Don’t Let the Perfect Become the Enemy of the Pot Roast
Late winter comfort food shouldn’t take you out of your comfort zone
By Albert Stern
I never fail to be impressed each time I visit our Federation’s executive director in her office and note the saying she has posted on her computer monitor:
Don’t let perfection become the enemy of the good.
I find it admirable that she keeps those words in front of her as a reminder to step out of her own way sometimes, acknowledging a self-identified “opportunity” (as they euphemistically put it in executive development seminars) that, as a passionate, idealistic, and dedicated leader, she wishes to work on. Lucky for those who work for her, she succeeds.
For someone as thoughtful as our executive director, a motto about not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is wisdom with practical resonance. Someone like myself, on the other hand, will stumble upon a meme like this…
…and, with a sigh of relief, think, “My people are out there.”
One area of endeavor I can get very fastidious about is my cooking. When I embark on a culinary mission, however, I never quite believe that I’m going to end up slaving over it as much as I usually do. Nothing in the kitchen pulls me outside my comfort zone quite so much as comfort food, perhaps because I go in thinking that cooking that kind of meal will be as comforting as eating it. Of course it never is, especially if one has a personality, like mine, that is rife with “opportunities.”
My mission to cook the perfect Dutch oven of braised meat started some 20 years ago during a visit to Las Vegas. I was assured that one meal I could not miss during my stay was served by Craftsteak at the MGM Grand Hotel — Chef Tom Colicchio’s “24-hour Braised Short Ribs.” I was an obsessive foodie in those days — I worked for several years as a contributing editor for the Zagat Survey empire — and burned to know what the best of everything tasted like. I can’t explain it, but when you get into a foodie meshuggah brain, you read PR fluff like this from the MGM website — “James Beard Award-winning chef Tom Colicchio uses only the finest ingredients to create dishes bursting with…the true flavor and essence of each dish” — and get really excited. Superstar chef! True flavor! The essence of each dish! You do some research and find out that Craftsteak in Las Vegas prepares 1,200 pounds of braised short ribs each week, and it takes just a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure out that at 7 pounds of rib meat per cow, 7,213 head of cattle have to perish each year to satisfy the ravenous appetite of Craftsteak customers for just this one dish. That’s nearly three times as many kine as comprised the herd that Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Captain Woodrow F. Call drove north from Lonesome Dove, Texas, to the lush summer grazing grounds of Montana.
Most short rib recipes call for braising the meat for 2 to 3 hours, until fork tender. And it would seem to be enough. Who would think — who would dare — to braise short ribs for 24 hours? Chef Tom Colicchio, pilgrim — that’s who. And why 24 hours? Because 24 hours is better than 23 hours. This is, after all, still America and its capital is still Las Vegas.
Hopped up on the hype, I sat down at my table at Craftsteak and ordered the short ribs. They arrived in a tureen. I raised a forkful to my mouth and folks, those short ribs were…not that much better than the minute steak pot roast that my next-door neighbor in Miami Beach, Mrs. Magda Weiss, used to prepare for Shabbos when I was growing up. Oh, the short ribs were fantastic — but so was Mrs. Weiss’s pot roast. I left Craftsteak wishing I had, like my dining companions, ordered the grilled ribeye — I should have realized that braised meat is properly home cooking, not restaurant food.
Let me tell you — nothing burns at a foodie as fiercely as the idea that he has, unknowingly or unwisely, not ordered the best plate of food on the table. It’s not a feeling of disappointment, exactly — but more a feeling that a misstep has been made and must somehow be rectified. (If you’re a foodie, you’ll know what I’m talking about; if not, there is no way I can explain.) To make things right in the universe, I either had to go back to Craftsteak and order the ribeye, or set off to do battle with Chef Tom Colicchio by making the supreme home-cooked braised short ribs.
I started by attempting a version of the Craftsteak recipe — pretty simple actually (call it ‘2-to-maybe-4-hour braised short ribs’), but with some fussy ingredients like fresh hot cherry peppers and sherry vinegar that actually turned some people off. I went through all the promising short rib recipes in the cookbooks I owned, and they all turned out well enough. But, as any home cook worth his or her salt knows, if you want the perfect, the road inevitably leads to Cook’s Illustrated, the flagship publication of America’s Test Kitchen.
The co-founder of Cook’s Illustrated, Christopher Kimball, is a wicked man, the real-world incarnation of the old Saturday Night Live character “The Anal-Retentive Chef” (although he has performed a kind of teshuvah with his more recent Milk Street project). America’s Test Kitchen might prepare dozens upon dozens of versions of a dish, meticulously documenting the details of each iteration, until it arrives — with scientific fussiness — at its supreme expression. The truth is, the Cook’s Illustrated version is almost always the best — but you have to do exactly what the recipe says. No cutting corners.
