To give your meat a flavourful crispy exterior, cook uncovered on a rack set in a shallow roasting pan. Don't add water! Invest in a digital thermometer that lets you monitor the temperature of your roast – or even alert you when it's done – without opening the oven door.
Step 2: Prepare the Meat for Roasting
Insert an oven-safe thermometer or probe thermometer into the thickest part of the roast, making sure it isn't touching the fat, bone, or pan. Do not add water or liquid and do not cover the roast.
Baste meat every 30 minutes while it cooks to keep it moist.
This should help keep it from drying out and make it more flavorful. This is especially helpful for larger selections of meat, like roasts, but you can also use it on steak, pork chops, or even a simple chicken breast.
Fill the pot with enough water to fully cover the meat. Use a wooden spoon to break up the meat into small crumbles. Bring the water to a boil, stirring often so the beef stays in small pieces. Once it boils, lower the temperature, cover the pot, and let it simmer until the beef is fully cooked through.
A surefire way to make a tender, juicy pot roast is through braising; that is, cooking the meat in a small amount of liquid in a tightly covered pot at low temperature. Stove top roast recipes can be customized with your choice of herbs, vegetables, potatoes, and liquid braising mixtures.
Electric roaster ovens make the most of this feature by cooking foods through the even distribution of heat and liquids. Because the covered roaster traps and recycles moisture from the food as it cooks, no additional water or other liquids are needed unless called for in a recipe.
There is no added water in any fresh, unprocessed beef. Beef is washed during slaughter, but the small amount of water would be absorbed on the surface of the meat, not bound to the protein or inside the tissue and would quickly evaporate or drip out. Beef is often ground while partially frozen.
Do you know what food has the largest global water footprint? Beef. It takes approximately 1,847 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef — that's enough water to fill 39 bathtubs all the way to the top.
Place your cut of beef into the base of the slow cooker and add aromatics, such as onion, celery and carrots. Add stock, water or other liquids, making sure there is enough to come up 1-2cm from the base of the slow cooker bowl.
Add water, wine or broth to about an eighth of an inch high in the pan. You may need to replenish it during cooking. This will keep drippings from scorching. Toward the end of roasting, let the liquid evaporate so that the drippings can brown for about 15 minutes.
Simmering at a lower heat for a longer period of time will give even tougher types of meat that tender texture your family will die over! Make sure your meat never roasts dry. Keep it covered in its natural juices and beef broth for maximum juicy tenderness.
Another problem is overcooking the pot roast, leading to dry meat. Prevent this by ensuring you have enough braising liquid in the pot and don't let it go dry.
Roast the Chicken
If you are not roasting any vegetables with the chicken, it's a good idea to add about 1/2 cup of water to the pan to prevent the drippings from burning. Place the chicken on the rack breast side up, slide the pan into the oven, and roast it uncovered for about 60 to 70 minutes.
Placing the oven rack too high up will cause your roast to brown too quickly and burn! After 30 minutes in the oven, add a ½ cup of water to the bottom of the roasting pan. The key is to allow the onions to brown and caramelize while roasting, but not to burn and smoke in the fat.
If your roast is not at room temperature, the cook time will be longer. Regardless of the size of your roast, aim for cooking at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C), for 20 minutes per pound.
In regards to tenderizing, soaking in water does make the meat more tender, but at the cost of reducing the flavor.
The fibrin of meat is hardened and contracted by dry, intense heat, but softened by moist, moderate, and long continued heat. Albumin dissolves in cold water, but hardens in hot water and by dry heat.
In boiling water the meat is heated up and cooked through contact heat. The temperature is relatively low, around the boiling point, but water is an effective carrier and transmitter of heat.
While you could simply submerge the meat into a bowl of cold water, it's not recommended. Not only will the meat absorb water and possibly become water-logged, but it may also introduce bacteria to the meat.
Sous vide is a cooking technique that involves vacuum-sealing food in a bag and cooking it in a precisely regulated water bath. This low-temperature, long-time cooking method produces results that are impossible to achieve through any other cooking method.
The steak is vacuum sealed and dipped in the water bath where it is slowly cooked to a perfect temperature. The wonder of sous vide cooking is that the steak is evenly cooked throughout (no spots that are more done or less done) and you keep more moisture in the steak than other cooking methods.
The ideal time to salt your meat is 24 hours before cooking, though dry brining can start as close as two hours before placing your meat on the heat. Simply apply ½ to ¾ teaspoon of salt per pound of meat, spreading evenly over the entire surface.
To guarantee a well-caramelized crust, sear the roast in 1-3 tablespoons of oil for two to three minutes per side, either in the roasting pan or a skillet, before putting it into the oven.
Think about your tools: Your roasting pan or baking sheet will shield meat or vegetables from the heat source, so if you want foods to be evenly cooked, you'll need rotate and flip during the roast, at least once.