**A Perfectly Cooked Pot Roast**

The pot roast was in the oven for about four hours, and it is looking and smelling fantastic in here. As I take the lid off, I can see that the liquid is still slightly below the meat, indicating that the roast is incredibly tender. The vegetables are also perfectly cooked, with a nice caramelization on them. This is what makes me very happy - there's nothing quite like the satisfaction of serving a dish that's both flavorful and tender.

When you look at this pot roast, it's so tender that I'm grabbing it with these meat forks and it just totally breaks apart. What I like to do is break up the meat a little bit right in the broth, then spoon out some of the delicious juices and start building our plate from there. This way, when you pull the meat apart, it gets the benefit of getting some of that extra juice on top.

As we begin to serve ourselves, we're taking some nice chunks of the pot roast, along with some lucky bay leaves that we removed earlier. We're just going to start putting some good chunks in our serving vessels, and as I lift the spoon, I can see that it's just meltingly tender. The bacon chunks that we cut earlier and seared off are also making an appearance - they're still nice and chunky like me.

**A Family Tradition**

Growing up, my mom was Greek and Sicilian, and when she made this pot roast, she would actually put in a little bit of tomato sauce too in the broth. I like that method, but I keep mine on the brothy side because it's how I enjoy it best. The technique is exactly the same either way - it's just a matter of personal preference.

One of the beautiful things about bundling herbs together is that it's so easy to pull them out. Just like that, we're left with fresh mint, which I love to tear and place right on top of our dish. Mint is such a soft herb that I don't feel the need to slice or chop it - just pick it and place it there. Any soft herb works very nice in this dish - basil would be good, flat leaf parsley would be good, cilantro is also a great option.

**A Final Touch**

To finish off our pot roast, we're taking a little bit of lemon zest on top. And as I'm about to serve the broth, I realize that it's time to give this all a taste before feeding my friends. It needs just a pinch of salt and maybe a little more pepper - but other than that, it's perfect.

As we sit down to enjoy our pot roast, we're surrounded by the delicious aromas of beef broth, carrots cooked in that same broth, and crispy bacon. The meat is tender and falls apart at the touch of my fork - it's just what I love about a perfectly cooked pot roast. And as we take our first bites, we can see why this dish is a staple of every season: it hits all the right notes and is both inexpensive and delicious.

