How do you make a pot roast?

It sounds like the first line of an old fashioned joke, but it is actually a serious cookery question. How can you roast something in a pot. After all, a pot is traditionally associated with water rich cookery whereas roasts are about dry heat and oil.

As I said, a pot is associated with moist cookery and indeed a pot roast is all about moisture. The meat used for pot roast have less fat than meat used for steaks so there is a danger of them becoming dry, chewy and stringy if the moisture is not retained.

Whatever meat you use, the first task will always be browning it which is basically frying the outside of the joint to carmelise the natural sugars. This gives the meat a richness of both colour and flavor that would otherwise be lacking.

Then it is a simple process of adding the vegetables and herbs to the meat in your crockpot, pouring in the liquor (often a good stock, sometimes nothing more than water) chucking the whole pot in the oven for a few hours and relaxing while dinner prepares itself.

There are many hundreds of wonderful crockpot recipes out there, so experiment and see which you like.

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