Well one thing is certain, Italians like veal! It is so much easier to buy veal in Italy than we have found at home. This is a real shame as the UK Rose Veal probably has the highest welfare standards in the whole of Europe and yet there is the reluctance to eat veal in the UK with a sad consequence for bull calves born to dairy herds.
We had found some veal which we were going to use for a Vitello Tonnato dish when we first arrived in the village. On this first day it had been the only veal we could find at the butchers in the local supermarket – we didn’t know what cut it was – and it had a different name from the silverside we had used last year for the Vitello Tonnato. We bought it anyway and consultation with the butcher and the dictionary suggested that it was a deboned leg – ‘Polpa di Coscia” but we wait to be corrected!! (Whilst we still don’t have a definitive answer internet searching suggests it may well be silverside after all – bu twitht the way it behaved when cooked – that still makes sense!!)
Anyway, we were going to slow roast the piece we bought and serve with pasta – but more of that later.
The piece itself when rolled was too big to fit into our 7 inch roasting dish – so we trimmed off a couple of slices to grill as ‘minute steaks’. These were cooked on a hot grill at around 250C – they were salted and peppered and cooked straight from the fridge for less than 1 minute on each side. They were taken off the grill and left to stand for around 5 minutes before serving with a green bean and roast pepper salad and a drizzle of lemon. They had a texture and consistency rather like that of lamb leg steaks – so we were reasonably happy with are ‘guesstimate” of the cut! More importantly, they were delicious and ridiculously easy!
