- Pot roast.
I know, it's everyone's favorite.
Classic nostalgia, Americana dish.
We are going to make
a French onion-inspired pot roast today.
Let's do it.
Cue music, doo doo doo.
(laughing)
(relaxing upbeat music)
What is this beautiful, amazing cut of meat, you ask?
Well, it is chuck roast, the roast of chuck,
some might say.
No one says that.
When selecting a cut of chuck roast,
we want to look for a chuck roast
that has a ton of marbling, right?
Definitely, the more fatty the better.
Marbling is imperative when looking
for a great piece of chuck roast, right?
Marbling is essentially these little fat pockets
that sit in between the tissues
of the muscle fibers of the beef.
I'm going to lightly season the beef a little bit.
The salt is going to help me get a nice caramelization
and crust around the outside of my beef
so that it doesn't sweat too much.
The onion, really important part of this dish,
because I mean, it's in the title.
One of my favorite ingredients.
It's a great base.
What I like to do when I caramelize onions
is start with a medium-high heat.
For me in this dish I want to
get some color on these onions immediately.
Throughout this dish the idea is to
always be caramelizing. ABC, right?
This smells just absolutely beautiful.
So I'm gonna set these to the side.
I'm actually gonna start to
sear our beef here over this heat.
When I'm searing this beef,
my goal is to impart the most amount of flavor
and ultimately texture, right?
This is not a rushing process.
It's not a race.
Take time to start to develop that flavor.
This is really where the magic starts to happen.
We are essentially building all of the compounds
of this pot roast individually,
so that by the time we are ready to add everything
to the cocotte, or the braising pan,
everything is on its own, it's already delicious.
And I'm actually going to add a little bit of thyme.
Layering flavor is very, very important.
(upbeat music)
I don't know about you,
but when I was a little girl
I used to eat ruffles with a French onion dip.
So delicious.
So when I was thinking about this pot roast,
I was like oh my gosh,
how do I make this the most delicious?
It really is just about compounding the flavor.
Dehydrated onions.
So what this dehydrated onion is gonna do
is add foreground flavor.
When it's rehydrated in that cocotte, or pot,
with the beef stock, it's essentially gonna dissolve
and then that beef chuck roast is gonna act
as a sponge and absorb all of that oniony flavor.
So I'm essentially compounding the onion flavor.
We're gonna do the same thing with the beef flavor, right?
So what I do is I actually use a dehydrated beef powder.
And then I add a little bit of paprika for depth of flavor
and it's also going to add some color.
Onion powder, dehydrated garlic.
I actually don't use a ton of dehydrated garlic
unless I'm making things that require
a lot of cooking time, right?
And about equal parts.
You can totally eyeball this, that's it.
So the assembly.
What we're gonna do is essentially build
a almost like a crust on the top
with our, we'll call them, accoutrements,
our garnishes, our flavorings.
Just gonna pour a little bit of this butter over the top
because we definitely do not want that to go to waste.
Be liberal with this, the soup mix.
And then the ketchup is going to kind of caramelize
over the top.
I know it looks funky.
I know it's weird,
but the ketchup is going to create this
kind of caramelized crust on the top
that's gonna be amazing.
Placing the caramelized onions over the top.
We've taken the thyme, we've brought these onion down.
They're not just a regular caramelized onion.
We really got some amazing color, depth of flavor to this,
which will translate into this sort of crust over the top
and impart a ton of flavor into our broth.
And we're going to add a little bit of thyme
to add more aromatics and depth of flavor.
Definitely bay leaf, one of my favorite ingredients,
fresh bay leaf.
It's super, super imperative.
When adding the broth it's so important.
Do not start with cold broth.
Just like the beef, we do not want to start with cold beef.
That's basically it.
Thank you, beautiful pot.
Thank you, pot roast, we love you.
And this is gonna go in the oven
for about three and a half hours.
(upbeat jazzy music)
Oh my gosh, amazing.
Our pot roast is out of the oven.
Our patients paid off.
Three and a half hours, roughly.
This is what you want in a pot roast.
Really delicious, falling apart.
We have this amazing jus leftover.
Ahh, pan's hot.
And we want to use and capture all this amazing remanence
that we've built into the body of this stock, right?
For me, this is the best part.
This is where our French onion flavors come to life.
I have this vision in my mind of slice, delicious pot roast
over a amazing crostini.
It's so awesome.
You can see that marbling in there.
So I'm gonna cut this against the grain.
Just look through.
The grains are running sort of parallel.
So I'm just going to prepare my beef,
set that to the side, and then make my crostini.
Crostini time.
Let's do it.
French onion soup is one of my all-time favorite soups,
mainly because I love the crunchy cheese on the top.
I've used a lot of different cheese over time.
So what I'm going to do is place the cheese on top
and just pop this in the broiler
so it almost kind of burns or brulees a bit.
So these are gonna go into the broiler.
Okay, this is the most important part of the dish.
The crostinis are in, our cheesy delicious crostinis.
Just make sure you don't burn them
because when you're working with the broiler
things happen very quickly.
It's like zero to 60 real quick.
Oh my gosh, this is exactly what we want.
Oh, oh oh, a little bit burned.
A lot of char.
So you only want to take two crostinis.
You do not want to get overwhelmed.
Dang.
This is going to change the world of pot roast.
Yum.
This came together so beautifully.
I mean, it just makes sense.
Beef jus.
It's two recipes built into one, right?
Why get rid of that amazing jus?
We elevated this dish.
It's a hybrid.
It's French onion soup, meets pot roast,
meets the most epic, delicious, delicious dish ever.
My mind is blown.
Oh my gosh.
(upbeat music)
So tender, so flavorful.
I will have this any day.
Okay guys, so this is a brand new dish.
The French onion soup hybrid meets pot roast.
Pot roast is definitely the sort of winner,
star of the show here.
And we took it a step further
and made another dish out of the by-product.
Sort of being sustainable in our practices.
We had this amazing beefy, delicious, rich jus
that we turned into this awesome broth.
Couple slices of bread, some delicious melted cheese.
We turned that amazing pot roast into a brand new dish.
So take that idea, apply it to different dishes.
You can do the same with roast chicken,
what have you.
If there's other dishes that I should sort of mash up,
tell me, let me know, leave in the comments, let me know.
I will recreate them.
And let's talk about it.
(upbeat music)