W ith a spacious stomach comes a spacious desire to eat tasty food, and to do it with minimal effort. After all, life is too short to spend hours cooking a single meal.
So deciding that I will be slow cooking a roast over the weekend was an instance of me stepping out of my comfort zone. But boy oh boy, the results of investing more time than usual slow cooking the roast left me with the realization that sometimes, the things in life which take the longest to happen are also the most worthwhile. At least my roast was!
How it Began…
It all began with me being invited to a fancy business dinner alongside my colleagues a few weeks ago. Apart from networking (and – if you’re lucky enough to be friends with your coworkers – silently judging the other attendees), the main attraction most people have in attending business dinners is the food they’re going to be served with. The case with me was no different, and I was eagerly awaiting dinnertime.
As time went on and my stomach started to rumble with full force, part of me just wanted to disappear from the scene, but the other part wanted to stay for … yes, that’s right, the food! And so I did.
It was a great decision on my part because, within a couple of minutes, the embarrassment I was feeling due to my noisy stomach vanished into thin air, and feelings of bliss overtook my being.
Finally getting to eat tender, juicy roast, cooked to perfection, was the best thing that happened to me that day. The first thing I did after going home post-dinner was to ring up my chef friend and dissect the potential ingredients of the recipe with him.
The genius of my friend combined with the experience I have gained through my experimental approach to cooking over the years helped us produce a rough draft of the recipe.
Remarks of excitement were exchanged and it was decided that the next time we meet, it’ll be over a serving of slow-cooked roast. That auspicious day came a few weeks later.
The Cooking Process
That day, I woke up early in the morning to make preparations for this piece of art. For starters, the cut I settled on was topside of (1 kg) beef: a lean cut coming from atop the rear-end of a cow. After I had my hands on all the ingredients, I stepped into the kitchen and pulled out my beloved slow cooker, bought especially for this recipe.
In it, I added two chopped carrots, one sliced onion, and three tablespoons of cornflour. I stirred well to make sure that the coating is even. In a separate dish, I rubbed some oil on the beef and seasoned it well with salt and pepper. Next, I seared the beef in a hot pan before transferring it to the cooker.
Then I added 500 milliliters of beef stock, a quarter bottle of red wine, three tablespoons of tomato puree, and two teaspoons of sugar to the cooker.
This is where my test commenced; I left all these ingredients together to work their magic in the cooker and waited patiently for six long hours till they cooked on low heat. Once that was done (after what felt like an eternity to me), I transferred the beef from the cooker into another dish and covered it with foil to retain its warmth.
While the beef rested for about thirty minutes, I brought the cooker’s remnants to a gravy consistency using three tablespoons of cornflour. Because my cooker didn’t have a metal pot, I transferred its contents to a pan – which made me even more impatient to get such aromatic food inside my stomach.
Soon after, the dish was ready to serve. With a sharp knife, I sliced the beef and coated it with red wine gravy – almost as generously as my friend and family complimented me over the dinner table for blessing their mouths with such a burst of mellow flavor!
You might think it’d be an exaggeration for me to claim that slow cooking a roast has given me new motivation to live, but it is what it is. And I can’t wait to do it all over again soon!
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- slow cooking roast
- cooking a roast
- slow cooking meal
