What are some suggested cooking times for roasts?!
What are some suggested cooking times for roasts?
Every time I watch the Food Network concerning meats, they cook it to rare or medium rare. That's all well and good, but I and everyone else I cook for consider this severely undercooked. Can anyone help me out with some good cooking times per pound per type of roast (5lb beef ribeye, 4lb Boston butt, or 3lb tuna loin, for instance) to achieve medium well - that stage of doneness where the last little bit of pink is gone, but the meat is still juicy?
Answers:
For a beef roast, I would suggest cooking by temperature to 160F will give a medium to medium-well. Times can be tricky considering cooking temperature and shape of the roast. However, I'd say roughly 350F for 2 hours.
Pork, boston butt, I generally slow cook that in a smoker for a minimum of 6 hours at 200F, but this should also work in the oven. You won't get the smoke, but use a dry-rub to season the roast.
For a Boston butt, I generally brine the meat overnight so the roast picks up extra moisture and flavor. A basic brine is 1 cup of table salt (or 1.5 cups of kosher salt), 2 cups of sugar to 1 gallon of water. After an overnight soak, rinse the pork, pat dry and coat with your favorite seasonings.
Tuna... That's one thing I personally think taste worse (dry and crumbly) when cooked well or medium-well so I have no cooking recommendations for tuna beyond medium-rare.
use the lazy cooks best friend a slow cooker experiment wth the time we add oxo to the water to make gravy or beef dip
about 20 minutes per pound for pork and beef but the tuna will cook much faster. use the finger test. Push in on the meat when you have cooked it for what you think is long enough. the less done the meat is, the easier it is to push in with your finger. Honestly though, it's trial and error for someone who hasn't used that method before.
If you want it to be fall-apart tender, put it in a crock pot and cook it on low for 10 hours or so.
If you like, you can speed it up quite a bit with a pressure cooker. Try an hour in the pressure cooker, then a couple hours in the crock pot. Make sure to transfer the juices to the crock pot along with the roast, or it'll be real dry. You can do it all in the pressure cooker, but it won't be very pretty; that's why you want to finish it in the crock pot.
You can season the roast before cooking, or not, as you prefer.
I put my roasts in the crock pot before I go to bed one night and serve it for dinner then next evening. It cooks on low for about 20 hrs or so. It's just as juicy as it could be and fall apart tender. Delicious!!
I usually cut 5-6 potatoes into wedges and slice one onion to put in the bottom of the crock pot. Then I slice another onion to put on and around the roast. I add 1/2 cp of water and sprinkle it with some Schilling Grill Mates for steak - just a little.