How To Cook Classic, Fall-Apart Pot Roast in the Oven

Pot roast was a one-pot wonder long before that was a term for dishes that are inexpensive and require little hands-on cooking. This dish has long been the Sunday dinner that feeds a crowd and fills the whole house with a cozy aroma. After a few hours of cooking, you have tender pieces of beef in a rich glaze, surrounded by melt-in-your-mouth carrots, potatoes, and onions all soaked in the beef’s gravy. It’s a dish only a long, slow braise could deliver.

While it is near impossible to screw up a pot roast, there are a few steps that make this dish worthy of its celebrated status. Choosing the right cut of meat and the best potatoes for braising in the Dutch oven, and making a lush gravy are chief among them. Now, I haven’t tasted your mother’s pot roast, but I can say without question that this is the best beef pot roast you can make in the oven in your own home.

Beurre manié is a brilliant way to thicken soups, stews, and gravies at the end of cooking. It is essentially an uncooked roux and translates roughly to mean “kneaded butter.” One of the nicest things about beurre manié is that you can make a big batch, divide it, and freeze for future use, whisking it into gravy as needed for thickening without any additional cooking.

Tough, inexpensive cuts of beef are best for pot roast, like chuck, brisket, or round roast in the 3-pound range. The connective tissue that makes these cuts tough are actually what makes them ideal for pot roast. While the meat braises, the tissues cook down, creating a velvety broth that flavors and moistens the meat.

While the benefits of searing meat before cooking it are often debated, browning the beef for pot roast is required for a single reason: flavor. Coating the beef in a little flour and browning it in the same pot used later for braising gives us lots of lovely browned bits to scrape up during deglazing to build our gravy upon.

To be honest, I find the braised vegetables from the pot roast more crave-worthy than the beef itself. Having tried everything from parsnips to turnips in pot roast, here’s what works best for pot roast:

• Carrots: Large carrots, never baby ones, with a nice 1/2-inch-thick minimum diameter at their tops. Smaller carrots will become too soft in the gravy.
• Potatoes: Go for Yukon Gold potatoes over Russets, as they have more flavor and a tender, toothsome body when braised.

The best wines to add to pot roast are Malbec and Côtes-du-Rhône. Both types are great for cooking because they have big fruit flavor and even some herbal notes that highlight the herbs that are cooked with the pot roast. They aren’t too tannic or acidic either — a good versatile choice for drinking and cooking.

I always have at least one bottle of each at home (if I’m living life the right way!). They are very drinkable and it is easy to find a really great bottle for less than $12. I always cook with wines that I enjoy drinking because the flavor concentrates and permeates the whole dish.

Once the roast is supple and tender, you can shred or chop the roast and return it to the pot. You can serve it straight-up in bowls with crusty bread for sopping up all that rich gravy. It is often served over buttered egg noodles, or you can really gild the comfort-food lily and serve the roast and gravy over mashed potatoes.