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.

Golden Fork
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8 Comments

Golden F. February 28, 2016
I caught a break....last minute my husband asked for the classic mashed potatoes side and I stuck in a pan of oiled, seasoned, asparagus under the broiler when I took the meat out of the oven.
 
702551 February 28, 2016
Yeah, figured something changed in your original parameters.

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.
 
Golden F. February 28, 2016
Thank you all. I read all the answers and studied the serious eats instructions this morning. I used the reverse sear method. It made perfect sense to me.
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.
 
702551 February 28, 2016
What were the accompanying dishes and how did you handle them with your kitchen appliance resource? Your original post mentioned baked potatoes and roasted vegetables.
 
sydney February 28, 2016
We tried Serious Eats' backwards-seeming recipe (that he first did a Cooks Illustrated?) and we'll NEVER try another recipe. It roasts LONG in an insanely LOW oven and is to-die-for. We did it with a cheaper cut, not tenderloin, though I think I did it once with tenderloin as well. http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/12/the-food-lab-reverse-sear-beef-tenderloin-filet-mignon.html
 
702551 February 28, 2016
The Serious Eats reverse sear works great, but the caveat is that it basically prevents you from using your oven for anything else. Golden Fork also wishes to make baked potatoes and roasted veggies for this meal.

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.
 
702551 February 27, 2016
It'll probably be about 30-35 minutes total cooking time, but don't watch the clock.

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.
 
HalfPint February 27, 2016
I've had great success with this recipe from America's Test Kitchen. It was designed for an eye of round:

http://www.food.com/recipe/tender-eye-of-round-beef-roast-atk-465509
 
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