Food Review

[unicornduke]

So I made the venison roast. 

It turned out pretty well for the most part.

I'm a little confused on the roast, it is partially above the liquid in the pot. So that section isn't as cooked as the lower part, it's really tough too and a grey/dark brown color on the outside. Is this what should be happening?  The fat wasn't broken down all the way. So I threw it in the pot for another hour to see if that does anything. The other issue might have been that the recipe said a 2-3 pound roast but it turns out the recipe is for a 2-3 pound bone in roast, which mine was not. But it was on the smaller side at 2 pounds and I slow cooked it for four hours. If I cooked it more, it might have just cooked through eventually. 

Other than that, it turned out super tasty and the meat below the liquid line was super tender and delicious. It was more vinegar than I like, so I'll probably reduce that amount next time I make it. It doesn't have a ton of other taste in there other than meat but ehh, it's good. 

I also want to apologize to the entirety of Mexico for completely butchering the tacos I attempted to make. 

So I put down the corn thingys, put the meat on, put the ricotta on (it turned out more like queso fresco), then heated up some corn and carrots and dumped them on top. 

Comments

[graydon]

This is where the verb "seethe" comes from!

If you have the roast submerged, it gets convective heat transfer; if it's above the liquid, it only gets radiative heat transfer (and is obviously going to be a little dryer.) Radiative heat transfer works well from inside cast iron or the right kind of ceramic pot, but not from glass or stainless or a lot of other pot materials. (That is, the bits of the roast sticking out will get browned, as well as dried.)

Sometimes people turn the roast over if it's being slow cooked, sorta two thirds of the way through, or they try to make sure it's certainly all submerged.

When I do this sort of thing (usually with pork shoulder, so more fat than even plump fall venison) I tend to saute some chopped onions until about half done, plunk the roast on top (this is in a ceramic or cast iron dutch oven, although the specific examples are french :) and then add stuff. Chopped potatoes, dried apple, dried cranberry, anything like that; turnip, carrots, whatever. Then it gets some fairly acidic fruit juice; grape, cranberry, cherry, pomegranate, anything like that. (The whisky and the maple syrup (a dram each) over the roast are optional.) And then in the oven at ~300 F for about five hours for a five pound roast. That leaves it just about sliceable when cold, rather than falling apart To get venison to disintegrating I'd expect about an hour and a half a pound.