Dawn Brocco's Life & Design Blog

Hubby found the last chunk of a sale-priced 5 lb. top sirloin roast at the store Saturday. Just a buck 50 a lb! This will be dinners for the week. A coupla days of it plain, with gravy, then the remains made into stew.
Now, I had sorta remembered the recipe from "America's Test Kitchen" , another PBS show I try not to miss (but did manage to miss this Sunday) for their roast beef with gravy. But I needed the recipe and didn't want to wing it. Much searching and filling out forms (and losing patience with slower weekend cable speed) took place so to access the site's recipes.

Hubby rubbed it with salt, pepper and garlic powder the night before. I patted it dry the next day and bravely browned this hunk 'o meat in the cast iron pan - alot for this non-meat cooker. Then popped it onto the v-rack in the large baking pan and into the oven at 275 degrees for 2 hours.

I cooked some of my homemade egg noodles and ladled the gravy over the medium rare slices (at 2 hours' cooking time for the 5 lbs) and the noodles, with green beans on the side.

Now the gravy. Delicious, though more work than my usual gravy and, it repeated on both of us.

You use the pan the meat was browned in and toss in a chopped onion (they called for 2, but this guy was huge enough), 2 carrots (to their 1) and 1 stalk celery, all chopped. Saute til softened. Add 1 tbl tomato paste (which we were out of, of course!, so I substituted 4 tbl of his homemade marinara sauce), and 1/4 c flour. Stir and cook this til it's all blended well - a couple/few minutes.

Add 1 c red wine (of which I only had 1/3 c), 4 c beef broth (mine was low sodium). Stir it all , bring to a boil then simmer 10 minutes til it thickens.

Well, mine didn't thicken so much. I know the tomato sauce instead of the paste added more moisture, but I WAS short 2/3 a cup of the wine, so it should have balanced out.

Not to be outdone, after I strained the gravy through a cheesecloth-lined sieve into a saucepan, I added 1.5 tbl butter to the frying pan and a couple tbl flour and made a roux. I added some of the4 gravy to the roux to blend it in and then added the roux to the gravy and NOW it thickened. Add 1/2 tsp worcestershire sauce (instead of their 1 tsp, as it kills hubby), salt and pepper to taste, then let it sit covered while the meat was roasting.

I think, though that I'll stick to my simple gravy of butter and canola oil roux with beef broth and a bit of drippings from the pan, with salt and pepper. Sometimes with a touch of onion powder or other seasonings, depending on the gravy.

The sirloin was a good cut - almost as tender as a tenderloin, at such a great price! I'm spoiled now. London Broil can be good and it can be tough.

Now, all that veg that was used *just* for gravy flavoring. I didn't want it going to waste, as it still had flavor. So they went into another saucepan with 2 cups of chicken broth and some salt and pepper and simmered awhile, for an easy veg soup.

On with today's madness - endless phone calls, waiting on return calls, faxes, continued tax prep, laundry, emails, and all the other usual Monday-after-a-holiday-weekend stuff to deal with!

One of these days I'll have something knitting-related to report! I hope!