As I look around the table, I'm grateful for the simple pleasures in life that bring us together with friends and family. In this case, it's a perfectly cooked pot roast - and I hope that you'll get in the kitchen and try making one of your own. Remember to add some fresh mint and lemon zest, because those two ingredients really make this dish shine. And most importantly, enjoy every bite - it's going to blow your friends away!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi guys I am Michael Simon welcome to today's class so today I am going to make pot roast I mean  who doesn't like pot roast but what makes this pot roast so special is it is a pot roast for any  season we're gonna braise it and cook it really slow which gives you all that rich deliciousness  that you want to kind of cuddle up with that makes pot roast so special so it's great for the cooler  days but then we're going to give it a little Mediterranean finish it has the roasted carrots in  there some fresh mint some lemon zest it's really going to brighten it up so this is a pot roast  that is every bit as comfortable in the summertime as it is by a fire in the winter now a great  little tip for large format cuts of meat like this this is a chuck roast a blade chuck roast  and I like to Salt this the night before if I have time it allows the salt to kind of penetrate down  into the meat it also makes the meat a little bit more tender breaks down the cell structure of the  meat a little bit so it gives you even a more flavorful pot roast now if you got this the day  of and you had to start cooking thing you could season it and let it go keep the seasoning on as  long as you can but if you can do this overnight it is beneficial and you are going to get better  flavors so I have kosher salt here a big hunk of meat so you need a good amount of salt so we salt  it pretty liberally on all sides and the thing is once you put this in your fridge uncovered you are  going to see that the salt goes into the meat you will not see it in the morning and a little bit of  moisture or water is going to come out of the meat which is going to help you intensify the flavor of  the beef and it's also going to break down that structure a little bit to make things a little  bit more tender I like to put this on a rack to keep it off the tray give my hands a quick washand then what you're going to do is you're going to press pause we're  going to put this in the fridge and I'll see you in the morninghey everybody welcome back a little Simon Says pot roast happening so while we were away I preset my  oven to 350 degrees so that is warming up we took our pot roast out of the fridge now when  you look at this you could see how it has changed in look a little bit it's got a deeper red right  here which is because some of that moisture came off we also let it uncovered which forms  almost like a pellicle on the exterior which is going to allow us to get that really good  caramelization and Browning on there and what you can see is inside the meat some of that moisture  stuff has been released and the cell structure of the meat has changed a little bit which is going  to make it more tender so here's what salting in advance does for you it gives you better flavor it  makes sure that the meat is seasoned all the way through and it's going to help the meat become a  little bit more tender as you cook it so that is a win-win for me if you have the time to do  it now I'm going to move this out of the way for just a moment and we're going to start working on  our bake get now those of you that know me know that I have a love affair with bacon it is like  people say now oh Bacon's trendy everybody uses bacon it's easy to make things good with bacon all  those things are true I've Loved bacon since I was a little kid I still love bacon I'm going to love  bacon till the day I die my grandfather is 102. Heats bacon every day and I will eat bacon just  like Kim so we have slab bacon today and what I did is this a little trick if you want to cut slab  bacon into big chunks what I did was we placed it in our freezer for just about 10 minutes before  I started working for it it just firms it up a little bit because bacon obviously has a lot of  fat in it and when that gets warm or comes to room temperature it gets a little bit harder to work  with so freezing it just firms it up I'm going to take my range and turn it up to about medium  I have a dutch oven here to me if you could have any pan at home one of the ones that you should  really look into is a dutch oven you could roast in it you could braise in it especially these cast  enamel ones they last forever great piece of equipment I am going to cut my bacon in pretty  large chunks so I'm going to go straight down here and then I'm just going to cut these into like  like lardones like sometimes you get those salads if you go to a French restaurant every once in a  while that frize salad with those big chunks of bacon the poached eggs that's how we're gonna  cut our bacon here and we're gonna render the bacon first and the bacon is going to release  a good amount of fat which is then going to be what we cook everything else in so this is a  win-win for everyone and you can see because the bacon was frozen it doesn't kind of Smash down  as I'm cutting it so here when you look at this you have the fat and the Meat part so you want to  cut that way down go straight down there so you get that nice balance of fat and meat if you cut  it the other way you're going to get the fat cap and then the meat so you want it to look almost  like 50 50 as you're cutting it and I would just say you know find somebody or a brand that you  really like and when you could get slab bacon it is a great option you know growing up in Cleveland  there were a lot of vendors throughout the market that smoked their own bacon and made slab bacon  and now at the restaurants and at home we make our own bacon which makes me very happy also  all right let's continue to get this cut up  and then we just start rendering this out now depending on some of the times with recipes and  when you're cooking you know a recipe will say one thing but sometimes a little bit of judgment  needs to be made too so with bacon if you look at the bacon and the bacon looks a little bit  on the lean side to you it's okay to put a little bit of olive oil or oil in the  pan to kind of get that fat moving this looks pretty good I'm just going to put in a small  splash of oil and this is just going to help kind of the fat and everything get moving so that is a  judgment call for you so bacon goes in and we are going to let the bacon start to render outremember too another thing with bacon when you're working with it bacon has already been  cooked So when you buy bacon at the store it's been cured and smoked which means it's cooked  through already all we're doing is deciding on how much crispiness and texture and so forth that we  want with the bacon when it's going in the pan so you don't have to worry about when with bacon like  is that I cook this enough is it undercooked cook it till the crispiness that you desire  and as that's