Post 5: Pot Roast-- or how to make your house smell ridiculously good in a few easy steps.

You know those weeks where you wake up and it's Monday, and by the time you catch your breath, it's Friday?  Well, it's been one of those weeks Chez Dairyland.  Which means that when I woke up this morning, I was really hoping for a relaxing day hanging out with E and P.  And after making a nice breakfast of waffles and Neese's sausage and reading the Sunday Times while P was napping, we were well on our way to reaching that happy place.  After my Pats laid an epic beatdown on the hapless Titans this evening, I was damn near ebullient.

Another step in the right direction came today, too... here in NC it's one of those autumn weekends where the first chill is in the air, the clouds are a little grayer than they get in July, and I've just begun to notice the leaves changing.  I love this time of year.  It makes me crave the kind of food that makes the whole house smell delicious and warm and comforting, and because it takes so long to cook, it allows for time to decompress and enjoy Sunday (read: watch football, work out, and hang out with my wife and daughter).  Double bonus!

Pot roast, in my experience, is like the OG of those all-day dishes--simple, satisfying, and just rustic enough that it can never be fancified like lamb shanks and short ribs have become on restaurant menus in recent years.  It exemplifies what's beautiful about braising, though-- take a tough, unattractive hunk of meat, and with enough love and care, you can create something that is much greater than the sum of its parts.  And it's effin' cheap to boot. Even at Whole Foods (hey, I got a gift certificate for my birthday... thanks Mom and Dad!).

Okay, enough preamble.  Onward and inward.  Or something like that.  So, you're gonna start with what's called a chuck blade roast.  It comes from this part of the cow.  This one was about 4 lbs--which is pretty typical.  I like to start by bringing it to room temp, tying it, and rubbing with kosher salt and coarsely cracked black pepper.  It'll look like this:

Preheat the oven to 250F.  Then, you're gonna heat a couple of tbsp of EVOO in a Dutch oven over high heat.  Remember the smoking pork fat from my birthday dinner?  This is another time where if you are me, you're glad you have that high-powered hood fan.  It might even be why you insisted on its inclusion in the kitchen renovation. If you are me, that is.  My good friend Bret Jennings, who owns this restaurant and taught me a great deal of what I know about good food and cooking, was the one who taught me that the secret to a good braise is getting a really good sear on the meat you are braising.  That means smoke. And hood fans.

At any rate, when you're done getting the sear on it, it'll look like this....

... and you'll have a nice little puddle of EVOO and rendered beef fat.  Remove the beef from the heat and set aside, and throw in rough chop mirepoix, comprised of 4 carrots,  2 ribs of celery, and a medium sized onion.  Add a head of garlic, halved, 4-5 sprigs of thyme, 2 fingers of rosemary, and a couple of bay leaves.  Side note: This seems like a good time to clarify a point that one of my readers mentioned to me earlier this weekend-- unless otherwise noted, all herbs are fresh.  I almost never use dry herbs.

Sweat the mirepoix and marvel at the aromatics that come from those simple vegetables cooking in animal fat.  Those Frenchies were on to something, I tell you what.  Then, I like to sing my braise of choice a little lullaby as I nestle it in its bed of vegetables for a long winter's nap, like so:

On top of this, for pot roast, I add 1/2 a bottle of dry unoaked red wine, 1/2 c. San Marzano chopped tomatoes, and stock to cover.  In this case, I had kept my braising liquid from lamb shanks last Monday, so I had a nicely herb-infused, collagen rich stock to use to braise this bad boy.  What's the lesson here?  Always save braising liquid.  It makes great stock for soup, braising stuff again, etc.

Bring to a simmer on the stovetop, cover with tight-fitting lid, and put in 250F oven for 4 hours. Easy peasy.  In about 1.5-2 hours, your house will begin to smell AWESOME.  When it's done, take it out of the oven and let it rest in its liquid with the lid on (key point being 'in its liquid.'  Braised stuff will dry out and get stringy unless you let it hang out in its vegetable/juice bed while it's resting).  If you have to sneak a look, you'll see that it looks like this:

While you are slowly infusing your house with the smell of awesomeness, it's a good time to figure out what you're gonna serve with it.  I chose two things-- acorn squash with cumin, cayenne, and maple syrup, and because I wanted the meal to be really heart-healthy, twice-baked buttermilk-cheddar mashed potatoes.  That's right, people.  Because to quote the great American philosopher Samuel Clemens, moderation is best practiced...wait for it... in moderation.

Squash is pretty easy. Preheat oven to 400F (if you're making this with the pot roast, wait until you've taken the pot roast out to rest).

