I don’t get it. I fixed a pot roast about a month ago that really wowed the crowd. But tonight’s 2.0 version just didn’t work. Same recipe. Here’s what I did:
Place pot roast in dutch oven. Add about 1.5 inches of water. Sprinkle roast with kosher salt, pepper, peppercorns. Add sliced onions. Stir in Kitchen Bouquet. Omit thyme because I’m not sure what the hell it’s used for and besides, my g-friend anything other than salt and peppert. Pop into 350-degree oven for about 3.5 hours.
I thought the longer you cook a beef pot roast, the more tender it gets, within reason. Not so tonight. It was chewy and a bit dry, believe it or not. On second thought, I may have added 2 inches of water. Whatever.
Do you have a slow-cooker? I put the potatoes on the bottom of the pot, followed by onions, celery, and carrots, then put the meat on top. Season to your taste, but add NO WATER. Cover and set the pot to run all day on low.
When you come home from work, everything will be done and it will have made plenty of liquid you can season and thicken for gravy. And the pot roast will be firm, not stringy or dry, and fork-tender.
Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with your recipe. Roasts are not created equal, and you may have gotten one with not enough fat, or a bad distribution of fat. I have pretty much the same advice offered by Uvula Donor. Eliminate the water, include lots of aromatics (celery–leaves and all-- onion and carrots are standard, but I will use whatever is handy – the green stalks of leeks are perfect) start it in a 400F oven, reduce the heat to 225F after a half hour, extend the cooking time by an hour and a half, seal the dutch oven well by adding a sheet of aluminum foil under the lid. The foil will also allow you to stick a meat thermometer into the roast while the pot is still sealed. Seasoning is up to you. I have developed the habit of lightly salting the aromatics but prefer to wait until the final stage before getting serious about salt. An oven roast, by the way, is exactly what thyme and bay leaf is for. Do not worry about your girlfriend, you remove them before she knows they were ever there. When the roast is done, transfer it from the dutch oven to a platter and back into the still-warm oven. Strain the liquid in the dutch oven into a saucepan. You might discard the aromatics at this point, but if you have a stick blender, throw some of them in there too (except for leek stalks) and whir away. This will improve the gravy’s flavor and eliminate the temptation to thicken it with starch. If you discard them and still want to thicken the gravy, well, did you boil potatoes? If so, you’d have done well to save the water you boiled them in and kept the pot boiling to reduce the liquid. Add some now, along with whatever additional salt and pepper it requires. Btw, a pot roast, for the pedantic, is cooked in a pot on top of the stove, even more slowly, and the method works well for meat that contains too little fat to make a good oven roast and too much connective tissue to be edible any other way. Good luck!
Many pot roasts and casseroles are improved by replacing some or all of the salt with so sauce, kashmiri masala, mashed anchovies or mashed marinated olives. 2 to 4 tablespoons of soy would do it. After hours of cooking it has only a hint of its usual taste - pretty subtle. The kashmiri masala (Pataks make it is a garlic masala so I replace garlic with but it also adds bite and resonance - my favourite secret ingredient).
I’ll sear the roast in a frying pan on the stove top before slow cooking it.
Also, for one of the best pot roasts I’ve made I used a generous dousing of Manischewitz Concord Grape wine (this was for Passover, so I had the stuff around) When I put it in the pot. It was awesome.
I have a variety of recipes for pot roast. The crock pot/slow cooker version is best and I agree that not all pot roasts are created equal. But I have another techinque that doesn’t require a slow cooker and you don’t have to add vegetables at the start, you cook them separately.
Cut off four sheets of aluminum foil, each about 18 inches long.
Crimp the long ends of two of them together to make a large sheet. Repeat with the second set of sheets.
Place one large sheet on top of the other. Put the sheets on a cookie tin (or jelly roll pan). If these are well sealed, they will hold all liquid inside.
Flour and season the outside of a potroast with whatever seasonings you like. 5. Place the roast in the center of the sheets. Seal the left and right edges of the foil together to make a large, leakproof packet with an open top.
Into the packet add—trust me, here—about a cup full of left over, unflavored, brewed coffee. You can also add a little worchestershire sauce if you want.
Then add a packet of dried onion soup mix, like Liptons.
Completely and tightly seal the packet.
