The aslow-cooked roast is a pleasant mercy on a cold day, and a lean, immature Scotch Beef silverside cut is perfect for this lazy method – which relies on nothing more than regular basting with the savoury juices to create a flavour-packed and inexpensive dish.
Also the onions become soft, sweet delicacies to enjoy at leisure. In some cases you will want to pot-roast beef, in this case we advise to check how to cook the silverside beef with french onion.
Serves 6
Prep time: 20 mins
Cooking time: 2 hr 35 mins
Ingredients for silverside beef recipe
- 2kg boned and rolled Scotch Beef PGI silverside
- 1 tbsp beef dripping or butter
- Salt and black pepper
- 8-12 small red onions, peeled and slit in a cross at the pointed end (so that they do not burst in the oven)
- 4 heads garlic, halved
- A few sprigs of thyme
Method of preparation of silverside beef roast:
- Recognize after switching your joint from the packaging, pat dry and bring to room warmth.
- Preheat your stove to 200°C for fan assisted or 215°C for ovens without a fan.
- Choose a wide, heavy-based roasting tray, ideally with deep sides and handles for easy movement.
- Rub a little goose or duck fat into the joint if it doesn’t have a generous coating of fat, then season with good quality fine sea salt just prior to cooking.
- Create a trivet by approximately chopping equal amounts of onion, carrot and celery (or our preferred choice of celeriac, the root of the celery) plus a bay leaf, sprig of thyme and a few black peppercorns.
- Put the beef fat bottom up onto the trivet which should line the base of the tray.
- Set in the middle of the oven and roast for 20 minutes, then decrease the temperature to 170°C for fan assisted or 180°C for ovens without a fan. Continue roasting for 20 minutes per 500g reaching a core temperature of minimum 56°C for a medium rare roast. The joint will continue to cook once removed from the oven, reaching a core temperature of 58ºC.
- Transfer from the oven, put on a clean tray and keep warm by covering with a sheet of tin foil. Rest for a minimum of 20 minutes before carving, leaving the roasted vegetables in the tray for the gravy.
- For the gravy, make up 500ml of Essential Cuisine beef stock, then deglaze roasting tray with this stock stirring in all the caramelized juices from the tray. Next, pass through a fine sieve driving all the juices from the vegetables into a clean saucepan. Bring to a simmer and thicken if required by whisking in a teaspoon of cornflour mixed with a little cold water and reduce until it becomes a rich, glossy gravy.
There it’s also a technique to cut the Silverside cut of beef meat. See the main idea on this video:
Check our Beef ‘n’ Biscuit Bake