Any Good Pot Roast Recipes?

Hated pot roast all my life. My mother’s was beef broth shoe leather with tasteless veggies. Several years ago we attended a birthday dinner at Lark Creek Inn, (now closed), in Larkspur. We looked at the menu on line and their pot roast sounded good for some unknown reason. I ordered it. It was so delicious, flavorful and tender. It came in an individual serving size bowl. Can’t get the recipe from them and their other Lark Creek restaurants in the bay area won’t cough it up, so does anybody here have a good recipe? Damn, now I hungry.

I’ve been on a life-long quest for the perfect pot roast. I stumbled upon this several years ago and continue to make because it is really the best (and easiest) I’ve ever had:

Mississippi Pot Roast
1 (3-4 pounds) chuck roast
1/2 lb. cremini mushrooms, sliced
1 packet ranch dressing mix
1 packet au jus gravy mix
8 T. butter
4-5 pepperocini peppers

Scatter mushrooms around the bottom of a slow cooker, then place chuck roast on top of the mushrooms. Dump ranch dressing mix, au jus mix, stick of butter and the pepperocinis on top of the roast and cover. Turn slow cooker on low for 8-9 hours. Remove roast and allow to rest for 15 minutes. Pour gravy into fat separator and de-fat. Chop pepperocinis and add with mushrooms into gravy. Carve into slices (or shred) and serve with polenta or mashed potatoes. Pass gravy.

what tends to go wrong with a lot of people’s pot roast is they don’t brown it first.

Ingredients:
chuck roast - size how you want. I normally go 4-6 lbs because I like leftovers
onions
garlic - usually leave cloves whole and put in as many as you’d like depending on your taste for garlic. I go nuts personally.
various root vegetables depending on your taste (carrots/parsnips/turnips/potatoes). I usually go for fingerling potatoes due to thickness, parsnips, turnips and carrots.

chop root vegetables to be of uniform size…1/2 inch to 3/4 inch thickness in general. drizzle olive oil over the veggies, toss with salt and pepper. Recommend kosher salt.
preheat oven to 350

Use a dutch oven style pot (I use le creuset) but anything similar would work. Oil the pan and heat till very hot. Salt and pepper the roast liberally (kosher salt) Place roast in the pot and sear on both sides until it is a deep brown. Usually 5-10 minutes a side. Really let it brown. Take roast out of the pan.

Throw the veggies into the oil and give them a quick toss in the oil to heat them up, but not long. Just a couple minutes. This is more about seasoning the veggies with the beef oils.

Deglaze with some beef stock, maybe a cup or two and a little red wine, maybe half a cup. Put the roast back in, and nestle in well. Cook in the oven covered for ~2 hours. Beef should be falling apart. easily.

Remove beef and use a slotted spoon to remove the veggies. Make a gravy with the remaining juice. You could just dissolve flour or wonra in water and add that to the juices on the stovetop or you could make a roux while the roast is cooking and add the roux to the juices instead. You can also just skip the gravy and use the juices because they are delicious on their own without the thickening.

Both of these are tantalizing.

Wow, I had no idea there was a ‘recipe’ for pot roast! Normally, get a roast, brown it on all sides after heavy salt, put some wine in there and a bunch of herbs, onions, carrots and maybe potatoes and cook for a LONG time. How does one ruin a pot roast?

Damn. Now I’m in the mood for pot roast and it isn’t even autumn yet.

Maybe this weekend.

Mississippi Roast is amazing!!! I add more pepperoncinis, and if you can find low sodium in either the ranch or au jus, that is a bonus. It can get a tad salty, but holy moly the taste is great.

Or if you want to start from scratch, here is the recipe without those packets. I haven’t tried it this way yet.

