A perfect beef roast every time…
- Know thy oven. Sure, it SAYS 200, but that does not mean it’s 200. It could be 160, it could be 250. You just never know. Get one of those tinny inexpensive hanging oven thermometers and check out all the notches. How hot IS it when that dial says 200? In my compact oven at home, it’s actually 275. No wonder those cookies always burned when I first moved in.
- Don’t hurry. 375 does cook a roast faster, but 200 will give you a uniform medium rare in 4 hours. So you spend $80 on a prime rib - have some respect for it, will ya? An animal died for that hunk of beef. It deserves slow-roasting.
- Don’t use a meat thermometer. I don’t care if everybody swears by them, but if you want to be a roast-meister, learn to tell how much fat is in the meat by the marbling. Learn to tell how much bone there is by weight and size of bones. Learn to intuitively judge thickness/time ratio. If you’re a traditionalist like me when it comes to slow roasting, it should be perfect everytime regardless.
- Sear the outside EVERYTIME. Just because you’ve got that dial on broil it does not mean you’re searing the outside of the roast! In order for the outside caramelization to happen without losing half the juices of the meat, sear 4 minutes each side on medium heat in a heavy-bottomed pan.
- Don’t over season. If you’re going to salt it, use coarse salt and cracked pepper, and RUB with garlic, not COVER in garlic. None of that ground salt and pre-ground pepper. If you use pre-ground stuff, instead of helping to protect the roast in the oven, you’d just get a dry salting hunk of meat because the fine salt would draw moisture out.
- Practice DOES make perfect. Like grilling a steak and testing for doneness, roasting beef is no different. In the beginning, follow the charts. But eventually you’ll see that no chart can compete with experience and human intuition.
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on Monday, December 19th, 2005 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Sally's Kitchen Tips.
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