Perfect Roast Beef

I ate some really bad meat the other day.  You know the kind - the 'turkey' you buy at the grocery store in the pre-sealed tubs.  But it's not turkey, it's some kind of loaf, and the ingredient list is longer than a graduate thesis.  I know how they get it - they take meat trimmings, grind them up, and then cook them slowly in a mold, letting the proteins coagulate into a kind of 'meat brick'.  But I'd rather be building houses with these things than eating them; the consistency isn't right, and you don't really know what you're eating.  This is why hot dogs and I don't get along - don't bother digging into what those things are made out of if you plan to keep eating them.  Also, just because we CAN make something doesn't mean we should.  So I'm taking a stand - I'm making my own deli meats.

Boom.  Homemade roast beef bagel sandwich.

As part of my 'you can do it yourself' mania, I decided recently that I needed to buy a deli slicer.  Like the ones at the grocery store, but probably less safe.  You know, one of these things:

My new finger / meat slicer

Like an addiction, I can't seem to get these ideas out of my head until they're done, so now here I am, proud owner of a meat slicer.  So now I've got this thing, and together we're going to draw a line in the sand at the deli counter and say "no!  I'm not eating meat where I can't see muscle fibers any more!  I'll start my own deli, at home, with more alcohol and better television".  And that's how we convinced ourselves to buy a meat slicer.

I bought a 4.5 pound beef roast, top round, choice cut - nothing fancy.  Granted, roast beef is typically one of the meats in the deli that actually is a real cut of meat, but I'm starting there anyway.  At least this way I know exactly what other ingredients went into my lunch meats - beef, and nothing else.  And to kick this adventure off right, I roasted it according to a new recipe my mom found for me in Saveur #137.  The idea is to get a roasted hunk of meat that looks just like the deli's cuts - red all the way to the edges, instead of your usual gray outer ring with a bit of red in the center.

2014-01-26 update: I'm updating this recipe to my own modified version, which gets even better results and employs the time-honored tradition of 'thinking about what you are doing before you actually start', which in this case required a couple of half-decent attempts and a working knowledge of thermodynamics.

Perfect Roast Beef

• Five pound roast, preferably top sirloin to avoid the need for tenderizing the meat
• Salt
• Pepper

Stage 1: Roasting

Season the roast with salt and pepper.  Take a large, heavy skillet, preferably cast iron, and heat it up dry,  getting it up not quite to smoking temperature, but pretty close.  You're going to sear this bugger on all sides, but do so in a very particular way.  What I mean is this: once the pan is hot, place the meat in the pan on one of its faces.  Leave it there for a few minutes, then take it out of the pan completely, and rest it on a plate.  Now let the pan get rocket-hot again, and repeat this process with a fresh face of the meat.  Why are we doing this, you ask?  Because we want the surface of the meat to be perfectly browned as an artifact of the delicious maillard reaction, which, like caramelization, develops complex flavor profiles (and does not "sear in the juices", as was debunked by Alton Brown on Good Eats), and we want to do it quickly.  The first time I tried this, I got a nicely browned outside, but it took longer than I wanted to, as the cool meat hitting the pan caused fluctuations in the pan surface temperature, which in turn had to keep heating up to searing temperature over a longer period of time in contact with the meat.  If one could reduce the time that the meat is being exposed to very high temperatures, which can somewhat substantially penetrate into the core of the roast, one could ensure that the browning of the meat would not get in any further than the outermost shell of the meat.  Look, it's hard to explain without a diagram, a series of videos, and a number of formulas, so just take my word for it.  Sear, remove, pause, repeat until browned on all sides.

I call this "meat mountain"

Look at how thin the depth of penetration of heat is into the meat.  Brown on the outermost 1/32", and then just starting to turn for the next 1/8"- 1/4".  Let's see what this looks like once fully cooked.

Now, place the quickly browned roast on a rack in a roasting pan in the oven and cook at 200 degrees (F) for 3 hours 20 minutes, until a probe thermometer in the center reads 130 degrees**.

**Raw meat alert: if you are the meat police, or know them, you are fully aware that all meat should be cooked to above 145 degrees to kill off harmful E. Coli bacteria and other food-bourne illnesses (I'm serious - see the Beef: It's What's for Dinner official guidance).  But if you want to eat good meat, you probably ignore this all the time and realize that whole muscle cuts can be cooked to pretty much whatever temperature you like, and you're probably going to be fine 99% of the time.  And come on, look at that guy in the video!  Who are you going to trust, him or me?

This is not a fast process.  Expect a cool 5 pound roast to take about 2.5 hours to fully come up to temperature.  On the upside, the place is going to smell like the best local deli restaurant kitchen you've  ever eaten at, and it's going to do so for the better part of the day.

After the final side is seared

Temperature once pulled: 130 deg F.  This is from my 2013 attempt

Stage 2: Slicing

The slicer works!  While I'm no expert in carvery, I was able to put whole meat in one and get sliced meat out the other, which is always a good thing.  Plus, I retained all my fingers.  Also, the roast beast came out looking impressive, and after one iteration came out perfectly.  I'll show pictures from both attempts.  Even on the first attempt, it was red almost all the way out to the edges, which is a first for me.  Photos below - thickness can get down to maybe 1/16" - 1/8" before it starts to disintegrate, but that's adequate for my kind of sandwiches.  You have to vary the speed with which you slide the meat past the blade as you adjust the thickness, which is an art that I will probably never be able to master.

The roast beast, 2011 attempt

Locked and loaded

Here's what an almost perfectly roasted cut of beef should look like... (2011)

And here's what a completely perfect roast looks like (2013).  The difference - pausing between searing each side, allowing the pan to come to temperature.  There's about 1/4" ring of meat that is kept more red and more moist by this method.

Another look at the improved method (2013)

Savoring the sliced meat on a bagel sandwich (2013)

Like the Seinfeld tip calculator: it does other things!

I had lunch and dinner plans the day of this experiment, but I was so eager to try the product that I made a breakfast roast beef sandwich.  Another valuable lesson learned - a breakfast beef sandwich is gross.  But it did give me an opportunity to see what else can be sliced well, such as tomatoes and onions.  Bonus.