Tremendous Pot Roast
Prep
20m
Cook
210m
Total
230m
Bigly says
We need to talk about pot roast. The TREMENDOUS pot roast. The greatest pot roast assembled in a Dutch oven, ever — and there's been a LOT of pot roast, the medieval people had pot roast, they cooked it in cauldrons over open fires while they argued about turnips, true story, very interesting time period, the menu was limited but the technique was solid — and every single one of those cauldron pot roasts was building toward this exact recipe. The one I'm giving you. Today. Right now. Plain and simple.
The so-called food sites — the ones with the ten-minute videos of someone whispering at a camera while they slowly stir a pot — those sites will tell you pot roast is HARD. Pot roast is fussy. Pot roast requires a sous-vide and a thermal immersion circulator and a degree from a culinary academy in Switzerland. WRONG. Pot roast is the most forgiving cut of meat in the entire known universe. You're SUPPOSED to overcook it. That's the WHOLE POINT. Time and low heat take a tough hunk of beef and turn it into something that falls apart when you LOOK at it. That's not cooking. That's MAGIC. And anybody can do magic. Even you. Especially you.
My pot roast — and families come up to me, big families, three generations in one room, they say, 'Bigly, the roast. The roast. Grandma asked for the recipe and Grandma never asks for ANYBODY'S recipe' — my pot roast is built on a deep sear, a tower of aromatics, real beef stock, a splash of red wine, and patience. That's it. The patience is the secret. The patience is the BIGLY ingredient. You let it go. You let the oven do the work. You walk away. You come back three hours later and you have a roast that makes people cry at the table. Real tears. Tremendous tears. Believe me.
Ingredients
- 3.5-4 lbboneless chuck roast(chuck only — round and rump are for rookies)
- 2 tsp, plus more to tastekosher salt
- 1 tspblack pepper
- 2 tbspvegetable oil
- 2 tbspunsalted butter
- 2 largeyellow onions, quartered
- 1 lbcarrots, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
- 1.5 lbYukon Gold potatoes, halved
- 3 ribscelery, cut into 2-inch pieces
- 6 clovesgarlic, smashed
- 2 tbsptomato paste
- 2 tbspall-purpose flour
- 1 cupdry red wine(something you'd actually drink, cooking wine is a crime)
- 3 cupsbeef stock(low-sodium, you'll season it yourself)
- 1 tbspWorcestershire sauce
- 6 sprigsfresh thyme
- 2 sprigsfresh rosemary
- 2bay leaves
- 2 tbspfresh parsley, chopped (for garnish)
Steps
- 1
Preheat the oven to 325°F.
- 2
Pat the roast bone-dry with paper towels. Season aggressively on all sides with the salt and pepper.
- 3
Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat until shimmering. Sear the roast on all sides until deeply browned — 4-5 minutes per side, no shortcuts. Transfer to a plate.
- 4
Reduce heat to medium. Add the butter, onions, carrots, and celery. Cook 6-8 minutes until edges are browned and aromatic.
- 5
Add the garlic and tomato paste. Stir constantly for 1-2 minutes until the paste turns brick-red.
- 6
Sprinkle flour over the vegetables and stir 1 minute.
- 7
Pour in the red wine and scrape up every browned bit on the bottom of the pot. Simmer 2 minutes until reduced by half.
- 8
Add the beef stock, Worcestershire, thyme, rosemary, and bay leaves. Bring to a simmer.
- 9
Nestle the roast back into the pot. The liquid should come about two-thirds up the side of the meat — not submerging it. Cover with a tight lid.
- 10
Transfer to the oven and braise 2.5 hours. Add the potatoes, cover again, and continue braising another 45-60 minutes until the meat shreds easily with a fork and the potatoes are tender.
- 11
Transfer the roast and vegetables to a platter and tent with foil. Skim excess fat from the surface of the braising liquid. Bring the liquid to a simmer on the stovetop and reduce 5-10 minutes until it coats the back of a spoon. Taste and adjust salt.
- 12
Shred or slice the roast, return to the platter with the vegetables, ladle the gravy generously over the top, and scatter parsley. Serve immediately.
One more thing
And that's the roast. Three hours, mostly hands-off, and you've got a Sunday dinner that puts every restaurant pot roast on Earth to shame. The kind of dinner where the leftovers — if there ARE leftovers, which, statistically speaking, there will not be — become the greatest sandwich of your life on Monday. Pile the meat on a soft roll, ladle the gravy over the top, add a little horseradish, and you'll forget what you were upset about. Pot roast is a CURE. A cure for bad days. A cure for bad weeks. A cure for whatever the day threw at you. The thirty-minute weeknight nonsense out there can keep right on going — this is the real thing. The slow thing. The BIGLY thing. That's the recipe.
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Substitutions, what to serve it with, why other chefs are wrong about it. He's got opinions.
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