The Prodigal Roast

I don’t think there was ever went a weekend without a roast being cooked at home. Whenever you go to my Dad’s house if you haven’t visited in a while he’ll make you a roast beef. Its like the prodigal roast, home is the hunter, home for a roast.
Cooking the roast was for some unknown reason the one thing I did not pay attention to during my childhood. I can tell you how much my grandmother paid for her house in Geelong sometime in the 1930’s. I can recount my first memory which was incidentally when my mother discovered I cut my first tooth, but I cannot recall how either of my parents cooked the family roast.
I just knew that it meant that I had to peel the vegi’s and it seemed to take all day, and also that they never made enough roast potatoes.
For years I winged my way through cooking roasts, I’d start with a vague game plan like cook meat at this temperature for this long and then turn the heat down to cook the vegi’s for another hour or more and then things pretty much fell apart from there.
Things would end up over cooked or undercooked and I would never have any idea as to why. So here you go this is pretty much what I’ve figured out about roasting so far, I’ll even give you my recipe of really crispy roast potatoes. Let’s go with Roast beef, just coz, roast anything you want as long as it’s legal.

I started reading Harold McGee’s book about a year back, it was kinda like reading biographies of old Hollywood, you know the ones where you find out everyone was gay and you think “But how come? they seemed so butch”, in it he breaks down a few long held ideas about the chemical process of cooking like the long held belief that adding olive oil to butter will stop it burning, it wont, and that searing meat in a pan before roasting seals in the juices, it doesn’t, the only way to seal meat would be in polyurethane, if you sear it in a hot pan it wont seal in the juices but it will create a crust on the meat and that adds to the flavour.
I like the idea of looking at cooking from a scientific perspective, I do think of it somewhat as a pseudo science its part creativity and part scientific principal and because of that part fact part fiction combination often times people end up doing things that they might believe make the difference to how a dish turns out but in actual fact does absolutely nothing.
Make cooking an experiment, everything I write about here is stuff I’ve observed during experiments.
For years I had been cooking roast beef on the highest heat in the oven for an hour before turning down the heat and slowly roasting, the result was all the juice evaporated from the meat and it ended up tough.
To try and alleviate that I started resting the meat which made a bit of difference until a saw something with Heston Blumenthal who is an English chef who runs a restaurant in the UK which was named best restaurant in the world in 2005. Obviously a guy worth taking cooking tips from.
He was saying that he’s been experimenting with the whole roasting process and had found that the slower you roast something the more tender it turns out which would seem logical considering dishes like osso bucco where you take a really tough cheap cut of meat and you cook it really slowly to break down the fibres.
He cooked this piece of beef at about 90c for 24 hours and it was beautifully rare when he carved it and everyone was suitably reverent when trying it so I thought I should give it a try, now my oven wont even go that low but I thought fair enough lets see if I can get something along those lines.
So I’ve started roasting red meats at about 160c for at least 2 hours usually more depending on how big the cut is and it’s something that seems to work whether I’m using an expensive cut from an organic butcher or something I bought from Safeway at the last minute.
This means that the moisture from the meat itself evaporates relatively slowly, gives the meat a uniform texture as opposed to the outside being really well done and the inside being rather rare which happens at higher temperatures and in your tougher cuts of meat the long cooking dissolves collagen in the meat into gelatin which makes it more tender.
So I flavour my beef with whatever I have around at the time, maybe some mustard maybe some garlic maybe a little red wine, whatever you think.
I add pepper but I tend not to salt the meat at this point more out of habit and a desire to monitor my salt intake than anything else and also because I do find that creating a crust on the meat before roasting it adds quite a bit of flavour without the extra salt.
I sear the meat on all sides in a really really hot pan with a little olive oil for a minute or so then place it in a roasting dish with some carrots, onions or whatever vegetables you happen to have with a little oil.( I don’t put the potatoes in the roasting dish though I have a whole other thing going there).
I let my meat roast with its vegi’s at 160c for at least an hour and a half for about a 1kg portion if you like it rare to medium, if you like it more well done then aim for about 2 and a half hours it’s at a low temperature so you wont dry it out. Check on it every so often just to make sure everything is cooking evenly and to turn the vegi’s and after about 45 minutes before the meat is done to your liking start your roast spuds.

Crispy Roast Spuds.

I use Sebago potatoes for my roast spuds they usually come unwashed from the supermarket and are pretty big they have a nice fluffy texture when cooked and also work really well when making mash potatoes. If I was making a potato salad I’d use something like Desiree spuds but I think you can’t beat a Sebago for roasting.
Peel and cut in half, the bigger the spud the less water it seems to absorb when you boil them.
Boil or steam your spuds until they are tender, no par boiling, no blanching, boil those spuds then drain them and let them sit freely draining in the colander until as much moisture as possible has evaporated away.
Then get a large roasting tray and coat with a little canola oil or sunflower oil, any oil that you can get a high heat from, I used to do this with butter and olive oil but it made the potatoes taste too fatty and masked their natural flavour so using the canola oil as well as being a little kinder to your heart is a little cleaner in the cooking.
Space your potatoes out on the tray they won’t get crispy if you crowd them.
When the potatoes are ready to go into the oven take the meat out and let it rest.
Turn your oven up to about 260c and roast the spuds on the highest shelf in the oven until they start to colour on the bottom then turn them and put them back into the oven after about 20 mins go back and check them and they will be pretty close to done, turn them again and start getting ready to carve the nicely rested roast. If you were brave and decided to try making that most fickle of dishes the Yorkshire pudding then you would have put it in at a high temp with the spuds but we’ll talk more about that another time. If you salted the water when boiling the spuds you will probably find that at this point you don’t need to add extra salt when you are ready to serve them. I’ve tried this recipe in both gas and electric ovens and its worked in both so try it out and tell me what you think.

A couple of flavour combinations I’ve tried for roasting.

For lamb: Orange, Rosemary, Marsala and thyme
Oregano, garlic, lemon and olives

For Beef: Red wine garlic and rosemary
Black pepper, whole grain mustard and port