Halve lengthwise and seed an acorn squash.  In a small mixing bowl, whisk together 2 tbsp cumin, 1 tbsp cayenne (to taste really), 1.5 tbsp salt.  Add 1/2 cup maple syrup, whisking to combine.

In the well left by the seeds in each half of  the squash, put a sizeable pat of butter (depends on how frisky you're feeling, I guess).  Split the syrup/spice mix between the two halves. 

Put in oven and set timer for 20 minutes.  When 20 mins are up, take a pastry brush and baste the rim of the squash with the buttery-syrupy goodness.

 

Add 20-25 more minutes.   Squash is done when it's fork tender and well caramelized on top.  It'll look like this:

 Note the well of sweet/spicy/buttery nectar in the middle.  This is the added bonus of acorn squash-- it acts as a font for its own dipping sauce.  Which is, needless to say, awesome.

Ok.  On to potatoes. Like the squash, most of this can happen during the last 40 minutes of cooking the pot roast if you want-- that way when you take out the roast to rest, the oven is ready for the squash and potatoes' higher heat needs. I like Yukon golds for this and most other potato-related enterprises, save french fries (Russets are unsurpassed for this).  Anywho, for E and me, we used half a dozen large-ish Yukon golds, cut into eighths.  Boil in salted water until fork tender.  Remove from water, and run through a food mill with the coarse plate in.  If you don't have a food mill, go buy one.  I can't live without mine.  And besides, it's pretty!

Anyway, whatever you do, don't use a mixer-- this will turn your mashers to glue.  Starch to gluten, chemical composition changes, blah blah blah.  Just don't do it. I promise.

After you've run the potatoes through the mill, it's time to make the really healthy part of the dish.

For this many potatoes, I use 3/4 c. buttermilk and 1/4 stick of butter.  Slowly melt the butter into the buttermilk over low heat, and using your microplane, grate 2 cloves of garlic into the mix.  Stir to combine.

Pour the buttermilk into the milled potatoes, and stir to uniform consistency... which should be feather light and pillowy... and marvel at the wonder of the food mill, and how you ever survived without one.

Spoon all this into a glass/ceramic baking dish and grate sharp cheddar cheese over it to cover.  Salt and coarse grind black pepper, and you're ready to rock.  Throw it in that same 400F oven that you're using for the squash, and when you're done, it'll look like this:

 

At which point your mouth will begin to water uncontrollably, because if you had Smell-O-Vision, you'd agree that smells REALLY good.

This whole time, while the squash and potatoes were finishing, I was letting the pot roast rest in its braising liquid.  Take it out and it'll dry up. Trust me.  The other thing I did as soon as the pot roast was done was take a couple of ladle-fuls of braising liquid, run it through a fine sieve, and put it in a saucepan over medium-high heat to reduce.  This helps to concentrate the flavors, and gives you something to salt that's not the big pot of stuff-- that way you can save the stuff that's in the big pot more easily and adjust salt upon reheating.  This time I had one of those moments of clarity/laziness, where I saw that there was a thin sheen of maple syrup left in the small saucepan from that morning's aforementioned waffles.  I ladled that sauce right on top and stirred it in... and I'm glad I did.  More on that later.

And then it was time to make one of these:  And for some reason,

 

Now, there's not a lot of textural variation in this dish.  It's all pretty much spoon-tender.  But the meat is so silky and beautiful, and totally imbued with all the herbs and garlic and mirepoix and wine... and the potatoes have that tang of buttermilk and sharp cheese, and that low hum of garlic underneath that just warms you to the core.  And the squash- the squash is like dessert, only better. Sweet, salty, earthy from the cumin, and an undercurrent of heat from the cayenne.   And the sauce got a deep earthy sweetness from the maple that wasn't cloying-- it just helped to accentuate the herby, beefy loveliness. Take a bite of all three together and it's like Twizzlers... it makes mouths happy.

WHAT WE DRANK WITH IT:

 

Note that I usually say "what to drink," but I'm guessing that you may not have access to a bottle like this.  See, the wine shop where I work has a regular customer that has an extensive cellar, to say the least.  When we make deliveries to his house, he's nice enough to tip us all in wine.  In the case of the latest delivery, it was Diamond Creek Cabernet "Gravelly Meadow" 1991.  I'm not generally a California Cabernet kind of guy, but in the early 90s they were still making wine with some balance and finesse.  In the autumn of its life, this was really pretty-- all the primary fruit had turned to smoke and leather and dried flowers and currants... and the texture was flannel-soft and totally integrated.