Old Fashioned Beef Pot Roast Recipe

• An Instant Read Thermometer
• 3-pound beef chuck roast
• 1 large white onion, julienned
• 2 cups sliced white mushrooms
• 4 stalks celery sliced thin
• Salt to taste
• Pepper to taste
• 1 Tbsp garlic powder

• 1 Tbsp onion powder
• 1 tsp paprika, sweet, or smoked
• 4 cups Beef Broth
• 1 pkg Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix
• 4 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2 Tbsp cooking oil or olive oil
• 2 Tbsp unsalted whole butter
• Roasting pan with a lid, or a roasting pan and aluminum foil

Preparation

In a large roasting pan, heat 2 tbsp of cooking oil or olive oil, take your seasoned roast and brown it on all sides, remove from pan, add julienned onion, and sweat, add celery, and sweat for 5 minutes, add butter, and allow it to melt, add mushrooms and cook 5 minutes. Add half your Worcestershire sauce, sweat the mixture, set the roast back in the pot on top of the vegetables, pour the remaining Worcestershire sauce onto the roast, add the Lipton’s onion soup mix on top of the roast, add one can of Campbells Golden Mushroom soup on top of the roast, add the beef stock, the liquid should come almost to the top of the roast. Place the lid on the roasting pan, or cover with foil, and place in a pre-heated 325⁰F oven and roast for 3 hours. At three hours, remove the lid and take a temperature of the roast. Done is 175⁰F and fork tender is 200⁰F-210⁰F. Allow the roast to rest for 20 minutes. While the roast is roasting prepare your sides, mashed potatoes, roasted potatoes, buttered carrots, whatever you desire.

Good beef pot roast is hard to beat, but if you handle it wrong you will be extremely disappointed. Roasts except for Prime Rib and Chateau Briand are usually cut from the tougher parts of the beef, where the muscles get the most use. Chuck roasts come from the shoulder, have a moderate amount of fat and connective tissue. This makes them ideal for braising. To make the perfect pot roast you need to follow some guidelines, if you do, you will love this cut of beef and it will become a family favorite.

First, always purchase a well marbled chuck roast. The marbling is intramuscular fat that melts as the roast cooks and leaves the roast with space between the layers of meat causing it to be tender. If you cook it to fast, the fat will not melt, and the proteins will tighten up and the roast will be tough.

This is a picture of a perfect chuck roast, if you look closely, you can see the muscle structure is separated by a thin line of fat, the different portions all contain a high amount of marbling, and the beef itself is almost cherry red, indicating a good solid meat structure from a healthy animal. You will also see that there is some larger areas of fat, this too will melt with the proper cooking time and temperature. A good Beef Pot Roast, this one is 3 pounds, will need roughly 1 hour and 15 minutes per pound at 325⁰F in a covered roasting pan to get to 210⁰F and allow the roast to become fork tender. This meant being able to separate the meat with a fork. If you were to pull the roast at 175⁰F the roast would be flavorful, but you will need a steak knife to cut it. A well-cooked Beef Pot Roast should be fork tender.

Another key thing necessary for the best overall flavor is to sear the roast on all sides. I seasoned this one with salt, black, white, green, and pink ground pepper, All-spice, and smoked Hungarian paprika. This combination is an amazing seasoning for beef, whether you are going to roast it, smoke it, or grill it.

Another thing to keep in mind, steaks are between 1 and 2 inches thick, roasts are 2 inches thick or thicker. Another reason for braising and/or slow roasting. Braising is brown the meat, and then cooking it in liquid either in the oven or on the stove top, covered. This lower cooking temperature and liquid in the pot allows the meat to breakdown and get tender, which is our goal.

Once you have your roast browned on all sides, then remove it from the pot, and cook your aromatics in the pot to form a flavor base for your roast and sauce. Usually you would use mirepoix, Celery, carrots, and onions at a ratio of two parts onion to one part each celery and carrots. Since I roasted the carrots separately, I didn’t add them to the pot, but used celery, onion, and mushrooms instead.

Once the aromatics are sweated to release their flavors, put the roast back in the pot on top of the aromatics and add your liquid. I use beef broth; it is rich and enhances the flavor of the roast. I also add Worcestershire sauce to enhance the flavor.

Once you get to this step, make sure your oven is pre-heated to 325⁰F, place the lid or cover on the roasting pan, and put it in the oven. Keep it covered and in the oven for three hours. At three hours, open the oven and remove the lid and take a temperature with your thermometer. It takes three seconds to get the temperature reading. Once you see what the temperature is, if it has not reached 210⁰F, place the lid back on and continue to cook, check it again in 30 minutes and do so until it reaches the desired temperature. Once there, you have the perfect roast.

WHERE DO YOU PUT THE MEAT THERMOMETER IN A ROAST BEEF?

Taking the temperature of a beef roast is done by inserting a meat probe into the center most thickest part of the roast. Depending on what you are preparing from the roast determines the final cook temperature, the pull temperature, and how long you rest it before slicing it. If it is being served as a pot roast, you are going to cook it until it is done, 160⁰F or 71⁰C, of it is for sandwiches like sliced roast beef, you will cook the roast to 135⁰F or 51.6⁰C. It is important to understand that roast beef is one of the meats, as with steaks, where you can cook the meat safely to any temperature you like. It isn’t like poultry or pork where specific temperatures has to be reached to make it safe to eat. Always refer to a meat cooking temperature chart and use either a ChefsTemp Final Touch X10 Instant Read thermometer or a ChefsTemp Quad XPro oven probe thermometer with long distance remote.

DO A MEAT THERMOMETER WORK ON THIN MEAT?

Instant read thermometers will work on thin meat if you insert the probe from the side. The proper way to get a temperature reading on thin meat is to lift it from the cooking surface with a pair of kitchen tongs and then insert the probe from the side to get an accurate temperature reading. The ChefsTemp Final Touch X10 is perfectly suited for this because the sensing probe is in the very end of the thinnest part of the probe. Any meat that you are cooking with the exception of thinly sliced deli meats can be tested for temperature, it only requires that you insert the probe of your thermometer into the thickest part from the side.

Finaltouch X10

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