One of my favorite things to cook is a roast. Part of it comes from the lazy two-thirds of me but it’s also due to the fact cooking something low and slow develops flavors and you go from having a hunk of meat to having dinner.
When I first bring a roast home from the store, I season it before I freeze it. The seasoning has been as simple as kosher salt to as complex as turning into a Memphis style dry rub. Press’n Seal Freezer wrap is my favorite this to use because I can pull it tight over and around the meat and I end up with a meat capsule–that sounds so wrong.
With my most recent roast, I coated the eye of round roast with Lawhorns[1] and wrapped the thing up tight. Into the freezer it went.
A week or so later, I tossed the roast into the fridge and let it hang in there until it had thawed. Onto the counter it went–this was in the morning–until it had come up to room temperature.
Now here’s when things get fuzzy since I have a habit of making things up as I go and forgetting to write anything down. For a great wine braised roast with an ingredients list and everything, check out Heather’s post.
Things I know were involved:
- Dutch oven
- Searing of Lawhorns covered roast
- 1/2 a bottle of yummy merlot–don’t worry about what happened to the other 1/2
- Probably 8 cloves of smushed garlic
- 3 or 4 bay leaves
- A couple tablespoons of flour
- A diced onion–Cara doesn’t like to see onions.
- A couple of stalks of celery diced.
- Chicken stock
- Yukon Gold potatoes-cut into big chunks
- A bunch of carrots-chunks as big as the potatoes
- A big package of mushrooms-quartered
- Sear the roast in the dutch oven until all sides are browned; the caramelization adds lots of flavor.
- Pull the roast out and put in the onion and celery. Cook until they’re starting to brown a tiny bit. I do this because if I don’t, Cara throws a fit because they’ll still have that mouth feel she finds so abhorrent.
- Add some olive oil to the dutch oven and toss in the mushrooms. Stir it all around until the mushrooms develop some color. Sprinkle your flour on top.
- Add the bay leaves and the smushed garlic. Stir it until you can start to smell the garlic.
- Toss in the potatoes and carrots. Stir.
- Pour in the wine and scrape the bottom of the dutch oven with a wooden spoon–don’t use metal on your dutch oven–until the bottom is cleaned of all of the brown, yummy bits.
- Add the roast back to the pot and nestle it into the veggies and wine.
- Add a couple of shakes of Lawhorns and then enough chicken stock–or water–so the liquid level is up about 1/2 way on the roast but not completely submerging it.
- Cook the roast in a 400° oven with the lid on the dutch oven for a while until your digital thermometer that you stabbed into the meat tells you the middle of the roast is at like 145° or something close since even after the meat’s rested, it will still be around medium.
- Remove the roast to a cutting board and tent–cover–it with foil. Pull out the veggies and put the dutch oven on a burner set to medium high heat.
- Cook it until it’s reduced by half. Taste for seasoning. Add a tablespoon or two of butter to the sauce right before you plan on serving dinner.
- Cut the roast against the grain–this roast will be more like a traditional roast beef than the pull apart pot roast you get when you use a chuck roast.
- Serve sliced roast with veggies, sauce and crusty bread.
- [1]Lawhorns sent me a bottle so I could try it.↩
