(no subject)

[which_chick]

Dinner at my house this evening was pulled beef arm roast (in gravy) with boiled potatoes and carrots. Sometimes I think that the more time-consuming pieces of beef get overlooked in these, our modern times, and that's a damn shame. All ya'll are missing out, because slow cooked chuck gives you really quite nice food with no effort.



You'll need a good-sized (three pounds or so) piece of chuck. Arm roast is a part of chuck, though you don't see it all that often in the store. I had one because brother-the-younger buys his beef direct from a local York farmer in half-a-cow amounts. When you buy half-a-cow, you get to pick (within reason) the cuts you want and sometimes you end up with interesting things. Also, they give you really excellent soup bones with big marrow hunks in the middle. (I don't know how other people's half-a-cow options work, but Joe's half-a-cow deal comes all in named cuts of beef with freezer paper on it. He does not have to cut it up himself. They also grind up hamburger for him.) Should you ever go for the half-a-cow option, you will get to eat lots of different parts of cow and The Joy of Cooking has a diagram of the parts of cow so that you can see where what you are eating came from.

ANYWAY, so you need a good-sized piece of chuck. Try to get one with a bone in it. Take it home and put it in your crock pot. You may need to cut it in half. If you do, make sure that the bone gets into the crock pot, too. Put the lid on, turn the crock pot to "low" and go away for ten to twelve hours. You don't need to add any seasoning or any water or anything else. Just put the beef in the crock pot, put the lid on, turn it on low, and go away for ten to twelve hours. When the beef is falling apart into strands, it's done. You should not have to work very hard at all to make the beef be in small pieces. The fat and connective tissue -- you can use your hands to peel them off of the meat parts. If it's not that soft, it's not done yet. (Did you really wait ten to twelve hours?)

Now, take your beef and make it into bite-sized pieces of beef. You should not need a knife. Throw away the fat, connective tissue, and bone, unless you have a pet who would enjoy that stuff, in which case you can feed it to the collie or whatever. SAVE THE JUICE, though. You should have juice, a fair amount of it, even though you didn't add any in the first place. Put the juice in a large frying pan and make it into a damn fine gravy.

What? You don't know how to make gravy? Wha-wha-what? *sheesh* Kids these days...

Basically, gravy is thickened, cooked pan juices. You thicken the pan juices with either flour or cornstarch. All right-thinking persons use flour because it's more tolerant and reheats better and if you have halfway decent stock, your gravy will be glossy enough without cornstarch. Chuck will give you halfway decent stock, I promise.

Now, as I said, you put the juice in a large frying pan. Don't turn the heat on just yet.

Take a juice glass (straight sides, fairly short). Fill it about halfway full with cold water from the tap, maybe 3/4 cup of water. It's not an exact science. Add about two tablespoons of flour. Measuring here is not super important, but I'm giving you an amount so that you feel confident enough to give this a try. Using a fork, stir the flour into the water to make it look like milk. There will be some lumps, but that's okay. Now, holding the tines of the fork across the top of the glass to kind of strain, pour the whitewash you just made VERY SLOWLY IN A THIN STREAM into the frying pan. Do not pour the lumps in if you can help it. Stop pouring before you get to the lumps. (We throw the lumps away. Flour is cheap. It's okay.) Stir the proto-gravy with a fork so that it's pretty uniform. Now, turn the heat on to medium. Keep stirring about once a minute or so with your fork, using the bottom of it to scuff the bottom of the pan. As your pan heats up on the burner, the gravy will start to thicken on the bottom of the pan. If you don't stir, it kind of gets gunky on the bottom and NOT thick all through like a nice sauce. Bring the gravy to a boil and let it boil a minute or two. (Flour gravy has to be boiled to remove the raw "flour" taste. Cornstarch gravy dies if you boil it. Do not look to me for cornstarch directions.) If it's still not thick enough, go back to your juice glass and make another round of whitewash, just like you did before. IMPORTANT: Since the gravy is now hot, you need to STIR THE GRAVY while you pour the thin stream into it because of the gunky problem I mentioned. Go slowly and don't add too much -- flour whitewash is a time-delayed thickener and you can always add more later. Taste. See if it tastes okay. It will probably need salt and pepper to taste right. Gravy is like soup -- it needs way more salt and pepper than you think. Add in stages and taste as you go.

When you've got the gravy done, add the beef chunks and make sure everything's warm, serve with boiled potatoes and carrots. If you can't boil potatoes and carrots to have with your beef and gravy, you don't deserve to have 'em.

The beef-and-gravy part would also make a damn fine hot beef-and-gravy open-face sandwich.

Comments

[staceman.livejournal.com]

Quite cool. I never knew that roasts were as simple as throwing it in the pot, and leaving it alone. But what if you want to make one of those roast dishes that have all sorts of stuff in with the roast, like, potatoes and such? Do you put it all in at the beginning, or do you allow the roast to cook a little first, then add the rest? Or, is it best to just do it all seperately, like you mentioned at the end about the potatoes and carrots?

Oh, and, got any good recipes for home-made wedding soup? :)

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

It depends on the size of the (covered) roasting pan you have and how much effort you are willing to put into the process. This is the default crock pot recipe where the crock pot does all the work for you.

If you're doing pot roast in the oven WITH VEGGIES, start with an appropriate piece of meat before adding any veggies. Meat takes a lot longer than veggies. Cook the meat until it's pretty near done first and then add the veggies. The veggies will take about an hour at 325. Long, slow cooking makes for nicer pot roast than shorter cooking, which is why the crock pot thing works so well. Suitable veggies: onion, celery, carrots, potatoes (use the round, red, for-boiling kind), rutabagas (yum!), turnips.

When crock-potting the meat, I do the veggies seperately because I don't own a microwave (and don't want one) and heating up cold veggies is a pain in the ass without a microwave.

I don't eat wedding soup, it's not my thing. Studio audience? Anyone out there eat the stuff? Hook a brutha up, willya?

[staceman.livejournal.com]

There's loads of recipes around the 'net for wedding soup. I just kinda hoped it was something you've made before, because I love the detail you go into with your recipes/directions. Most recipes I find online for things, tend to have me asking many questions, with no one to answer. You seem to cover it all the first time around.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I'm frequently leery of trying online recipes... not because I have questions, but because I like pre-vouched-for food. Sometimes recipes read well but come out kind of *meh* -- nothing special, I could do better just fucking around in the kitchen. If I can get an actual human being to vouch for the recipe, I am more willing to try it myself, I guess.