Drunken Pot Roast

Pot Roast:  Cut of beef browned and then cooked until tender, often with vegetables, in a covered pot.

Marinade:   A liquid mixture, usually of vinegar or wine and oil with various spices and herbs in which meat or vegetables are soaked before cooking.

Potted:  Intoxicated, plastered, stewed, besotted, or inebriated.

The foregoing pretty much sums things up for me when it comes to this week’s French Fridays with Dorie challenge.  We were to take a lesser cut of beef, soak it in wine overnight, brown the meat on the stove, engage in multiple steps over scores of minutes while dirtying a multitude of pots and pans (all the while the browned meat sits serenely in its own pot) in order to produce a braising liquid, then cooking the meat on the stove and in the oven for 2-3 hours.  Voilà—what started out tough and tasteless should now be tender and tasteful.  It’s a miracle, I declare!

That is how it was supposed to be.  But I made the laborious journey even more arduous when I had to visit four supermarkets to find a suitable cut of beef, I completely miscalculated the time and effort needed to complete the process as described in the recipe (I claimed the recipe was faulty, but Sous Chef—who is able to do addition and subtraction in his head—said it was not and that I had added the cooking and preparation times incorrectly), and I kept finding more interesting dining options, so the meat was left to marinate for three days instead of overnight.  The result was a pot roast that was indeed “potted” by any definition of the word.  Yes the meat was fork tender, but it had soaked up so much wine that even nearly three hours of cooking failed to dispel the wine’s alcoholic component.

Not for the first time, Sous Chef reminded me to read a recipe carefully, starting at the top and working my way downwards, rather than skipping around like some adolescent reading a Harold Robbins book and looking for the “good parts.”

For more French Friday with Dorie experiences visit www.frenchfridayswithdorie.com.

Boeuf a' la Mode

 

Print

Prep time

15 mins

Cook time

3 hours

Total time

3 hours 15 mins

 

Dorie refers to this as great pot roast. You can find it on page 252 of her book Around My French Table, which is one of our most used cookbooks. I normally don't post her recipes and encourage people to purchase her cookbook, but at the request of many Facebook Friends I'm sharing this one. Warning - Pot roast needs to marinate overnight in one bottle of wine, so allow time for that. Also, this roast needs about 2½ to 3 hours to cook so plan your meal time accordingly. This is not something you can whip on a weeknight after work. Oh, and don't let the meat marinate for three days in the bottle of wine or your sous chef might complain that the alcohol didn't burn off sufficiently. This is good served either on a bed of pasta in the style of beef burgundy, or on a bed of mashed potatoes, or spaghetti squash.

Author: Dorie Greenspan - Around My French Table

Recipe type: Entree

Cuisine: French

Serves: 4-6

Ingredients

• 1 - 4 pound, trimmed chuck, round or rump roast
• salt and freshly ground pepper
• 1 onion, halved and thinly sliced
• 2 carrots, trimmed peeled and cut into chunks
• 2 celery stalks, trimmed, peeled and cut into chunks (save the leaves for bouquet garni)
• Bouquet Garni - 2 thyme sprigs, 2parsley sprigs, 1 rosemary sprig, 1 bay leaf, and celery leaves, tied together in a piece of dampened cheesecloth
• 1 750-ml bottle of heary, fruity, red wine
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 4 cups beef broth
• 3 tablespoons oil (grapeseed, canola or peanut oil preferred)
• 3 tablespoons Cognac or other brandy
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste

Instructions

1. Salt and pepper the roast and place in bowl or container that will hold the roast, bottle of wine and vegetables. Toss in onion, carrot, celery and bouquet garni. Pour the wine and olive oil over mixture, and mix everything together the best you can. Cover the container and put in a refrigerator to marinate overnight. (If you can, turn the roast from time to time so the wine permeates it evenly.)
2. The next day, remove the beef from the marinade and bring to room temperature (approximately 30-60 minutes). Reserve marinade.
3. Strain the marinade, reserving the vegetables and bouquet garni. Pour the liquid into a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat and cook until reduced by half (approximately 10 minutes). Add the beef broth and bring back to a boil, then remove the pan from heat.
4. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Rack should be centered in the oven with sufficient space to place your covered Dutch Oven.
5. Using paper towels, pat the beef as dry as you can. Put a heavy skillet over medium-high heat and pour in 2 tablespoons of oil. When it is hot, put the roast in the pan and sear all sides (approximately 2 minutes per side), making sure you get a good color and crust on the meat. Transfer the roast to Dutch Oven and season it again with salt and pepper. Discard the oil.
6. Return the skillet to medium heat, pour in the last tablespoon of oil and toss in the drained vegetables. Cook, stirring until the vegetables are softened, approximately 10 minutes. Transfer everything to the Dutch Oven.
7. Place the same skillet over medium heat. Pour in ½ cup of the wine-broth mixture and stir in the tomato paste. Cook and stir until blended in with mixture. Stir in remaining wine-broth mixture and stir until blended, then add the bouquet garni back into mixture, season with salt and pepper and add to Dutch Oven.
8. Put Dutch Oven over medium-high heat and bring to boil. When liquid is boiling turn off heat, cover Dutch Oven with a piece of aluminum foil, and place lid on Dutch Oven. Place in oven and cook for 1 hour.
9. Pull Dutch Oven out of oven and remove lid and foil, and turn meat over. Re-cover the pot with foil and lid, slip it back into the oven and cook for another 1½ hours to 2 hours until meat is fork tender. Remove meat from Dutch Oven and cover. Let rest while you make the sauce.
10. Taste the sauce and if you would like it more concentrated in flavor pour it into a saucepan over high heat and boil sauce down until it is the way you like it. If you want to thicken like a gravy, you can add 2 tablespoons flour. Once sauce is complete, strain the sauce to remove vegetables. Either discard vegetables, or if you like soft vegetables serve on the side.
11. Slice the beef and serve either warm or room temperature.

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