January 6, 2013
comment 0

Roast

I’m back! The holidays were a whirlwind of excitement, travel and TONS and TONS of food. January 1 I started counting calories again. January 4 and January 5 were completely shot as I filled my face with food. Oops.

I made the best roast ever for our Christmas Eve dinner. This roast was a project. Not because it’s a difficult recipe, but because we could not find said roast in the store for a reasonable price. Bon Appetit recommended a three pound center cut tenderloin roast. The first place we went to find the roast it was $40 PER POUND. The next place, it was $20 per pound. Finally, god bless Market Basket, we found it for $15 a pound. And thankfully my mom went into Market Basket to buy it because I have a serious phobia when it comes to that store. So. many. people. If the blog “People of Market Basket” doesn’t exist yet, someone should start it. There are some serious characters.

Okay, so anyway, we went all out and chopped down our own herbs at the farm’s green house, but no need to go all out. Here’s the original recipe and here’s what you need:

  • 3 garlic cloves, chopped
  • 1 tbsp fresh thyme
  • 2 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 1/2 tsp black pepper
  • 1 1/2 tsp freshly ground pink peppercorns
  • 1 3-pound center-cut beef tenderloin at room temperature
  • 1 bunch fresh rosemary
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tbsp unsalted butter
The morning of, combine the garlic, thyme, salt, black pepper and pink pepper. Remove the roast from its packaging and have a few pieces of plastic wrap ready on the table (you’ll be rewrapping the roast, so cut accordingly).
Rinse the roast, pat dry and then rub the garlic mixture on all sides. Rewrap in plastic wrap and pop into the fridge to soak in the flavors for a few hours. One hour before you plan to begin cooking, remove roast from the fridge and let come down to room temperature. This is critical.
Preheat the oven to 400F. Scatter rosemary on the bottom of your roasting pan. Melt the butter and olive oil together in a cast iron skillet and sear the roast on all sides. I did this on an electric stove, and it took about 10 minutes. This most likely takes less time on a gas stove.
Transfer the meat to the pan and roast for about 30 minutes or until your meat thermometer registers 125 for a medium-rare.
Let the roast sit for 15 minutes before slicing.
NOTE – for some reason, 140 produced a very rare roast, so I sliced it up, popped it onto a cookie sheet, and let cook for another 5 minutes in the oven. It was perfect.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s