pot roast

On the Bone: For a Chuck Roast It’s Bigger and Better

October 25, 2017 / / Mains, Recipes

On the bone –or not–is a choice to make when you buy any of the big cuts of beef, lamb or pork. Generally, I prefer roasts that are on the bone.  They have more flavor and produce richer juices than their de-boned counterparts. The recipe I offer here is for a beef chuck roast on the bone.

Certainly, there are those who, for example, prefer a standing rib roast on the bone (without it how can it stand?).  Conversely, the boneless cut is easier to carve, cooks in less time and is just neater.  If the flavor difference is not crucial, boneless is a doable alternative.

Chuck roast on the bone

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Fall and Winter Pot Roast–And the Best You’ll Ever Have!

September 27, 2017 / / Uncategorized

I’ve been making this sweet and sour pot roast for years ever since I found the recipe in an obscure cookbook called Menus and Memoirs: Confessions of a Culinary Snob by George Spunt who spent his formative childhood years in a wealthy French-Austrian Russian family who emigrated to Shanghai in the early part of the 20th century and lived there until communist rule took over. He spent his remaining years in San Francisco and wrote several more books including a step by step guide to Chinese cooking, which he learned from the family Shanghainese chef who was commandeered by various family members to cook middle European food in the Chinese manner. It’s an interesting compilation indeed.

Fall roses and pot roast

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Tis’ the Season to Relish Comfort Food: This time, Beef Pot Roast Becomes Beef Pot Pie

November 16, 2016 / / Mains, Recipes

Perhaps the enjoyment of comfort food—seeking out solace with knife, fork and spoon—is more warranted than ever.  We have the growing morass of Washington politics within The New Disarray as pathological as urinary incontinence as some Americans grapple with the likes of  the threats to put an end to climate control policies, the EPA agency and the standards it protects, cannulating immigrants to what amounts to exile  and even the department of Education is under the gun as the new leader-to-be of the free world takes an ax to all that we’ve been used to for decades in the name of shaking up the establishment like a deadly virus. Or was it all a fatal scam to get elected?

That’s why I may turn to my favorite palliatives–butter, cream, sugar, flour, beef, poultry, anything sweet, pastry–loading up on carbs and the like, at least for a while as classic comfort food fills my fantasies.  I’m even renewing my penchant for Dunkin Donuts.

The basic beef pot roast

The basic beef pot roast

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Pot Roast: An All-American Standard for Sunday Supper and Comfort-Food Goodness

September 21, 2016 / / Mains, Recipes

Forget about cheffy burgers, artisanal farm-to-table pork buns or the progression of locally sourced, pastured and sustainably raised datum of dishes one must eat for culinary correctness and instead plunge your fork into the classic pot roast.

It’s so old-fashioned—but never out of style–it may rank as the perfect helping of comfort food. And the thing is it’s so easy to make at home as an especially good Sunday supper.  All you need is some time for low and slow oven roasting in a covered pot.

A Dutch oven is the cooking receptacle of choice, and the best are those enameled cast-iron pots made by Le Creuset.

A chuck roast is braised in a Dutch oven with onions and surrounding vegetables of potatoes and carrots

A chuck roast is braised in a Dutch oven with onions and surrounding vegetables of potatoes and carrots

Traditionally the two best cuts for pot roast are the chuck roast or brisket.  Other cuts such as shoulder, rump and top round don’t have the same marbling as the very fatty cuts of chuck.

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A perfect dish of pot roast: this one is an amazingly good sweet and sour brisket

March 9, 2016 / / Uncategorized

This is the best tasting dish of pot roast—aka braised beef—from a repertoire of various methods in which to cook tougher cuts of meat.  Here a brisket is dredged lightly in seasoned flour, browned in a Dutch oven, onions are then sautéed in the pot with a few cloves of crushed garlic and braised in liquid such as beef or chicken stock.  It’s cooked slowly either on top of the stove or the oven. This is the basic method for braised beef.

Brisket with sweet and sour raisin sauce

Brisket with sweet and sour raisin sauce

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