Off-Oven Roast Beef
Published January 19, 2013
Marcus Nilsson for The New York Times; Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop Stylist: Megan Hedgpeth.
- Total Time
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Rating
- Comments
- Read comments
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Ingredients
1 beef roast, like top, eye or bottom round, approximately 3 pounds
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon olive oil
Red-pepper flakes to taste
Preparation
- Step 1
Remove roast from refrigerator. Preheat oven to 500 degrees.
- Step 2
In a small bowl, mix together salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil and red-pepper flakes to create a kind of paste. Rub this all over the roast. Place beef in a roasting pan or cast-iron skillet, fat-side up, and put in oven. Cook undisturbed for 5 minutes per pound.
- Step 3
Turn off oven. Do not open oven door. Leave roast to continue cooking, undisturbed, for two hours.
- Step 4
After two hours, remove roast from oven. Slice and serve alongside, ideally, a watercress salad, some skillet-fried potatoes and a small tureen of Henry Bain sauce.
Private Notes
Comments
I call this Magic Meat and make it almost every week. (In fact, I made it just last night). Here’s the trick: you must follow the recipe EXACTLY. Take the roast out of the fridge right before you turn on the oven. This means the roast is COLD when it goes in. (If you start with room-temp meat, it’ll be too done in the middle.) You roast at 500 for EXACTLY 5 minutes per pound. I ask Siri: “How much is 2.85 times 5?” Then I roast for 14.25 minutes, using a timer. Timer for the 2 hrs. oven off too!
We like our roast beef rare so I left in the oven for one hour instead of two. Perfect!
Leave it off!
This is amazing & has become our regular Sunday dinner. I buy the 2 pack eye of round roasts from Costco to make 2 meals. We do dry brine with salt 1-2 days prior. I use my Dutch oven & a thermometer set to 130 degrees, and follow the 5 minutes per pound exactly. When cooking to a temp of 130, this roast only takes about an hour. It's nice & pink in the center, and juicy. We heat up the remains in the Dutch oven for a bit of au jus, but it's not really necssary. So simple & yummy!
Where has this recipe been all my life? Would not have believed it and yet..simple and incredible. Thank you!
One of the elements that I felt confused about was what constitutes my medium rare ideal temp. I thought it would be straightforward but saw everything from 125-145 when I googled, and it was unclear as to which was the pull out temp or the temp it would rise to after cooking. For anyone else in this spot, just an FYI, I used an electronic leave-in thermometer and pulled my 3.84 pound top round roast out at 125°F, which took slightly over an hour in the off phase. It rose on the counter to 136°. It was still rare for at least 3/4 of it (the ends were very slightly more well done), so I’d say if you want med-rare to pull it out at 130-135°F. (57°C)