Need cooking help to make a roast beef
I bought a 2.27 lb beef round eye roast on sale for 2-3 people. How do I turn it into a beautiful little roast beef medium rare? I seldom make anything more than London broil or hamburgers when it comes to beef and am completely at a loss.
Can someone help me with cooking time, and oven temperature? I have a convection setting on my oven if that makes a difference. Does this go on a rack in the pan? I have several nice Pensey's rubs for the outside.
Hopefully this will be Sunday dinner tomorrow with baked potatoes and roasted veggies.
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Mashed potatoes are usually executed on the stove, broiled asparagus are easy to accommodate by ratcheting up the oven temp from the beef searing temps to broil for asparagus.
Congratulations for getting this done and adjusting to the dinner's changing parameters. Now you have first-hand experience of the oven's availability for other usage.
In any case, it's great that you replied here (it rarely happens in the Food52 forum), it will give future readers much context to what worked.
My little roast beef came out spot on perfect! We had a wonderful Sunday dinner and I now have enough confidence to try it for guests.
I've done the Serious Eats reverse sear in my oven and my propane-fired grill. The reverse sear in my conventional electric oven is maddeningly slow because of the time it takes to bring up the oven temperature for the second part of the roasting process (the sear). This is less of an issue with my gas grill.
The reverse sear provides excellent results but impractical for many situations because it basically monopolizes that device (oven, grill).
If you want to do the reverse sear, you will need to fully understand the implications of how temperature management of said device/appliance will render its availability for cooking other dishes.
Just based on this person's wording of their inquiry, I would say that the reverse sear is not something this person should attempt tomorrow.
The general rule of thumb in cooking any meat is to get the internal temperature to a certain level; that's what counts, not how much time has elapsed on a clock.
The easiest and most reliable way to measure this is with a meat thermometer: your goal (medium rare beef) is to pull this out of the oven at 130 degrees and let it sit 10-15 minutes before carving, during which time it will crest at 135 degrees.
I would sear all sides in a cast iron skillet then transfer to an oven preheated to 300-325 degrees. I've been cooking meat for a long time and I'm old, so I have a general idea of where a roast is simply by touching it and feeling how the meat springs back. You can't really teach this, this is knowledge gained by years of experience.
Cook a roast, insert a meat thermometer after a while. Take the reading and when you pull out the thermometer, immediately touch the end of the probe on your lower lip. That's what that temperature feels like. If it's cold, it's raw. If it's cool, it's very rare. Touch the roast and note how springy it feels.
Do this with many other roasts/meats a thousand times over years. At some point, you will probably develop a feel about the doneness by noting springiness and the warmth of the metal probe on your lower lip. Note that different cuts of meat have different amounts of springiness (grass-fed beef has a springier texture than corn-fed beef), so you can't rely on that exclusively. The internal temperature is the key.
When you're an old fogey like me, you can actually do this without a meat thermometer. A metal skewer is sufficient. I stick it in the meat, touch it to my lower lip, and can pretty much tell the internal temperature. In a similar way, this is like a parent touching the forehead of a child to see if the child has a fever.
There are too many variables that make clock watching unreliable: the temperature of the meat when you start cooking, the accuracy of your oven's thermostat, how many times you open the oven door, how much time is required for your oven to return to the set temperature, etc.
The only thing that truly matters is the internal temperature of the meat.
Good luck.
http://www.food.com/recipe/tender-eye-of-round-beef-roast-atk-465509