‘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.

These cuts are cheap because they are harder to handle: they need coaxing and proper cooking time to prevent them from being dry or chewy. The cuts come from areas of the animal that have worked harder during the animal’s life, so the muscles are made up of tougher fibres, and the connective tissue between them takes longer to break down. Done properly, they should be so soft you could cut them with a spoon, and should sing with deep, complex flavour.

Indirect cooking is a far gentler way of cooking than searing or roasting. But it’s fair to say that the result is not a looker. Braising or poaching does not confer colour or grill marks; there is no golden rendered fat, crisp at the edge.