Monday, January 19, 2009

Pot roast bitches!

I made this last night, unreal. The cloves add the littlest bit of flavor to round out the juice. For the wine I used a cheap fruity zinfandel I had kicking around. I split it with the pot roast.

2lb chuck roast. You could do others, but what you want is a reasonably marbled cut of meat.
Onion
2 Cloves
Bay leaf
thyme
rosemary
Cheap red wine
1 Can beef stock, or 1 cups BTB beef stock
Mushrooms
Carrots
Potatoes
Turnips (optional)
Olive Oil

You need a dutch oven for this. If you don't have one, get one. 3.5 Qt for 2 people meals will usually do you, and they sell nice ones at TJ Maxx.

Trim the giant bits of fat that you can get off the meat. There's no need to be excessive.

Heat oven to 275.

Heat the oil in the pan, over med-high flame, and salt the meat while that's heating. I would like to take a moment to recommend Jane's crazy mixed up salt over plain salt. Also, for cooking, kosher salt is the poo.

Drop the meat in the pan, and brown one side, about 5 minutes. You want a nice crisp brown coating on it, be very careful not to burn. Repeat for other side, and if the meat is thick I also do the edge sides. Remove from pan.

Cut the onion in half, and place both halves cut side down in the pan to brown. Again, don't burn.

Remove the onion from the pan, pour in about a glass of red wine- I just dump what's left of mine at this point and refill. It will reduce drastically because the pan is so hot. During this time, be scraping the pan bottom with a wooden spoon to deglaze. After a minute or so, add the can of beef broth and finish deglazing. Turn off the burner.

Add the meat to the pot, put one of the onion halves in. For the other half, use 2 cloves to peg a bay leaf to the outer edge. Put this half, BAY LEAF SIDE DOWN into the pan. The meat and onions should take up most of the room in the pan, and be about half covered by broth/wine. Sprinkle some thyme and rosemary in there.

Put the lid on the pan and place in oven. Cook for 45 minutes, flip the meat, cook for another 45 minutes. Chop the vegetables you plan to add and just put them in the pan on top of the meat. Cook for another hour or so, until the veggies are done and the meat is fork tender. Remove meat and veggies to a platter, strain the broth into a sauce pan and reduce or thicken with Wondra.

I fork shred the meat and put a bunch on everyone's plate. It looks especially impressive on a bed of wilted kale. There will have been little deposits of fat inside that didn't quite liquefy, so work around those and get rid of them unless you're into that. Most of the meat will be falling apart because the long slow cook liquefies all the collagen between.

Enjoy!

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