This article was written for Annabel & Grace, which is now part of Rest Less.
I’m pretty sure that many A&G readers are far better cooks than I am. However, with Christmas looming and many of us planning to cook roast beef, I thought it might be helpful to let you in on the secret of cooking the perfect joint.
This recipe is from my friend, Julia, who’s renowned for her fabulously tasty Sunday lunches. We were out walking when she mentioned that she’d cooked ultra-slow roast beef based on Heston Blumenthal’s recipe, and how it was perfectly pink and tasted amazingly tender. Here’s how she did it…
Julia’s ultra-slow roast beef
Buy yourself a lovely piece of roast beef to suit your family’s appetite. I buy either a rolled sirloin or rolled rib. I have to say that this way of cooking roast beef is so fantastic that people do come back for seconds and thirds, so don’t scrimp! We weren’t left with enough to have cold roast beef sandwiches last week!
Firstly, make sure that your beef has been sitting out at room temperature for an hour or two before cooking. This is important as the joint will cook more evenly if you do.
Preheat your oven to 120°C. Season the fat with salt and pepper, then spend a few minutes searing it in a hot pan on top of your Aga or hob. Then spread the fat with mustard. I use Dijon, but English Mustard is just as good.
Lay it in a roasting dish and insert your thermometer into the middle of the beef. Set the thermometer to 55°C for rare or 57°C for medium rare. Put it in the oven at 120°C for half an hour.
Next, turn the oven down to 80°C and leave it to cook for 4 – 5 hours. My Thermopro has an alarm when it reaches the correct temperature, so it’s very easy to use. It’s attached by a wire that you shut the door around, with a magnet on the back of the unit so that it sits on the outside of your oven door.
Once it’s ready, remove your beef from the oven and put it on a roasting dish or plate. Cover with foil and a tea towel and leave to rest for at least an hour. This part is very important. The beauty of this is that you can leave it to rest for as long as you like, so you can be flexible with your timings. It’s still warm after an hour and a half and once you pour lashings of hot gravy over the top, it’s perfect.
Now that I’ve been converted, I’ll never cook beef any other way because it always used to be a bit of a lottery for me. Was it rare enough or wasn’t it? And I didn’t like the outer edge being brownish. With this method, you can achieve a perfect pink colour the whole way through the piece of meat, and it’s so much more tender than a fast cooking method. You’ll notice that when you get it out of the oven, there really isn’t much juice in the tray as it’s retained it all!
Happy Roast Beef! Julia x
Support your local butcher!
Grace’s perfect roast potatoes
These take a little bit more effort, but I think crispy roast potatoes are such an important part of any roast. I use King Edwards, which is one of the best varieties for roasties, although Maris Piper and Desirée work well too.
Place a roasting tray with vegetable oil in it (or, even better, goose fat) on the highest shelf of a 200-degree oven to get piping hot.
Thinly peel the potatoes before cutting the larger ones in half (you can leave small ones whole). Place them in a steamer fitted over a large pan of boiling water, put a lid on, turn the heat down to low, and steam them for 10-15 minutes. When done, you should be able to slide the tip of a small, sharp knife into the potatoes easily without it breaking them up.
Drain the water off (you can keep some for making the gravy later if you like) and tip the potatoes into the saucepan. Put the lid back and, holding the lid on firmly with your hand protected by a cloth or oven glove, shake it vigorously from side to side to roughen the potatoes up. This is how you get those moreish, crunchy edges. Carefully tip the potatoes into the hot roasting tray and turn them over so they’re evenly coated with oil/fat.
Pop back into the hot oven on the highest shelf and cook for 50 minutes or until they’re golden brown and crispy on the outside, but soft and fluffy inside. I usually turn them over halfway through. Sprinkle with rock salt (and a few finely chopped herbs if you like) and serve.
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Have you tried these recipes? If so, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.