Polpette di bollito

Boiled Beef Croquettes. Plus a few other of my favorite ways to recycle boiled beef…

One of the pleasanter dilemmas I face on a regular basis is what to do with leftover boiled beef. In all but the hottest months, making homemade broth is a Sunday evening ritual for me. With the advent of electric pressure cookers, it’s now more or less effortless, and homemade broth is so much better than anything you can buy. Broth making not only leaves you with a tasty broth but, of course, boiled meat, an old fashioned treat that many people these days have never even tasted. If it sounds to you like hospital food, think again. Properly made, boiled beef is every bit as good as any stew—aromatic and tender and beautifully juicy.

Fresh from the stock pot, I enjoy serving boiled beef as is, with a nice salsa verde, a piquant green sauce made with parsley, garlic and anchovies. But every now and again, especially if I’m dealing with leftovers, I like to mix things up a bit. If the meat is beef, as it is more often than not, I particularly enjoy recycling it as bollito rifatto con le cipolle, where I gently warm the boiled beef in beautifully caramelized onions and bit of rosemary, moistened with a ladleful of broth. It’s exquisite served with mashed potatoes. Another favorite is the Roman classic, piacchiapò, where the beef simmers with aromatic vegetables and a bit of tomato.

But perhaps the most delightful way of all to recycle boiled beef might be this one: polpette di bollito. Also called polpette di lesso, these are meatballs made more or less in the usual way, but using finely minced boiled beef instead of the usual ground raw meat. It may seem like a minor change but, let me tell you, the result is very different. Boiled beef is fork-tender, of course, which produces a more delicate morsel, but the beef has also been infused with the flavor of the aromatic vegetables and seasonings it’s been getting to know while simmering gently in a stock pot for a few hours. Polpette di bollitoare breaded before frying, resulting in a kind of croquette. But whatever you call them, they’re little globes of goodness bursting with flavor, tender and juicy on the inside, golden and crisp on the outside.

Serve them as a starter or, in larger portions, as a second course.

You might also like...

Picchiapò

One typically Roman way to recycle boiled beef goes by the curious name of picchiapò, literally meaning “a little beat up”. (The origin of the name has been lost to time.) There are lots of variations on picchiapò, but the basic concept is to make a tomato sauce and let the cut up beef simmer, along with a bit of the broth you made with it, for a few minutes to reheat and absorb the flavor of the sauce. Like so much of Roman cookery, it’s simple and rustic—and perhaps not very pretty— but absolutely delicious.

And yet more ideas for recycling boiled beef…

And click below for yet more ideas for using your leftover lesso rifatto (boiled beef): simmered with onions (my personal fave), “alla pizzaiola” (you guessed it, simmered in a oregano laced tomato sauce) and “alla ciociara” (with onions, tomatoes and potatoes).