Place the cookie sheet with the sealed packet into a 250 or 275 degree oven. Walk away and come back in 3, or 4, or 5 hours. Timing is not exact. If there’s a lot of fat on the roast, you can go for 3 hours. Less fat, more time.
Take packet out of oven. Carefully open the top, and remove roast. Set it on a platter to cool a bit and use the broth in the packet to make gravy. Mash some potatoes, add some roasted carrots and celery to the meal and you are ready for some fine homecooking. Works for me, anyway.
I think most likely The King of Soup is right. Your meat probably wasn’t up to snuff. Your pot roast slab o’ beef should be well-marbled (rump or chuck work well.) If it’s too lean, it will be dry. Examine your beef before you buy it.
Get a nicely marbled piece of meat with a bone in (like a chuck roast or blade roast), salt and pepper liberally, brown it thoroughly (I use bacon grease for preference) then instead of using a dutch oven (a lidded cast-iron pot, usu. shallow, but not always), wrap that sucker in heavy-duty aluminum foil. Before wrapping, however, you’ll need to add some stuff to give it character. Alton uses green olives and raisins, I omit the raisins and add some minced, sweated onion and garlic. Wrap the roast as securely as you can, then put it in a 250F oven for eight hours. After that, remove and let sit so the juices don’t run out, drain the juices and other bits into a blender and puree, slice or pull apart the roast, and thicken the gravy with cornstarch or arrowroot as you like. Killer, but a bit of a PITA due to the long, slow roasting time.
Pound the meat with a meat mallet, then put into a crock pot.
Pour in one package dried onion soup mix, and two cans undiluted Golden Mushroom (or Beef Mushroom) soup.
Cover, cook on low all day. I set it before I go to work in the morning and it’s ready when I come home.
The meat is usually falling apart, there’s a delicious gravy, and you can play around with different soups, spices, etc. There’s really no way to screw it up (unless you forget to turn on the crockpot.)
For pot roasts, I find these work really well. You can also use top or bottom round, but I find these cuts usually turn out a little bit tougher. I like chuck, and it also has the advantage of being one of the cheaper cuts. Bone-in works well, but boned chuck is fine, too.
(Also, as a tangent, when making hamburgers, my experience is to go for ground chuck and NOT the ground sirloin. The ground sirloin may look prettier and leaner, but the meat is far too lean for a good hamburger. I like my burgers with about a 3-to-1 or 4-1 meat-to-fat ratio. If you want to have fun, make burgers with 1/3 ground lamb, 1/3 ground pork, and 1/3 ground chuck. This is basically Serbian pljeskavica, and is simply awesome if you add in some minced shallots or garlic and a some salt or Vegeta (vegetable stock powder.))
I always do my pot roast on the stove, covered, over low heat and cook it for about 3-4 hours. If I were doing it in the oven, 350 seems a bit hot to me. I’d probably cook at around 300, or possible 275, depending on how much time I have on my hands.
As has been mentioned, brown your pot roast first. This will help with the flavor and keep the juices in. You’ll survive if you skip this step, but it makes for a nicer roast.
Remember, lean does not always equal good. In fact, most of the time, lean meat pales in comparison to its fattier cousin.
The temperature seemed a little high to me too, but sometimes the roasts are just tough. I tend to buy chuck roasts. The stores here have cuts labeled “pot roasts” but, according to my mother, they’re English roasts and to be avoided. I usually sear the roast, season however you want, add carrots and onions (my dad likes the potatoes cooked separately, he’s weird). Then I cook at 275.
Sear the chuck roast in a white-hot cast iron skillet that’s been sprinkled with salt. Get it nice and brown on both sides.
Put the roast into a crock pot on low or covered roaster at 250 degrees and cook all day. Add potatoes for the last two hours, and carrots for the last hour.
Now, into the roaster you’re going to add:
1 can of beef broth, and maybe a little water
1/4 cup of brown sugar, sprinkled over the beef
Minced onions to taste, again over the beef
1 tsp thyme, sprinkled over the roast
1 bay leaf, added to the liquid
Black pepper to taste
When you go to serve the roast, the gravy can be thickened with 10 gingersnap cookies, crushed. The roast will fall apart nicely, and the gravy will be nicely sweet.
I have had great luck with this recipe, and it’s absolutely foolproof.
