The January edition of Cook’s Illustrated has a nice article on slow roasting less expensive cuts of beef. I would like to quote from it, but my copy of the magazine has gone missing and the on-line version of the article consists of only the recipe that Cook’s developed to speed up this method. The gist of the article, not the recipe, is that beef can be slowly cooked and tenderized by running the oven at the same temperature to which you want the internal temperature to be when finished. In other words, if you want the beef to finish at an internal temperature of 130 degrees, run the oven at 130 degrees.

   It will take A LONG TIME for the internal temperature to reach 130 degrees like this and you will probably be convinced that you are simply growing bacteria. The magazine doesn’t recommend that anyone do this and gives a quicker, but still effective, method that I am sure works just fine, but I thought to try the SLOOOOW cooking method. It took close to twenty hours and I have since eaten the beef and have nothing to report in the bacterial or gastro distress line. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe the fact that I browned the eye of round on top of the oven before putting it in the oven prevented the bacteria load from building.

   I can say this - by using this method the house is deprived of the smell of roasting beef. That may be a good thing or not depending on your likes; it would be wonderful for fish, but I don’t have the berries to try it with fish.

   There was a glitch in my experiment .. The power in my part of the world is erratic. We live in Westchester and it seems at least once in every 36 to 48 hours, the power winks off for a second or two. Sometimes it isn’t long enough for the electronic clocks on the stove and Microwave to loose the time, but it is enough for the electronics to simply shut the stove off or the timer on the coffee maker to loose its programming. This happened the night I tried it; I don’t know how know how long the oven was down and at 130 it might not have mattered; I turned it back on and continued when I discovered that the oven was no longer on.

   The beef was surprisingly tender and flavorful. We are pleased with it, but it is an unreliable method in this part of the world. I don’t think I will do it again because  the savings in the cost of beef is probably offset by the cost of running the oven for twenty hours. The eye of round remains an eye of round; it doesn’t morph into prime rib or anything, but it is as good and tender as eye of round gets and the flavor is completely developed. It carves nicely and be sliced very thin by hand.

   This is where I would refer you to the recipe at the Cooks on-line edition, but I can’t because it is a subscription only site. Their main point is that the beef gets tender at 122 degrees internal temperature, that you can get to that point fairly quickly and the trick is to stay there for awhile before finishing at 130 for rare. I think I’ll try their improved method as the original slow cooking method worked so well.