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My Friend Chuck

When I hear roast, my thoughts immediately go to a beautiful standing prime rib roast. I mean am I alone here? Well, from browsing on the internet, Chef Steps told me that you could take a chuck roast at half the price and turn it into something almost as tender, and delicious. Well with a Chuck Roast and a little Sous Vide magic, I set out to make it a reality.

🔪Prep Time 15 minutes

🛁Sous Vide Time 18 hour @135F/57C

👨‍🍳Roasting Time 10 min

🥩 Total Time 18 hour 30 minutes

Ingredients

Additional Equipment

• Cast Iron Skillet
• Roasting Pan

Instructions

As you look at your Chuck, you can probably notice the line of fat that run through it. At this point you have a couple options. Leave it in, or trim the fat out and use butchers twine to put it back together.

I went ahead and cut it out for this first cook. Im not averse to fat but I went on the trim side for now.

After your trim your going to need to use some butchers twine to fit the two pieces together. The two pieces fit back together very symmetrically.

Take your butchers twine and make it into a nice looking roast.

I then started the cook by building some flavor by pre-searing. For this, I used a Cast Iron Skillet. Heat up the skillet on medium high and when it just starts smoking add the oil. In this step you are not trying to cook the meat, you just want to get that nice browning color on the outside. After the meat came out, I tossed in my cloves of garlic and a couple of sprigs of fresh rosemary to roast and release some of the flavors of the aromatics.

Then season the meat generously on all sides with salt and pepper. After Roasting the garlic and other aromatics, I transfer them directly to the bag with the meat.Im using the gallon size ziploc type bags.

In place of a nicely vacuum sealed bag, you’re going to want to use the water displacement method which is achieved by submerging the protein in the water till most of the air is out of the bag. Then secure the bags to the side of the Sous Vide Container with binder clips.

Set your Sous Vide cooker to 135F/57C and place bags in bath for a long cook. This temp is more on the upper end of medium rare but it looked so good on other cooks that I decided it was a good starting point for the first time.

After 18 hours, your chuck roast is ready to be finished. Remove the roast from bath and pat dry with paper towels. Right now it doesn’t look that appetizing, but we’ll take care of that in a minute.

For the roasting I set about making a herb crust for the outside. This was done with an egg white wash on the outside and a rub of salt, black pepper, rosemary and thyme.

Set in a preheated 500 degree oven and roast till the crust browns sufficiently. About 15 minutes.

And just like that your chuck roast is ready to be sliced. and Enjoyed.

Dinner is served.

Conclusion

As far as the meat goes, it was amazing. Very tender and juicy, just like a prime rib. Although the meat was delicious there are a couple things I am going to change for the next time. The first is to bring the temperature down a bit. Being the first time with a large roast like this, id say I was a little skittish to go low. Not anymore. Next time I can see myself trying a 130-132 temp. The second thing I will change is that I will run the herb rub through my spice grinder to get a better consistency. I was not happy with the crust. And finally, being the first roast I was definitely on the cautious side in the oven. I prob could have let it brown a lot more and I think a better consistency on the rub would help this. I Would def recommend you give this one a shot. And if you do. Send me a picture or tag me on social media and I’ll repost it.

Thank you for checking us out. Now go ahead and try this one! You’ll love it. And when you do, go ahead and drop me a comment and tell me how it went, I want to know! If you enjoyed this, check out our social media’s and go ahead and share this blog with a friend. If you want to be the first to see our new cooks, subscribe to the blog through the bottom of this page. See ya next time!

Equipment List Links:

Meat Tenderizer: Meat Tenderizer

Vacuum Sealer: Anova Vacuum Sealer

Sous Vide Circulator: Anova Nano

Sous Vide Container: Anova Sous Vide Container

Skillet: Skillet