Karl’s Beef and Spinach Bierocks

Eilene’s friends are coming over again—one has just returned from visiting family in the Philippines. The last two times I have made dinner for them it has been pasta—a tomato based sauce and an Alfredo sauce. I wanted to do something different and I have not made bierocks in quite a while, Eilene liked the idea.

A bierock—German stuffed bread—is not now, nor has it ever been haute cuisine, it is essentially a workingman’s lunch. When you are working, traveling, or having some kind of festival event, you do not always have time to sit down for meal. Having a meal in a neat, sealed package that you can slip into a pocket or pouch is a solution that many cultures have discovered.

I have made several different kinds of bierock before—bread stuffed with the traditional Volga recipe, the more common recipe in America beef and cabbage, as well as my own variations of Middle Eastern beef and lamb, chicken curry,  Moroccan chicken, Uyghur lamb, and even with chicken apple sausage. Today, I thought I would use beef and spinach.

Note: When I made my Alfredo pasta Eilene though that it did not have enough spinach so for this recipe I decided to use twice as much as I would be inclined to use. She wanted more vegetables and less meat.

As now has become my standard technique for ground meat, I used a Cook’s Illustrated browning technique for the meat. One of the Cook’s Illustrated chefs found that if you fried the meat in bits you ended up with hard pebbles when enough browning had occurred to enhance the flavor. By browning the meat in a large patty you get the flavor provided by the Maillard reaction, while still having most of the meat remaining moist and tender.

Karl’s Beef and Spinach Bierocks

Ingredients

Dough

2 cups bread flour
1 cup+ AP flour
1 Tbs. sugar
2 tsp. Kosher salt

1 cup milk
2 tsp. active dry yeast
4+ Tbs. butter, separate uses
2 eggs

Filling

1 lb. ground beef (80/20)

2 cups yellow onion, finely diced
1 cup celery, finely diced
½ tsp. Kosher salt

6 cloves garlic, minced
1 large beefsteak tomato, seeded and diced

12 oz. baby spinach, blanched and shredded
1 Tbs. chrevil
2 tsp. thyme
1 tsp. Mediterranean oregano

¼ cup dry sherry
1 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp. black pepper

Directions

Dough

1. Put the dry ingredients— flours, sugar, and salt—into a sifter and blend them together well.

Tip: I re-sift the dry mixture several times.

2. Put the milk in a large measuring cup and microwave it for one minute.

Tip: Some low powered microwaves may take longer. You want the milk warm, but not boiling.

3. Put the yeast into a small cup and add in ¼ cup of the milk.

4. Stir and let the yeast proof for 10 minutes.

Tip: If your yeast is good there should be a good head of foam covering the mixture after this time. If there is not, discard and buy new yeast.

5. Add 3 tablespoons of butter to the milk.

Tip: This both melts the butter and cools off the milk. You want it to be cool enough that it does not cook the eggs when you add them to the milk.

6. Scramble the eggs into the milk.

7. Make a “well” in the flour and add the yeast mixture, milk/butter/egg mixture.

8. Pull the flour from the sides of the “well” into the wet ingredients.

9. When the flour in the bowl is mostly incorporated, turn the dough out onto a well-floured smooth surface.

Tip: Put about half a cup of flour on the board.

Note: I prefer to make my initial dough a bit wet. It is easier to knead more flour into a wet dough than to add liquid to a dough that is too dry.

10. Knead the dough for 10-15 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic.

11. Add rub the dough bowl with some melted butter and rub the top of the dough ball in the butter.

12. Turn the dough over and cover the bowl with a smooth, clean, damp, kitchen towel.

Tip: Place the bowl in a warm place for one hour.

Note: Do not use a terrycloth towel, the dough might stick to it as it rises and be hard to remove.

Filling

13. While the dough is rising, prepare your filling.

14. Set a large pan of water to a boil and blanch the spinach for 3-4 minutes.

Tip: This step does two things: It greatly reduces the volume of the spinach—allowing you to get more vegetables into each bun—and it also leaches out some of the iron in the spinach.

Note: While iron is an essential mineral for living, cooking concentrates the iron and can give the finished dish a metallic taste.

15. Drain and shock the spinach to prevent it from over cooking.

16. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible from the spinach, chop it into fine bits, and set it aside for later.

