You know (or maybe you don’t, but I’ll tell you) how wordpress logs all kinds of fun info about how people find blogs and what search terms sent people to your site? Well, they do, and it’s a great way to procrastinate. I could spend hours looking at my stats and thinking about what I should add based on what people are looking at.
Anyway – I saw a very interesting search that sent someone to my site. The query was: “can you cook roast beef without foil.” This made me realize that I didn’t give traditional cooking instructions with my roast beef recipe. I assumed that everyone knew the traditional way, and so I just offered my revised version. But then I realized that not everyone spends 95% of their time thinking about food, and not everyone grew up in a household that held roast beef in such high regard. Whatever the reason, this oversight on my part must be remedied!
YES! You can cook a roast without foil. I use foil for 2 reasons: 1)I’m lazy, and foil makes for easier clean up, and 2)it keeps the juices around the meat, infusing more of the meat with yummy flavor and making it more uniformly tender. That said, I have gotten great results using a more traditional method. Traditionally, since you’d sear the meat on all sides and then saute some aromatics, you would use a large dutch oven (or other heavy pan with a tightly fitting lid). I’ve used this method with my version of roast beef and it works just fine. If you choose this option, you should choose a vessel with the smallest possible diameter in relation to your roast. This way the liquid will cover more of the roast. (again, if you were making a traditional roast this would be different, since you’d want a slightly larger pan for the searing). If you don’t have a dutch oven (I highly recommend an enamel coated cast iron one, it’s a great investment and there are lots of inexpensive alternatives to the expensive name brand), you can use a roaster with a lid, a casserole with a lid, a soup pot, etc, etc. Just keep in mind that the wider the vessel, the shallower the liquid will be around your roast.
So, go, free yourself from aluminum foil! Or, you could invest in some foil and a disposable foil roaster and free yourself of dishes almost completely! (I do this on holidays when I’m going to have a lot of people and a lot of stuff to do, and soaking and scrubbing a pot is the last thing I want to waste energy on).
