Traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding

I made a Sunday roast last night for me and a neighbour. As it turned out three neighbours got it, but that’s the thing about a roast dinner, there is always enough to go around. 

My mother wasn’t much of a cook, but one thing she could cook well was a roast dinner. Our favourite was probably beef with Yorkshire pudding. In the UK, only roast beef has Yorkshire pudding with it. It isn’t served with any other meat. Yes, most people love Yorkshire puddings, but reserving them for a roast beef dinner makes them more special somehow. And now I have got used to the way they should taste – soaked with lots of beef flavour from the gravy as well as horseradish cream, they just don’t taste right with any other meat. 

A roast dinner is a big event, mostly because of the sheer volume of the food being produced (see later). It is always a bit of a juggle to have everything ready at the same time, something you master with experience of cooking it, but I have got better at this by planning my cook. This was something I learned in my chef training which is essential for a British roast because of the number of components involved.

So, this blog started off as a list of what I should do and when, step by step, for me to follow myself. It should make the whole process easier for you.

This version is how I like it. I like both creamy potato mash, as well as roast potatoes, so it is essential for me to have both, for any roast dinner. I’ve also got to have gravy for pork, chicken and beef roasts.

My mum boiled her veg, but depending on the vegetable it, might also work roasted. If you want real gravy, you need to boil at least some of the veg. You can use whatever vegetables you like, but sweet potatoes and pumpkin are not used in Britain. I like to use sprouts and carrots because their stocks give the gravy so much flavour, and it’s that cooking liquor that will be used to make the gravy. Boiling the veg is also important because the vegetables get seasoned in the salted water as it cooks. Don’t worry about losing flavour or vitamins, the liquid will all get used for the gravy. In fact, you want some of the flavour from the vegetables to enter the liquid to make the gravy better.

Also, the vegetables should not be crisp. They don’t need to be mushy, but they should be fully cooked. If you want the traditional experience, don’t make the mistake of under-cooking the vegetables because you have been told they are healthier that way. Think about it for a minute. You are using all the cooking liquor in the gravy, so you are not loosing anything. And you are gaining. You are seasoning the food more deeply, enhancing their flavour accordingly. And if you still think it is healthier to under-cook then surely they would be even more healthy completely uncooked, in which case, have a salad instead. Come on, let’s see some common sense here! There is a reason why they were cooked like this, and it wasn’t because they were too lazy to take them off the heat in time. Root vegetables should be cooked until tender, not until crisp. This isn’t spaghetti we are making.

Feel free to use a packet gravy, but I like to at least try it first with just flour. If It works, I’ve impressed myself. If not, just add a slurry of packet gravy and add some of the potato water with it. If you think that might make it too salty, just uses tap water, or unseasoned stock if you have any. It will taste far better than just the packet gravy alone. Plus, deglazing the roasting tray with your cooking liquor also helps with the washing up! 

Now I love horseradish cream, served on the side. It’s not compulsory, but it is the perfect accompaniment for roast beef in my opinion, for the roast dinner itself, as well as on sandwiches with some thinnly sliced onion later that evening for supper or the following day. Or you can use horseradish sauce if you want it hotter (horseradish cream is just horseradish sauce and cream in equal parts), or English mustard. 

Recipe

Servings: 6 main meals. Total cost: $38

Ingredients

• Main meal:
  • 3kg potatoes
  • 1.5kg beef joint (rib roast/sirloin roast/rump roast/topside/silverside)
  • 1 large swede
  • 0.75kg carrots
  • 0.5 kg sprouts
• Yorkshire pudding:
  • 140g (200ml) flour (ideally bakers, if not use plain, if not you can use self-raising)
  • 200g (200ml) eggs
  • 100g (100ml) milk
  • 100g (100ml) water
  • 3g salt

Method

1. Prep vegetables and potatoes
   • Peel the potatoes, carrots and swede
   • Cut carrots and swede to 1 – 1.5 cm cubes and sit in a pot of salted water (salty enough to be slightly too salty). These can be drained and served as they are with a knob of butter, or mashed coarsely first
   • Cut potatoes into the size you want the roast potatoes to be and sit in a large stock pot with salted water
2. Put oven on 180C
3. Cover beef joint with mustard (powder or paste) 
4. Sear beef in baking tray on the hob while oven is warming up
5. Place beef in oven
6. Mix Yorkshire pudding ingredients into a batter and rest while beef is cooking (at least 30 mins) 
7. Put the potatoes on to boil (they will need 10 mins to reach boiling, 20 – 25 mins to cook, and 5 mins to mash, but you can put them on early-ish and keep them warm in the pot you cooked them in)
8. Beef is cooked when it reaches an internal temperature of 50 – 55C, depending on how well you like your beef cooked and how large the joint is (note it will increase by roughly 5C while resting)
   1. Turn on the deep fat fryer
   2. Remove a third of the potatoes half way through cooking and add to the deep fat frier
   3. Remove beef to rest and cover roasting tray with foil
   4. Put Yorkshire puddings in baking tray (individual or one large tray) and put in oven, you can increase the heat if you like and you have 30 mins to cook with
   5. Put vegetables on to boil (will take 5 mins to get to boiling, 10 – 15 mins too cook, and 5 mins final preparation time)
9. Make the gravy half way through the beef resting time
   1. Remove meat joint to a plate and cover with foil again, then put roasting tray on the hob
   2. Add an estimated equal weight of flour to residual fat in the tray and mix with a spatula until all the fat is absorbed, then cook until lightly browned (a brown roux)
   3. Add stock from vegetables to deglaze the pan and form a gravy, slacken off until desired consistency with potato stock water, then allow to bubble gently until needed
   4. I would not add any salt here. I often find my gravy is over salted, even when I don’t add any salt, because I season the vegetable water and potato water very well. I have stopped putting salt on the meat for this reason. 
   5. If you want to add packet gravy, do it now. Make a slurry, then pour in as much as you need to thicken and flavour it to your liking. 
   6. If you do find the gravy is too salty it’s an easy fix. Just add enough water until it is perfect, and thicken with a cornflower or potato starch slurry, whichever you have on hand. The gravy will still taste great. That’s the thing about real gravy, it seems to almost get better the more you dilute it, up until a point, but that point is usually beyond 2 litres, far more than you will need for the meal. 
10. Mash the remaining potatoes
11. Finish plating the vegetables (mash or add a knob of butter, etc.)
12. Slice the beef and add the residual juices to the gravy
13. Remove the Yorkshire puddings when cooked to your liking
14. Serve with gravy and horseradish cream on the side

