The easiest rosemary roast beef

The first slow roasting post:

Pink rosemary roast-beef 

The key to this recipe is slow roasting. The slow roasting technique ensures that you treat these delicious proteins in your meat in a way that they do not clog up. Also the tiny connecting tissues will not get tense making your roast tough.

The lower the temperature, the less the fibers will shrink, the less tough the meat will be because it won't lose as much moisture. Typically tough cuts of meat are cooked this way to keep the meat moist. Cooking the meat slowly breaks down tough connective tissue to form gelatin, which binds moisture. The amount of fat also helps because it breaks up the protein, lubricates the meat and makes it tenderer. The minimum temperature you should use though is 80 degrees to ensure that salmonella on the outside are killed (they die at 70 degrees).

The spices used in this recipe can be altered to your liking - we used rosemary, pepper and garlic but just use your favorite beef spices.

Ingredients:

1 piece of sirloin (i got cca 1kg, but any size will do just adjust the amount of spices). The sirloin we picked was aged for 3 weeks and organic.

2 tbl spoons of sea salt

4 twigs of rosemary (ideally fresh)

1-2 tbl spoons of freshly ground pepper

2 cloves of garlic

olive oil (our Olivi Oil is particularly nice for red meat because of its spiciness)

Oven thermometer

Preparation:

Be aware that preparing this dish will involve marinating for 24h which is crucial. So please start the preparation a day before you want to eat.

Wash the meat and dry it properly. Ground the sea salt, rosemary and pepper.

Mix the spices properly and rub thoroughly onto the meat. Wrap the meat in kitchen (cling) foil and put in the refrigerator for 24h or at least over night.

Let me spend some words on why marinating over night with salt will deliver you better results and more tender meat.

There are some misconceptions around this topic, typically only salt or salty ingredients such as soy sauce make the biggest difference. Through the water in the meat the salt "travels" deep into the meat structure where it slowly breaks down the fibers. The protein that forms when the salt breaks the muscle down helps to retain moisture, and makes the tissue a little looser.

The next day:

Before working with the meat take it out of the refrigerator and let it get to room temperature.

Slice the garlic very finely and rub on to the meat. Pre-heat your oven to 80 degrees celsius.

Place the meat "naked" on an oven grate with a pan underneath. Insert the oven thermometer into the middle of the meat and set the alarm to 55 degrees.

Once the core temperature of 55 degrees is reached take out the meat rub it with a bit of oil. Put the meat into a pre-heated searing hot pan. The browning that happens is called the Maillard reaction.

Maillard in 1912 discovered that certain proteins and amino acids react with certain kinds of sugars and cause browning. When meat is browned it forms hundreds of very potent flavor molecules that affect its aroma and taste.

After the browning cover the meat with aluminium foil for 20-30 minutes and let it rest.

Why you should do that:

When you cook meat the muscle fibers and the proteins begin to shrink and squeeze out moisture. If you immediately slice a piece of meat, the moisture that has been squeezed out of the muscle fibers will run out. But if you let it sit for 20 minutes depending on the size and thickness of the meat, the fibers start to soak back up some of that moisture. Trust me this makes all the difference.

The last two steps could also be done vice versa. That way you could use the browning to warm up the meat before serving.

Slice the meat in your preffered way (we like it thin) and serve with your preferred garnish. We like it just with pepper and a strong olive oil.

This roastbeef is also fantastic very thinly sliced the next day on a sandwich.

With this we love to have either a nice red Tuscan like Tempore or Memento or our new Macho Man Monastrell.

Please enjoy, comment and share!

Frank