It’s been long enough now that I don’t remember exactly what I had to do to prepare the Cook’s Illustrated short ribs recipe, only that it was back-breaking labor and everyone loved it. After the first time I made short ribs that way, if I happened to make them again and serve them to you for dinner, it probably meant I loved you. And then I stopped making short ribs altogether — because the Cook’s Illustrated recipe was too effortful and all other recipes did not quite measure up.
Then, I came across a recipe called “Brisket is Beautiful,” published by food writer Robert Rosenthal, a friend of a friend also known as “The Short Order Dad.” Basically, his recipe comes down to this — brown the meat (brisket, pot roast, or short ribs), throw all the other ingredients into a pot, and simmer for a couple of hours. But it wasn’t the ease that attracted me –what piqued my interest was the way Robert (an award-winning international advertising executive and former stand-up comedian, as well as a professionally trained chef) P.T. Barnumed the top ten reasons why brisket is beautiful:
1. It is easy to make. (And hard to screw up.)
2. It is mouth-wateringly delicious.
3. It’s inexpensive.
4. It requires only one pot.
5. It produces its own gorgeous gravy.
6. It makes your house smell really, really good.
7. It’s at least as good the next day. (“It makes a nice sandwich.”)
8. It feeds a lot of people.
9. It’s an extremely adaptable recipe.
10. Everyone loves it — kids and grownups alike. (Vegetarians, not so much.)
History demonstrates that Jews respond to lists of ten. Since then, I’ve never strayed from Robert’s recipe when braising meat. Mostly, I make pot roast and over the years the comments from people have run the gamut from “Like buttah” (the most glowing) to “Ethan’s dad’s pot roast is better than yours” (the harshest, uttered by my teenaged son in order to wound me — but the little thug cleaned his plate, so I let it slide).
Let me tell you another thing: Not only is Robert Rosenthal’s braised meat recipe easy to make, but it is also 90 percent as good as Tom Colicchio’s fancy-pants 24-hour braised short ribs. And 90 percent as good as those short ribs is pretty darn good. And at 10 percent effort for 90 percent of Cook’s Illustrated deliciousness, it’s an absolute no-brainer.
So we’ve reached the last paragraph of this story — the summing-up in which a clever writer tries to stick the landing by returning to where he or she started, showing that every oddball tangent was actually part of a well-worked-out plan. Rereading what I’ve written, I realize that kind of craft ain’t happening — what can I tell you, I started this article because my Traveling With Jewish Taste correspondent needed a break and I thought writing a food story would be easy. I considered going back and working harder to tie up loose ends, but realize that I have a great recipe to land this thing on and I should just step out of my own way. Why let the perfect become the enemy of the pot roast?
Pot Roast is Beautiful (via “The Short Order Dad”)
Robert Rosenthal suggests that the recipe is really just a starting point, and you can add things to it to suit your taste. My comments are in italics.
Ingredients
1 chuck roast, (about 2.5 to 3 pounds), rinsed and patted dry
Garlic cloves, peeled and sliced thin (as many as you like — I like a lot)
Salt and ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (up to you)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 pounds onions, peeled and sliced
2–3 bottles lager or amber beer (This is secret weapon #1 — beer is better than wine, ale is better than lager, and you probably won’t need more than 1 bottle for pot roast or short ribs, but you might with brisket)
10 ounce can of crushed tomatoes (You might like more — diced tomatoes also work)
Make the Pot Roast
With the tip of a sharp knife, make slits in both sides of the meat and stuff with slices of garlic. Season each side generously with salt and black pepper. (You don’t have to do it this way — chopping up the garlic and throwing it in with the rest of the ingredients works just fine.)
Place oil in a large, Dutch oven over a medium-high flame. When hot, brown the meat on both sides, lowering the heat as necessary so as not to burn.
When browned, add onions, cayenne, the remaining salt, beer, and tomatoes. Stir and bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the flame so that broth simmers. Cover the pot. You can leave it on top of the stove OR place it in a 300-degree pre-heated oven. (The oven is better, as it distributes the heat more evenly.)
Cook until meat is very tender but not falling apart, at least 2 hours. More is fine.
Remove meat to a carving board. Place the broth/gravy back on the stovetop, at a higher temperature, and reduce it to the consistency you desire. Taste and adjust seasoning. Then slice against the grain and top with onion gravy.
Comments: I throw in a couple of sprigs of thyme into the pot. If you want to add a vegetable, do so about 30–45 before you finish cooking. I like carrots (for the love of God, not the peeled baby ones), but think potatoes mess up the flavor and consistency of the gravy. Secret weapon #2 for me is to throw in a mess of potato gnocchi (DiCecco or Barilla) toward the end of cooking if you want to add a starch — the gnocchi absorb some of the gravy and provide a pleasing dumpling chewiness. Get an OXO fat separator and use it if you want a sauce that is less heavy.
Serves 4 (and [possibly] provides leftovers)
