Comment by chlodwig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chlodwig | Hacker News Reader

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Honest question, why do people seem to love rare meat so much? I agree that tough meat doesn't taste good, but I would argue a properly cooked pot roast is about the most tender cut of meat you can find.

Ribeye, lamb ribs, and lamb leg are all relatively tender. Beyond a certain point, I don't need my meat to be that tender. Frankly, ribeye is probably too tender to be optimal for health and physique -- it would be better to develop that Chad-like jaw to eat something a more tough cut ...

Rare meat is not only juicier, but too me it tastes a lot better. Rare meat tastes good, the denatured proteins of pot roast do not taste good. And while there is a tremendous amount of social conditioning and idiosyncrasies that determine people's tastes, I don't think is just me -- most people eat their steaks plain, but almost everyone I know adds sauces and fixins to their pot roast and brisket and other meats that have been cooked forever. IMO, they ruin the meat with over cooking and then add in sugars and other flavorings to make it palatable.

A well cooked pot roast is not that much different from the sous vide trend that's becoming so popular.

You put the roast in a dutch oven coated in salt and pepper the same as you would with a steak and a bit of water, then you let it cook at ~200F for 4 - 8 hours.

Usually you also slow roast some onions, carrots, potatoes, etc. along with it the last little while.

Then make a gravy from the drippings.

The gravy is good on the meat, but it's more for the vegetables. The meat is delicious in its own right.

With sous vide the collagen breaks down, but the internal temperature never gets high enough for the proteins to denature. Internal temp should not be higher than 135. The meat is still pink if you are doing it right. With pot roast, internal temp is going to 190 degrees or higher and the proteins denature (in addition to the collagen breaking down). I find that sous vide chuck roast taste better on its own than chuck roast, but it is worse than chuck roast seared and served rare. But the sous vide version is more tender than rare chuck roast, while being less tender than pot roast.

> With pot roast, internal temp is going to 190 degrees or higher and the proteins denature (in addition to the collagen breaking down). [emphasis added]

For a bad pot roast, maybe. I've never cooked a pot roast so hot that it would reach that internal temperature, and I've never known anyone else to either.

EDIT: Looking up recipes now, apparently some recipes do call for taking pot roast to much higher temps than I cook it to. Maybe that's why fast food roasts are so bad, but also why I don't eat them.

What internal temp do you cook until? Do you cook the whole roast as one big 6 pound chunk, or cut it up into pieces before cooking it? When I've cooked brisket or pot roast, I cook it until it is fork tender, which I think is usually around 190 degrees.

I leave it solid. 160 or so because my wife won't eat meat if it's still pink and a roast is hard to cook two of (versus steaks). We still find it plenty tender, they maybe not fork tender tender. But I'll do a long slow cook to help it become tender versus heating it up more.

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