going I'm just going to start working on some of my vegetables before we even  get the the meat going I have shallots carrots thyme garlic and coriander seeds so with the thyme  we're just going to tie off about 10 sprigs of time that's going to go in you don't have  to tie it off the reason that I do is because it makes it easy to remove once it is all done  so I'm just going to do this first kind of get all of our in professional kitchens they  say you know get your mise and floss together it means everything in place  but you just want to kind of prep as you go that way you're not wasting any timeshallots we're going to start the peel so I'm going to remove both ends of the shallots and then  we will just peel those with carrots I talk about this a lot during these cooking classes I like to  buy like a small medium-sized organic carrot clean them real good and I leave the skins on  if they look really dirty to you or the skin looks beat up or you know you're  not comfortable doing it peel them I don't peel them all right and shallots Bacon's looking goodkeep that goingbut you need to work on these guysso really the great thing about pot roasts and braises and you know there's been a lot  of popularity now with pressure cookers and insta pots and things like that the thing  that a couple things that I Love About Braces is one it's like having a meat candle in your  house your whole house smells good for the entire process like it really makes things smell great  and then the other thing is is when you do a classic braids like this as the meat is cooking  the liquid is uh evaporating which is intensifying all the flavors in a crock pot or instapot or  you know pick one of those there's very little evaporation of liquid so you don't get those deep  robust flavors now will you save an hour two hours whatever you not have to watch it or any of those  kind of things yes all that is true and I know some people are limited with time and and you know  how much time they could sit over something but you will never get the same flavors as you do with  the braids so even if this maybe ends up being a Sunday meal for you something that you just do one  day a week on Sundays because you could take a little bit more time over the stove that is  totally fine but I would recommend it no matter how much you may be in love with some of those  other equipments in your house this is really where you get maximum flavor and remember before  the crock pot this a cast enamel pot a dutch oven was like the crock pot okay I'm just peelingit's more fun doing some of these at the restaurant because have someone to do this for  you you can see that at grocery stores though now one thing that has changed a lot since I've been  little or younger is that you can find grocery stores that actually do this work for you where  they they peel the shallots or they cut vegetables and and things of that nature not the ones that  are like in glass jars but they're actually packaged by prepped and packaged by the store  so you could assure that they're still fresh they are they do cost a little bit more but  they do save you time I don't recommend buying like pre-sliced pre-roasted pre-sliced garlic  that's all Jarred because that's a different situation all right we're almost to our shelves  by the time we are through with the shallots I'm gonna have the bacon at a place that I like it  and again if you want it to be a little bit more crispy you could make it more crispy but remember  this is a braised dish so even as you crisp it it's still going to get soft through the cooking  procedure but I like to get a little bit of caramelization on there for flavor it also helps  some caramelization happen at the bottom of the pan or that fond which is then going  to come up into our sauce which is really going to make the pot roast big big flavorstelling you I could peeldo moreI think when they were shopping for shallots for me they made sure that  every shallot that they bought had two heads in it just to test my patients  today but I'm not backing down I'm sticking with it one more to gobut again you could see a lot of times with cooking you know when you're cooking it's all  about timing everything to make the job as easy as possible so while you have dead time which would  be this the the bacon Browning it also gives you a moment to peel the shallots so the bacon is ready  I'm going to remove that to my plate turn the heat down just a touchand you could see that because these are nice big chunks of bacon you get a little bit of  that crispiness on the outside but it's still going to be really meaty on the inside which  is what I want in a stew or a braise like this what I don't want is little thin little chunks  of bacon because they're just going to go away and be almost unidentifiable so bacon is brownednow we are going to put in our pot roast that we have seasoned already so you don't need to add  any more seasoning to this and we're just going to put this right in that rendered Bacon fat  I'm going to turn my heat back up to high  and I'm just going to let this continue to Brown on we're going to get a brown on kind of all sides  really hard sear on the larger pieces do not cheat this Step A lot of times people put meat in a pan  they start moving it around dancing around doing the you know The Jig you really have to let this  caramelize and get that right on the edge of like your like oh my gosh I think it's almost burnt  that's when you flip it that deep caramelization is where you get those deep luscious flavors that  everybody loves about a brace so take your time here and because I have a little bit of time  I could continue to work on my vegetables so I'm going to get my carrots cut  I'm going to get my garlic peeled and smashed and so we have a little bit of time to go  through this process here when you look down at your carrots kind of keep them the same  thickness and so forth as your shallots so everybody is cooking at the same timeput these in my little bowlforeignour garlic and I'm gonna today I'm going to use about five clovesif you like more garlic add more garlic you don't like garlic use less garlic and what I  really always want to show with any of my cooking classes is to me it's imperative you learn the  technique because if you learn this technique you could make hundreds of different kinds of braises  and change the ingredients within them as you go you could use pork instead of beef you could use  turnips instead of carrots whatever it is you could add more garlic less garlic you could make  it spicy but the key here is the technique of the braise I'm gonna get all this okayrest goes in the compost I'm going to use six of the largest cloves in here or five  six save these three for a rainy day or a vampire take off the edgeand then I'm just going to give these a little Smash and a peelthis should be good and brownall right that's what I'm looking for you guys see that we didn't move it we didn't  touch it nothing happened we just worked on our vegetables and we got that great caramelization  because the pan is doing a lot of the work for us and that's really why you buy these  