If you like Yorkshire puddings, check out my blog demystifying them here. You will be able to tweak the recipe to exactly how you like it and get perfect results all the time.

There should be extra gravy and sliced beef. You can make sandwiches with the beef and if you increase the potatoes to 4 kg there will be enough gravy and potatoes left over to make a cottage pie the following day (just add minced beef and onion, fry until browned, then add left over gravy and mash in any leftover vegetables, season, put in a casserole dish, allow to cool, then top with the left over mashed potatoes). 

I save my carrot peelings for stock, as well as the skin and tops and tails of the onions. Until recently I would throw my potato peelings away, but now I deep fry them to make crisps while I wait for the potatoes to come up to the boil and par-boil enough to be deep fried. 

Once the meat was cooked and resting out of the oven, there was space for me to keep the “roast” potatoes warm in the oven in a metal bowl while the Yorkshire puddings were cooking, so everything was warm when served. 

If you want perfectly cooked meat every time, you need to invest in a meat thermometer. It takes all the guesswork out of cooking meat. They only cost around $10-20. I will be writing a detailed blog on this soon. For perfect (medium rare to medium) beef you want it to reach 55C after resting, meaning you need to remove it from the oven when around 50C and leave it to rest. It will continue cooking on the inside while resting, so don’t cut into it for at least 30 mins. If you want your beef more rare, remove from the oven around 48C, and if you want medium-well, remove from the oven at 55C.

My beef wasn’t perfectly rectangular, so I had to compromise. The two ends were at 62-65C and the thickest part in the middle was still only 48C. Sure enough, it came out perfect, something for everyone, depending on where along the joint you took your meat from.

One note here is when I took my temperature readings I found the coolest part of the meat wasn’t the centre. It was higher than the centre. Once I saw this I quickly turned it over. Sure enough, the side that was toughing the bottom of the pan was much more cooked, so a simple flip over was all that was needed.

Variations

I tend to use the same vegetables each time, namely carrots and sprouts. Other traditional ones I like include cabbage and swede. Some like peas. I also love roast parsnips or a baked cauliflower cheese, but their preparation takes the complexity level of this dish up a notch. They are really great additions though, especially if you can make a good cauliflower cheese. You can even make a creamy potato bake and serve that instead of mashed and roast potatoes.

Less flavoursome alternatives might be broccoli, snow peas, etc. but because I want a tasty gravy I tend to avoid these, unless they are in season and extremely cheap.

I wouldn’t use pumpkin or sweet potato because for me they don’t belong in a roast dinner, but that’s because I’m British. I know they are an essential component for many in America and Australia.

Economy

While classically the ‘king of British dishes’, and one that uses a relatively premium cut of beef, it isn’t that expensive to make. My butcher did topside for me for $17/kg. A 4kg bag of potatoes costs $7 at most supermarkets. And the ‘odd bunch’ bag of carrots costs $0.80/kg. 

Traditionally, Sunday was the day that everyone in the family was few well, and meat was always the centrepiece of the meal. It was a way to ensure your family stayed healthy, even if you could only afford to do it one per week. Surplus food had to be made to ensure this, so you are expecting left-overs. In fact, many British dishes rely on these left-overs as core ingredients to them, like bubble & squeak, cottage pie, shepherd’s pie, meat pies and pasties, or just to flavour simple mince and onion or sausages served with the left over gravy and some reheated mashed potato. 

I live alone, so this recipe would provide me with a main meal for every day of the week, as well as roast beef sandwiches for half those days, and a large bag of crisps made from the potato peelings to go with them. 

Add on top of that $10 for 0.5 kg beef mince and 2 onions the following day and I also have another 6 portions of cottage pie. That’s basically an entire person’s food allowance for the week, for the total cost of $38 + $10 = $48. A little bit of cheap bread and jam, and an egg or two if I’m feeling flush, and that’s breakfast taken care off too.