healthy meals with sarah

Pot Roast reminds me of Sunday lunches after church with my family when I was growing up in Texas, serious comfort food. It still one of my favorite meals, this is serious comfort food!! I have adapted this recipe by borrowing ideas from quite a few sources and combining them all to make a gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo, Whole30 compliant, etc. version of this traditional dish, and it’s still really delicious! Ina Garten’s Company Pot Roast is my primary source of inspiration for this, her technique is really great for thickening the sauce even without the flour, butter, and wine that she uses.

This recipe takes some time, but you won’t need to be in the kitchen the entire time. You’ll need about an hour for chopping, searing, and stirring during the afternoon and then it needs to cook for 2.5 hours after that. You’ll then need about 15 minutes to finish the sauce and serve. So if you want to serve dinner at 7, get started around 3:15.

Ingredients:
3-4 lb. grass-fed chuck roast, tied
2 yellow onions, chopped
1 leek, chopped (white and light green parts)
2 cups sliced carrots
2 cups baby portobello mushrooms, sliced
5 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups small yellow potatoes, halved or quartered depending on size
4 cups organic beef broth
28 oz plum tomatoes in pureé
sea salt & freshly cracked pepper
olive oil

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees fahrenheit and begin chopping all of your veggies, I chopped mine a few hours ahead to speed up cooking time.

Pat the beef dry with a paper towel. Season the roast all over with salt and pepper. In a large, oven-safe Dutch oven pot, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Add the roast and sear for 4 to 5 minutes on each side as well as the ends, until nicely browned all over. Remove the roast from the pan.

Add about 2 more tablespoons olive oil to the Dutch oven. Add the carrots, onions, mushrooms, leeks, garlic, more salt and pepper, and cook over medium heat for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until all of the veggies are tender but not brown, like the picture below.

Add the beef broth and deglaze the pan (scrape all of the brown bits off of the bottom) then bring to a boil. Add the tomatoes, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1 teaspoon pepper. Add the potatoes and then put the roast back into the pot, try to make sure the liquid is covering almost all of the roast and veggies. Bring to a boil once again, cover, and place the covered pot in the oven for 2 1/2 hours, until the meat is fork tender.

Remove the roast to a cutting board. Skim off as much fat as possible from the sauce. This is really important part: transfer quite a bit of the sauce and vegetables to a blender (enough to fill up a fairly large blender) or a food processor fitted with the steel blade and pureé until smooth. Pour the pureé back into the pot, place on the stovetop over low heat, and return the sauce to a simmer. Taste for seasonings and let the sauce continue to simmer. Meanwhile, remove the strings from the roast, and slice the meat. Serve warm with the sauce spooned over it. The sauce is so good that my husband was literally drinking the extra sauce off of his plate!

For leftovers, I cut the rest of the meat into bite size pieces and add them back into the sauce and serve it as a stew, seriously tasty! Hope you enjoy this one as much as we do!