Can this overcooked roast be saved?

All righty, then! Some good ideas I just forgot about….

I made some shepherds pie, will make some shredded and in BBQ sauce, and I have some nice rolls to make a couple sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, and horseradish.

That should cover it. Thanks for the great suggestions.

I’d say Chili, but it’s liable to cause a breach of the peace. :grin:

It sounds like the OP has his plans done, but give it’s a roast beef, I’d slice thin, make a Thai dressing, and serve it with crisp lettuce and cucumbers (and a side of jasmine rice) as a Yum Nua.

Might be nice after a number of heavier Holiday meals.

My ex-wife always insisted that it wasn’t real pot roast if it could not be pulled apart with a fork. And hers, done in the slow-cooker, was delicious.

I second chili con carne! Use a slow cooker. Nothing finer in the dead of winter.

Pot roast is a whole different thing from conventional roast beef. It’s slow-cooked for a long time in liquid to tenderize it. It’s supposed to be well done, but also moist and tender. It’s delicious in its own right but it’s a completely different creature from oven-roasted beef like prime rib. If that gets overdone, it needs careful special treatment as noted in the various posts here.

Damn, @wolfpup , I want to eat at your place!

I have just two words: “meat thermometer”. And understanding how to use it. I have at least two good name-brand meat thermometers, and both of them are liars. If I actually left a prime rib roast in until it read “medium-rare” it would be closer to medium-well if not outright gray shoe leather. I typically take it out just before the thermometer reads “rare”, then let it sit for a short time. I have the little red slider thingie set to the ideal reading, which is below “rare”.

Also, there are four types of meat thermometer that I’ve used, and only three of them work.

  1. old fashioned “yeast and roast” thermometers, with a glass tube holding some liquid, encased in a protective metal sleeve that usual also has the temperature numbers printed on it. These are designed to stay in the roast while you cook it. They have a wide stem, and aren’t suitable for small things like chops or steaks.

They are cheap and work well, so long as the glass doesn’t slip in it’s holder. (The holder has the numbers, remember.) It’s worth calibrating a new one once, with boiling water, to make sure it was assembled right, and to mentally adjust what it says if it wasn’t.

  1. cheap bimetallic “instant read” thermometers. The only way they are “instant read” is that they usually have a plastic disk that’s not oven safe covering the disk that shows a reading. They actually are significantly slower to indicate the actual temperature than type 1 thermometers are. One day i calibrated all my thermometers in boiling water, and ending up throwing away all of these. They are really slow and now very accurate.

  2. expensive electronic “instant read” thermometers. The thermopen is the standard in this group, but there are others. These have a little pointy metal bit to poke in your food, like type 2, but they are much more expensive, require batteries, and work very well. I love my thermopen.

  3. wireless electronic thermometers, designed to stay in your meat as you cook it. These are expensive, and fussy, and I’m a convert.

Why yes, i have spent a small fortune on meat thermometers over the years… They really work, though.

Have you tried cheap electric instant read thermometers?

I have not tested those. That one is obviously a cheap knock off of the thermopen. I’ve had my thermopen for many years, and have no need for a second device in that category. They may work great. I wouldn’t know.

Yeah, my thermopens don’t lie. I have the classic model and the lollipop shaped one, and both are bang-on, reading identical or a fraction of a degree off from each other (as tested with boiling water and ice water.) One’s over ten years old now; the other about four. One of the best kitchen investments I’ve made.

I just checked my meat thermometers. I may have had more than two but two are all I can find right now. I was mistaken – only one is a name brand, and that is a Taylor brand with a mechanical dial that looks pretty much like the one in the main picture.

The other one seems to be some sort of no-name, but the interesting thing is that both of them lie in exactly the same way. I have to take my beef roasts out well before they even register “rare”, or they will be overdone.

I have no explanation for this peculiar phenomenon. I only report my observations! To be clear, they’re both reliable thermometers (in the sense that they’re consistent) but you have to make a significant allowance for calibration.

That looks like one of the cheap bimetallic ones i discarded. They are mostly badly calibrated, and they are also extremely slow to register the temperature. If you can use it reliably, more power to you.

I wouldn’t call it a knockoff because it’s not pretending to be a Thermapen. It’s just a cheapie digital thermometer. For accuracy sake, I have the one below which costs $12. I put it in a glass of ice water and it took two seconds to reach a reading of 32.6F. I put it in a pot of boiling water and it took four seconds to reach 209.4F. I’d be surprised if I use it more than seven or eight times a year though. For $120, the Thermapen is probably sub one second and accurate to a tenth of a degree. I needed that kind of performance for some tests when I was working but not for cooking, particularly my cooking.

A Stir fry rice with chunks of rb.

Grind into a spam like spread, with prepared horseradish, mayo, sour cream dill and lemon juice.

BBQ sliders

So many possibilities

Okay, so not great, but good enough for your purposes, and very attractively priced. And the speed is very good.

I use my kitchen thermometers almost every time i cook. Sometimes i use multiple thermometers. If you are cooking for someone who is immune compromised (and i am, at the moment) a couple of degrees can make a difference of 5-10 minutes in how long you need to wait for pasteurization. I suspect my thermometer needs are more restrictive than yours. :grinning_face:

If I used it every day and was doing stuff like pasteurization or canning, you better believe I would treat myself to a fancy one. We probably paid nearly exactly the same per use! If anything you got the better bargain.

I, too, have a wide variety of meat thermometers on hand (let’s abbreviate that to ‘MT’ from now on). Here are my experiences:

I most often use the ‘continuous read’ style of MT, with a probe that has a long wire that plugs into the unit that displays the temp. This is necessary for long, slow cooks, like slow-smoking a pork butt, since you don’t have to open the smoker to check with a thermopen at regular intervals.

The problem with the ‘probe and wire’ MTs is that those probe / wire thingies fail… a lot. And there doesn’t seem to be a good source of just the ‘probe / wire’ replacement part, so I’ve had to repeatedly buy the whole ‘probe / wire / display unit’ combo. So I currently have like a half dozen or more display units that work perfectly fine, but only two ‘probe / wire’ thingies that seem to work. And when I cooked two roasts for this past Christmas dinner, it turned out one of them was wildly inaccurate. When one MT, the one I suspected was accurate, read about 125-130F, perfect medium rare, the other read 155F. When I swapped out the high-reading MT probe with the one I figured was more accurate, it read 115F.

Since Christmas dinner was at stake, I went looking for another source of confirmation. I found a thermopen-style MT that was almost never used, but so old it had an analog dial on it. That dial was taking forever to move, and I didn’t know if I could trust it. Then I found a couple instant-read thermopens like hajario linked to upthread, in the kitchen utility drawer, brand-new in the box. I asked my wife “where did these come from?” “Oh, they were on sale somewhere, so I picked up a couple”. I broke one out, checked the one roast, and got almost instant confirmation that the one roast was around 130F and the other was still low at 115F, like the more accurate ‘probe / wire’ MT had read.

So, the lesson I took from this was that I will continue to use the ‘probe / wire’ style MTs for convenience with long cooks, but I’ll always use two at a time when able to (by now I kind of have an instinct for when one is inaccurately coming up to temp too quickly) and I will also keep an instant-read thermopen on hand for final confirmation.

The tech for some home smokers is amazing. I’ve read a bit about them. Probes in the roast and monitoring in the chamber to adjust valves to keep the temperature steady or follow a specific profile.