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This is the Cooks Illustrated recipe mentioned by Dennis:

Classic Pot Roast

INGREDIENTS
1 (3 ½- to 4-pound) boneless beef chuck-eye roast, pulled into two pieces at natural seam and trimmed of large knobs of fat
Kosher Salt
2 tablespoons Unsalted Butter
2 medium onions, halved and sliced thin (about 2 cups)
1 large carrot, chopped medium (about 1 cup)
1 celery rib, chopped medium (about ¾ cup)
2 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed through garlic press (about 2 teaspoons)
1 cup Beef Broth, plus 1 to 2 cups for sauce (see note)
½ cup Dry Red Wine, plus ¼ cup for sauce
1 tablespoon Tomato Paste
1 bay leaf
1 sprig plus ¼ teaspoon chopped fresh thyme leaves
ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Balsamic Vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS (SERVES 6 TO 8)

  1. Sprinkle pieces of meat with 1 tablespoon salt (1½ teaspoons if using table salt), place on wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet, and let stand at room temperature 1 hour.

  2. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 300 degrees. Heat butter in heavy-bottomed Dutch oven over medium heat. When foaming subsides, add onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and beginning to brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Add carrot and celery; continue to cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes longer. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir in 1 cup broth, ½ cup wine, tomato paste, bay leaf, and thyme sprig; bring to simmer.

  3. Pat beef dry with paper towels and season generously with pepper. Using 3 pieces of kitchen twine, tie each piece of meat into loaf shape for even cooking.

  4. Nestle meat on top of vegetables. Cover pot tightly with large piece of foil and cover with lid; transfer pot to oven. Cook beef until fully tender and sharp knife easily slips in and out of meat, 3½ to 4 hours, turning halfway through cooking.

  5. Transfer roasts to cutting board and tent loosely with foil. Strain liquid through mesh strainer into 4-cup liquid measuring cup. Discard bay leaf and thyme sprig. Transfer vegetables to blender jar. Allow liquid to settle 5 minutes, then skim any fat off surface. Add beef broth as necessary to bring liquid amount to 3 cups. Place liquid in blender with vegetables and blend until smooth, about 2 minutes. Transfer sauce to medium saucepan and bring to simmer over medium heat.

  6. While sauce heats, remove twine from roast and slice against grain into ½-inch-thick slices. Transfer meat to large serving platter. Stir chopped thyme, remaining ¼ cup wine, and vinegar into sauce and season to taste with salt and pepper. Spoon half of sauce over meat; pass remaining sauce separately.

A lot of people skip the browning step. That’s how you ruin it.

can’t decide which to try. You guys each need to make your recipe, then send to me, I will pick winners!

Iirc, CI has suggested that having meat exposed to the hot oven air will effectively brown the meat. Granted, you will have to flip the pot roast at least once and have the braising liquid no more than 2/3’s the height of the meat.

Amy Thielen’s pot roast is the best I’ve ever had.

Cooking roast, or any slow cooked material, should be a fundamental skill.

One of the primary mistakes and I believe the biggest, is sealing the vessel (specifically a dutch oven) even at low temperatures. This is covered in The Food Lab. Sealing the vessel creates much higher temperatures than the apparent setting. So… word to the wise, leave the lid cracked when you put it in the oven. I have tested this myself and it is absolutely correct. The problem with a sealed dutch oven and temperatures that go beyond 300 even when the oven is set to 240 is that you can drive moisture from the meat, even in a sealed environment. Slow cookers may avoid this with a very light lid that allows easy egress, but oven users beware.

The Cooks Illustrated recipe plus David’s browning step and no blending is more or less what I do off the cuff. Good to see celery recommended, I think a little (just) adds a nice flavor, with a higher ratio of carrots. I have another nice recipe for a lamb shoulder chop braise (with the nice surprise addition of cinnamon sticks to the liquid) where you do that with a sieve (and where the meat gets air-browned quite nicely as Mel mentions), so I can see how blending / sieve for sauce might work here.

How does it ruin it?

That sounds quite good

Makes it taste more boiled and less roasted. I find it usually isn’t as tender either. As others have said if you don’t cover it and flip it you could probably skip browning it but not otherwise.