Originally Posted by
Plow
do non-crock-pot recipes count in here?
haven't seen any good pot roasts cuz it's kinda hard to control a crock pot...
stuff you need:
meat
2-3 onions
6 or so carrots
however many potatoes you like
1/2 cup to a cup of liquid... I like a mix of about a half cup beef broth and about a half cup of beer. Other people like red wine, and I guess most common is just straight up a can of broth
salt, pepper, garlic, rosemary, thyme
So, start with a bigass chunk o' beef, 3-5 lbs, really pretty much anything works but a big cut of chuck is generally the way to go. Make sure you let it sit to room temperature or it'll be a pain to cook properly.
Take a big ole pot, or a dutch oven, or whatever. You need to be able to get it hot, which is why crock pot doesn't work so well, but I'll go into what you can do with a crock pot at the end.
Coat the bottom of the pot with olive oil, then toss in a couple pats of butter. Get it as hot as you can without burning the oil/butter. A tiny bit of smoke is ok but be careful not to ruin it.
Toss in the beef. Salt and pepper the ever loving shit out of it. Kosher salt is nice cuz it sticks real well.
Brown each side. Then take out the beef. Recoat the bottom of the pan with butter/olive oil as neccessary.
Cut the onions in half, peel, then cut off the tips. Toss them as they are (halves) into the pan, along with a couple cloves of garlic, and brown the flat side and the rounded side. Pull them out, cut up your carrots, and do the same.
Now take all that out, and pour in your liquid. Make sure you scrape the bottom really well and get all that delicious stuff left behind mixed up into the broth.
Then just chop your potatoes and put everything back into the liquid. Keep it hot for about 10 or 15 minutes, then take it to the lowest you can possibly get it and let it cook for 4-6 hours. Toss in some herbs like rosemary and thyme, a couple small sprigs fresh or a couple pinches of dried. And, of course, a bay leaf or 2 (don't forget to take it out at the end lol).
As to a crock pot, the main thing is that you can't really do the browning in the crock pot, so you have to scrape the bottom of your browning pan really really well to get all that stuff mixed into the broth, and then you'd transfer it over and do it all in the crock pot.
It's done when attempting to cut into the meat fails because it just falls apart instead.