Veal saltimbocca is an Italian dish made with thin veal cutlets, ham, sage, and sometimes cheese. The meat is pounded, dredged in flour, and cooked in a pan with white wine and butter. It can be served with pasta, polenta, or baked potatoes.
Veal saltimbocca is an Italian dish that involves cooking flat pieces of veal with slices of ham, sage, and sometimes cheese. The pieces of meat left in the pan are turned into a pan with white wine and cold butter. A Roman version of veal saltimbocca has the pieces of veal rolled up with some additional spices and then cooked, creating small, firm cylinders of meat. The dish can be served with pasta such as spaghetti, polenta or baked potatoes.
Perhaps as you would expect, veal is one of the most important ingredients in veal saltimbocca. It must be very thin in order to cook all the way through without burning. Commonly called scaloppini when prepared this way, veal cutlets are placed between two sheets of wax paper or in a plastic bag. With a heavy tool that has a large surface area, the meat is pounded repeatedly from the center to the edges to flatten the piece so that it is as uniform in thickness as possible.
To prepare the veal for cooking, a thinly sliced piece of ham is placed on one side of the schnitzel. Fresh sage leaves are then placed in the center on top of the ham. Toothpicks or a long skewer can be used to secure the sage and ham so that the schnitzel can be moved and cooked without the pieces falling into the pan. If fresh sage is not available, finely chopped dried sage can be used by rubbing it on the surface of the veal. The entire piece is then lightly dredged in plain flour, forming a thin coating on each side.
Each piece of veal is placed in a hot pan with olive oil ham-side down on the bottom first. After a few minutes of cooking, the cutlets are turned over. Some veal saltimbocca recipes call for cheeses such as fontina, mozzarella or provolone to then be placed on top of each piece and allowed to melt when the meat finishes cooking.
When the veal saltimbocca is ready, it is removed from the pan. Using the white wine, the bottom of the pan is frosted so that any remaining bits of the veal are scraped off. The white wine is reduced, after which the butter is slowly added until the sauce is thick and glossy.
Veal saltimbocca can be served on a plate with the pan sauce drizzled on top. Popular accompaniments include fresh pasta with a buttered sage sauce, polenta garnished with parsley, or tomato salad with fresh herbs. The Roman variation is made and served almost identically, except that the cheese is rolled inside the veal and thyme is often added to the meat.
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