‘Delicious, not glamorous’: how to make a pot roast

A pot roast is probably the antithesis of glamorous cooking. But that’s also sort of the point. For as long as we’ve been cooking meat, we’ve looked for ways to make the tougher cuts more tender and succulent. It’s the kind of cooking that every culture around the world has developed individually, a way of transforming the cheap and possibly unappetising into something delicious. The answer is simple, and relies on three elements: low heat, moisture and a lidded cooking vessel.

Pot roast is the American way of slow-cooking whole joints of unforgiving meat, usually a piece of beef (although similar principles apply to pork and lamb). But this kind of cooking is not confined to the US, and really, I am using the term ‘pot roast’ as a shorthand for any kind of slow, indirect, enclosed cooking. The same techniques are found in German Sauerbraten, Cuban ropa vieja, and the French pot au feu – where the meat and vegetables are poached together but served as two different courses.