Roast beef, the quick veal roast that will get you out of trouble at Christmas time
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Total: 35 min Diners: 6 – 8
Roasts are the great protagonists of Christmas lunches and dinners, but in homes there is usually no more than one oven and unless it is one of these latest generation in which you can cook at various levels without mixing flavors, the choice of recipes that make up the menu can be a problem if you do not manage well the times of use of the oven. If you have to use it for several dishes, you won’t be able to afford to roast a capon for four hours, but you can succeed with a delicious roast beef that usually takes less than an hour to finish.
Ingredients
Veal, 1.5 kg in one piece (*) Salt Freshly ground pepper Old-style mustard Butter, 1 tablespoon
Preparation of the veal roast beef
(*) As always when we are dealing with a recipe with few ingredients and little preparation, the most important key to success lies in the correct choice of raw material. The ideal would be a piece of beef, which is not easy to obtain, but we will also obtain good results with pieces of beef and yearling which are tastier than the youngest veal.
It seems a truism, but it is also important that the piece has a uniform thickness because otherwise, when roasted in the oven, some areas will be overcooked and others may be raw. If we use an irregularly shaped piece, we can improve the shape to make it more uniform by tying the meat with bridle twine.
The best cuts of meat to make roast beef, for my taste, are the high loin and the low loin and always cooking it with the fatty layer that covers these pieces, as this fat will melt in the oven and will make our roast much juicier without the need to water it ourselves.
Other pieces that can be used are the sirloin -which despite being a more expensive cut, for my taste is not better than the tenderloin-, the rib -it is very tasty, but the bones in the roast beef bother me a lot; the shoulder and the corner of the hip.
Another key point is that the meat should have been out of the refrigerator for at least a couple of hours to temper. If we go directly from the refrigerator to the oven, the final result will not be good.
If we want the cooking to be perfect, it is best to use a probe thermometer, but if we do not have one, we can achieve equally good results by keeping a close eye on the clock.
Step 1
Heat a frying pan with the heat on high and when it starts to smoke, brown our piece of meat on all sides.
Step 2
Preheat the oven to 200ºC, season the meat with salt and freshly ground pepper and smear it with old mustard.
Step 3
When the oven is at the indicated temperature, place the piece of meat on a rack with the fatty side up and with a tray underneath to collect the juices that will drip off the meat and then recover them to prepare the sauce.
Step 4
Bake for 10 minutes at 200ºC, lower the temperature to 170ºC and continue baking for as long as necessary until the desired doneness is reached, taking the following table as a reference:
Point Temperature Baking time at 170ºC per kg of meat Undercooked 50ºC 15 min Medium rare 60ºC 19 min Well done 70ºC 23 min
I usually take it out of the oven when the temperature is 56ºC, that is to say, a little less done than medium, because I like the inside to be very juicy. If you don’t have a probe thermometer to warn you, you can use a basic thermometer to check the temperature when the indicated time has passed.
Step 5
When it’s done cooking, remove the roast beef from the oven and let it rest for about 20-30 minutes to allow the juices to settle before slicing. Do not worry if it cools a little, roast beef is never served hot, but warm with the sauce very hot or cold as if it were a cold meat. And, during this resting time, we can take advantage to make a sauce by passing all the juices that have been collected in the oven tray to a saucepan, adding a tablespoon of butter and putting the mixture to heat over low heat while stirring nonstop with a few rods until you have a sauce bound.
Step 6
Serve the roast beef cut into thin slices, accompanied, for example, with mashed potatoes, baked potatoes in their skins, stew, or whatever you like and with the sauceboat nearby.
Notes
If there is roast beef left over, it is best to wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and store it in the refrigerator to eat it cold as if it were a cold meat.
With this quick cooking we obtain a roast beef with two textures, on the one hand a golden and crispy exterior and on the other hand, a juicy and rosy interior for true meat lovers. You can make a roast beef with a uniform texture if you cook it at a low temperature, but we will see that in another recipe.
The salt, pepper and mustard marinade is the most basic and traditional one, but we can marinate the meat with whatever we like. Aromatic herbs to our taste, a bit of breadcrumbs or a pinch of sugar that will favor the caramelization of the outer crust.