cast enamel or a cast iron or a heavy pan that conducts heat really nicely you're letting it  do all the heavy lifting as you go so now the garlic just give it a little pop with the knife  peel off the skin and we're not even going to slice this up just going to leave it wholegood trick with garlic too is if you need to do a lot of it at a time you could put it in  between two metal mixing bowls and shake and it'll pop all these skins right off  so if you're not into the tedious part of this process that works tooforeignwipe down the cutting boardall rightagain good caramelization I'm gonna get these other two sides so as I'm  getting the sides I have a little bit more room in the pan over here  so I'm going to just let my vegetables start to Brown in there a little bitand then we'll finish it when we pull out the rest of this meatso we got the two we got great caramelization on both sides I'm  just searing the other two sides then this goes off to a pan and we could  add the rest of our vegetables season them and continue to build the braceall right so carrots and onions are in again now we have that beautiful rendered Bacon fat in there  we also have a little bit of rendered fat from the beef we add the garlic I have my thyme bundle  just going to set that tied to the handle so it's easy to get up laterand now we're going to deglaze the pan so you could use in in this type of pan you  could use a metal spoon I sometimes you can use metal wooden either one works so we have beer  we have cider and we have stockthe recipe called for four beers some of that may be because you just want an extra one for yourself  so we're gonna go two cups of the cidermaybe three to four beers depending on what time of the day it is for you cooking you're  starting this in the morning you could put it all in your pot roast if this is  an afternoon project go three beers and save one for yourself all right two cups of ciderand now you just wannarub the bottom of that pan there we go here's a wooden spoon this is better so you had all that  beautiful caramelization at the bottom of the Pan Once you add your first amount of liquid in  you want to scrape the bottom of the pan with your wooden spoon  to pull that caramelization or that fond into the sauce never waste a moment to get flavorput in two tablespoons of toasted coriander seedstwo whole bay leaves dried or fresh depending on what you can finda couple beers usually you know I'm using a lager here a porter would work really it's  kind of I feel beers like wine and you hear cooks and chefs say this all the time use one  that you love to drink and I do think that that is true here too you know if if the wine or beer  tastes bad to you out of the bottle it's not going to taste good in your dish especially  because this is reducing as it's cooking so it's actually going to intensify the flavors as it goes  continue to bring this up to a simmer have our stock I always like to have extra stock on hand  but visually we're going to see where we end up in the liquid remember a braise is different it's not  boiled meat it's braised meat so we want to cover the meat about three quarters and keep that top  quarter exposed and we'll base it as we're going we see that's caramelizing too much as we go we  we can even give it a flip and continue that way so in recipes I typically tell you to have  you know more stock than you may need so let's look at this so we're just about exposed here  so I'm just going to put a little bit of stock in so I can keep the top of that meat exposedwe're going to add our crisp bacon  back to our braise I'm going to put this lid on and we're going to let this go for about  three to four hours until it is incredibly tender so hit pause we'll see you in a bithey everybody welcome back so the pot roast was in the oven for about four hours it is looking and  smelling fantastic in here and you could see when I take the lid off the liquid is still slightly  below the meat we got some good caramelization right on there all those vegetables are tender  too now this is what makes me very happy so when you look at this it's so tender as I'm grabbing it  with these meat Forks it just totally breaks apart and what I like to do is  I break up the meat a little bit right in the broth and then we could spoon  it out and start building our plate from there so this way when you pull it apart  in here it kind of gets the benefit of getting some of that extra juice on thereso now we're going to take some nice chunksthe lucky bay leaf remove that  and we're just going to start putting some good chunks in our serving vesseland it's just meltingly tendersome bacon chunks in there oh yeah this was one of my favorite things growing up  my mom is Greek and Sicilian so when she made this she would actually put in a little bit of tomato  sauce too in the broth and I like that method too and again the technique is exactly the same  she would just add some tomatoes because that's how she liked the roll I keep mine a little bit  more on the brothy side because it's how I enjoy it but you should make this how you enjoy it best  so we have those vegetables the shallots the chunks of garlic the carrots you could  really smell the thyme here's the beautiful thing about bundling the time it's just so easy to pull  out just like that and now I'm going to take some fresh mint and what I like to do with mint mint is  such a soft herb I don't feel the need to kind of slice it chop it dice it I just pick it and then  I'm going to tear it and place it right on top and I think any soft herb works very nice here  basil would be good flat leaf parsley would be good cilantro I like kind of the that  Sicilian slash Greek Flair of the mint and how it brightens up the whole dishtake a little bit of lemon zest on topand now I'm just gonna grab some extra broth and if you're serving this for your friends  you could either do the broth on the side and they could add it but I like to put a little  bit of broth after I put the mint and the lemon in there because when that hot broth hits the  mint and the lemon zest it helps it release its oils so it really just perfumes the whole brothall right let's see what we got a little snack for Mikey I'm a growing boy so bacon carrots  pot roast I got myself a shallot a little bit of herbage I'm hereand I also think it's important I don't even need the knife I also think it's important  to give this all a taste before you feed your friends see if it needs a little bit  of salt see if it needs a little bit more pepper maybe you want to hit it  with some more lemon all your choices so those carrots cooked in that beef broth  we'll go the meat you could see I could just break it apart with my Fork don't even need a knifeum those great bacon lardolans that we cut earlier and seared  off see how they stayed big nice and chunky like me all right that's it  little Simon Says pot roast I hope you get in the kitchen and try this one remember  because of the mint because of the lemon it is great for every season it's going to blow your  friends away inexpensive delicious hearty it hits every note we'll see you later take care\n"