Tip: I squeeze fistfuls of spinach that leave me with several “pill” shaped pieces. Slicing up the pills and fluffing the resulting pieces gives you a fine spinach chiffonade.

17. Add one tablespoon of melted butter to a large pan over medium high heat.

18. Form the beef into a single large patty, about half an inch thick.

19. Fry the patty for about ten minutes on one side, until crispy  and well browned.

20. Turn the patty over and continue frying until well browned on the second side, about another 6-8 minutes.

21. Remove the meat patty to a plate to cool.

Note: When the meat is cool enough to handle break or chop the meat up into bits—not to fine and not to big.

22. Spoon out all but two tablespoons of the grease from the pan.

Tip: Reserve the grease for later.

23. Deglaze the pan with a little water and then add the onions and celery.

24. Sauté the onions with the salt until they are starting to pick up some color, about five minutes.

25. Pull the vegetables to the sides of the pan and sauté the garlic in the hole in the center.

Tip: Add some of the reserve grease to the garlic, if necessary.

26. Add herbs and the tomato with all of its juices to the pan and simmer, stirring, for 7-8 minutes.

Tip: When I seed a tomato, I scrape the seeds and the “jelly” that surrounds them into a sieve over a bowl. I use a spatula to press the jelly into the bowl and add the diced tomato-which will release more liquid as it sits.

Note: Much of the flavor of a tomato is in the “jelly” and in the skin. While many cooks discard both—because they do not like the bits of tomato skin disrupting their dish—it is a loss of flavor.

27. Stir the beef bits, spinach, sherry, Worcestershire sauce and pepper into the vegetables.

28. Remove the pan from the heat and let it cool as you prepare the wrappers.

Assembling the bierock

29. Punch down the dough and divide it into portions.

Tip: How many portions you make with your dough is your choice. I found that dividing the dough into 16 portions, produced thin walled bierock that were not enough for a meal by themselves.

30. Divide the dough into 12 portions and pull in the sides into to make dough balls.

Tip: This is a raised dough that depends on gluten sheets for its “lift.” When you cut your dough, there will be an outside surface—smooth—and several “cut” surfaces—covered in bubble holes. Stretch the outside surface around and push the cut sides into the center of the balls. Lay the balls down with the crimped side down.

31. On a lightly floured board, take a dough ball with the “crimped” side up and roll it into a disk about 7 inches in diameter.

Tip: Flour the rolling pin ads well.

Note: You want to leave a flat hump in the middle of the dough with the outer edges tapering down to a fairly thin sheet of dough. If you roll out the dough into a flat disk the top of the bierock will be very thin and the bottom very thick as you gather the outer edges of the disk over the filling. By leaving the middle thick and the edges thin, they even out to make a bun with the filling in the middle.

32. Place one third of a cup of filling in the center of the disk.

Tip: The meat mixture in the pan is fairly loose. I found—that by using a spatula and a measuring cup measure—I could pack the filling down and place it in a tight packet in the middle of the dough. This made it easier to wrap the dough around the filling.

Note: If you read through my other bierock recipes I am undecided how much filling to add to each bun. A quarter cup of filling is easier to wrap the dough around, but this is not quite enough to leave a satisfyingly “stuffed” bun. A third of a cup is hard to wrap, without spilling the bits over the counter, but it produces a better bun.

33. Pull the edges of the dough over the filling and twist then together.

Tip: Pick up the two opposite edges of the dough and pinch them at the top with one hand. Pick up the other two edges and bring them to the top. You will have four folds of dough sticking out from the sides. Pull each of these to the top, in turn and pinch and twist them together. Lay the bierock on the counter sealed side down and cup your hands around it and gently rotate the tough to further twist the dough. use your hands to gently form the dough into an even “bun” shape.

Note: Video

34. Lay the finished bierock on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper.

35. Let the bierock rise for 20 minutes.

36. Bake, on the middle rack, for 30 minutes in a preheated 375º F oven.

Tip: Rotate the tray after 15 minutes, so that they bake evenly.

Note: Twelve buns, if properly spaced apart, covers two large lipped baking sheets. To bake them at the same time I start one on the middle rack and the second on the lower rack. To bake them evenly, I switch the pans’ level when I rotate them.

37. Transfer the bierock to a wire rack for 10 minutes to cool.

38. Bierock are tasty both warm and cold.