U Fleků / 10 Servings
Ingredients
2 kg of beef – eye round steak
250-350 g of bacon
2.5 kg of carrots
2.5 kg of celery root
2.5 kg of parsley root (substitute with parsnip root)
3 large onions
1 liter of heavy cream
lemon juice from 1-2 lemons, depending on the size
mustard
sugar
Spices
4 bay leaves
20 whole black peppercorns
10-15 whole allspice berries
lemon zest
salt
pepper
1. Clean the meat, lard it, season it with salt and pepper and brown it on hot oil. Thanks to this, the juice from the meat will remain inside during baking. After searing, remove the meat from the pan and let it rest for 15-20 minutes.
2. Clean the root vegetables and cut them into small cubes. Fry the vegetables in butter and oil until dark.
3. Add 3 large diced onions (they don’t have to be very small, as we will strain the sauce). Fry for a while longer and then let the mixture cool.
4. Put the roasted vegetable mixture in the roasting pan, put the roasted meat on top, and close everything with the plate cover.
5. Bake at a temperature of 160 degrees for approximately 2.5 hours until the meat is tender. It must be beautifully soft (Czech has a term for this: the meat must be like a cake).
6. Boil the bay leaf, whole pepper, and allspice in water (about a quarter of a liter). During cooking, the water evaporates, we can add it gradually (so that the spices do not burn).
7. Remove the meat and transfer the vegetables to the pan. Pour the spice infusion into the vegetables, add two tablespoons of mustard and start blending the vegetables with a hand blender.
8. While blending, gradually pour the cream into the vegetables. Heat on a low flame so that the sauce does not burn.
9. Season the sauce with salt and pepper and add lemon juice and lemon zest. Also add sugar, to taste.
10. When serving, put the meat on the plate first, then pour the sauce over it. To decorate the meat add a lemon slice, cranberries, and whipped cream.
11. We can use canned cranberries but also dried ones. We heat them slowly to release the liquid. If the canned cranberries are not moist enough, we can add orange juice or, better, cranberry juice. Use the juice for dried cranberries as well. Cranberries have a very strong taste, so we can add a little sugar to them so that they are not bitter.
Advice from chef Zdeněk Turšner
- In the past, sirloin was made from tenderloin, but today we use an eye round because tenderloin is very expensive.
- We lard the meat lengthwise – so that there are two pieces of bacon in the cut of the meat.
- Do not use flour to thicken the sauce! The sauce is cream-vegetable. A large amount of vegetables used thickens the sauce nicely when blended. The resulting consistency is then achieved by the amount of added cream.
- Grate only the yellow part of the lemon zest into the sauce. If we put the white part in the sauce as well, it would become bitter.
- You may or may not strain the sauce. The vegetables are overcooked, but there may be small pieces in them. Some people like it and some people don’t, and they decide whether to strain the sauce accordingly.
- Because some people like the sauce sweeter and others sourer, we can acidify it with vinegar. The sauce should be sweet and sour.
White bread dumplings
1 kg of semi-coarse flour
200 g of yeast
200 g of bread roll
700 ml of milk
2 egg yolks
pinch of salt
1. Heat half the amount of milk and crumble the yeast into it to form a leaven.
2. When the leaven rises, pour it into the semi-coarse flour we salted before. We start kneading the dough.
3. Add two egg yolks and continue kneading.
4. Finally, add the bread roll to the dough – carefully, so that the bread roll does not crumble.
5. Let the dough rise – about 30 minutes until it rises nicely.
6. Roll the dough into loaves weighing approximately 800 g.
7. Place the loaves in boiling water and cook for 35-40 minutes. The dough loaves will float to the surface of the water, turn them “belly up” in the middle of cooking.
8. Remove the cooked dough loaves from the water and pierce them in several places with a fork to prevent them from shrinking.
9. Cut the warm dumplings into individual slices with a thread. If slicing the dumplings after they have cooled, slice them with a knife.
Weight, volume, and length conversion table
1 kilogram (kg) = 100 decagrams (dkg) = 1000 grams (g)
1 liter (l) = 1000 milliliters (ml)
1 meter (m) = 100 centimeters (cm)
1 kg = 2.20 lb
1 l = 2.11 pt
1 m = 3.28 ft
10 cm = 3.94 in
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