apart, for the big ones especially. And there you go, that's all of them. Just literally take your fork in there and rip it off. You'll leave this off to the side, tent it, but it's gonna stay hot for 40 minutes at least. That is what we're left with. That's fairly thick. I have some pasta for James. All I did here was I just took a little bit of my sauce. You don't wanna boil pasta and let it sit in a colander. So I'll put a little bit more of the sauce on there. Now remember, you got a lot here. So this is for the brajol, for bread, and if you did a full pound of pasta, you're probably still gonna have a little bit left over. I say we serve all this up for the taste tester. We never have just brajol and pasta. Whenever we do it, it's always with meatballs and sausage. So this is a little unorthodox, I think, but I think it was probably the best way to show this recipe. Would you say so, Tara, or not? Yeah. You can use a knife, but it'll shred. Well, at least we know the bread is good. Yeah, I know. Which I didn't make. No, no, I'm talking about the sauce. The sauce. Oh, the sauce? The sauce, the sauce. Make sure you season your sauce with more salt and pepper at the end if it needs it. How's the meat? You want more sauce? Is it good? Good. Little bit more sauce on there? Yeah, sure. Yeah, everything's very good. It's like a good way to make this meal, like with the meat, the bread, and the pasta. You want to, after you stuff your face, you want to say anything about it? Yeah. I don't know if people want to just watch you eat for like five minutes straight. From how much I ate, I think you can tell where this is going. I gave the, like, we made shrimp and orzo earlier today. Two videos today. And I gave that a 10. I think this might be one of the first times I've ever given two 10s for videos in a day, but I'm giving this 10 too. Nice. I wasn't expecting that. I thought- Like these dishes, both of them are so good. I thought because he gave the 10 on the orzo one, which I don't know which one will be out for you when you're watching this first. They're completely different because this is like, this is like a five-hour cooking process from like preparing it, your sauce, the brojol, and cooking in the oven versus the shrimp and orzo is like 30 minutes, so. James, what did you like about the brojol? Do you taste anything inside of it? Did you get any sweetness from anything in there? I taste raisins, pine nuts. It's very good. It's one of my favorite things. It's one of my favorite things too. It's a little bit more labor than just throwing sausages into a pot. All right, James, anything else you want to say before we get out of here? Amazing dish. Thanks, buddy. All right, there you have it. Two 10s on, what's today's date that this happened? What was his magical date? President's Day, I got two 10s. He feels like the president. That's right. That was a corny joke. That was a dad joke. That was cringe. No, anybody who uses the word cringe, I automatically don't worry about what they say. When somebody tells me I'm cringe for walking through the door, I'm just like, the only thing cringe is you look older than me and you're using that word. You know, that's what I say. Don't laugh at me. It's not cringe. Your entrance is cringe. It's cringe? Yeah.