The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

heavy with meat juices. For soul-satisfying cold-weather
fare, it’s about as good as it gets.
Pot roast is essentially a large piece of braised meat.
Braising is the act of slowly cooking a piece of meat in a
moist environment. The moisture can come from
submerging it in liquid (in which case, it’s technically called
stewing) or by cooking it in a covered or partially covered
vessel designed to trap moist air around the food. As the
meat cooks at a low temperature in a moist environment,
just as when making stock, the connective tissue, primarily
made up of the protein collagen, slowly converts into
gelatin. This is essential, because cooking also transforms
meat in another important way: it drives out moisture—even
if you cook it in a completely moist environment. Indeed,
because water is such a great conductor of heat, beef boiled
in 212°F water will actually get hotter and lose moisture
faster than beef roasted in 212°F oven! But there are other
reasons to keep liquid in your pot. First, it regulates the
temperature, so that there’s no chance of anything ever
getting hotter than the boiling point of water. Second, it
facilitates the transfer of flavors among different parts of the
meat and the vegetables. Finally, what good’s a pot roast
without gravy?
All good meat recipes start with the right cut. For pot
roast, any number of cuts high in connective tissue will do,
but I prefer the chuck eye. It’s beefy and has plenty of
gelatin-rich connective tissue to keep it moist (see “Stewing
Beef,” here). After browning the roast in a Dutch oven, I
further bolster the flavor by adding a mirepoix of carrots,
celery, and onion, browning them in the same pot (the