In my journey through the Interwebs looking for the greatest bacon dishes, I should probably not neglect the cuisine of Germany. The Germans love their salted pork products as much as any other nationality – perhaps more than anyone. And they know how to combine the bacon with all sorts of crazy things. For instance, pickles wrapped in bacon? Yeah. I can’t figure out how that came to be. But now that I know about it, I’m dying to try it. This sort of wackiness happens in a German dish called roulade.

Bacon On A Roll

Roulade simply means “roll”, and so roulades can be made with pretty much anything. These folks show you how to make some with turkey and bacon – basically a sort of bacon-wrapped turkey appetizer. However, the roulade dish that involves bacon is rouladen or a rinderroulade. Traditionally it is made from the pickles and bacon I mentioned. It also includes beef, onion and mustard. There are a couple different ways to make this dish. Some of them, like this wikihow article, basically turn it into just another bacon-wrapped thingamajig. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not very German.

The German Way

The more German way of making this dish sees the beef as the outside of this roll of food. The website Mennonite Girls Can Cook provides an interesting recipe. It starts out with sautéing your bacon with some onions. Then, you take large, thin slices of beef and pound the bejeezus out of them with a tenderizer. Mustard is painted onto the beef slices along with pepper and salt. The onion-bacon mixture is poured onto the beef and a pickle is placed at one end. Then the whole thing is wrapped around the pickle and put into a pan. After you brown them, you can bake them in an oven with some cream of mushroom soup. It all sounds very Germanic and strange, but I’m sure, because there is bacon in there, it is mouthwatering.

Chef Keem offers yet another recipe in this video. He doesn’t really explain what he’s doing. In fact, there’s only a very mournful piano track that accompanies the video recording. The shot of beef getting tenderized with a tinkling piano in the background almost made me tear up. The bacon is hidden, too: it’s in the prepared mixture he very wonkily spreads over the beef with his hand. Watch this only if you thought that Rosemarie was too professional:

In any case, I adore anything that involves bacon being massaged into more meat. How about you guys? What sort of Germanic bacon dishes do you like to eat?