Roast Beef
Serves 4 Time 90 minutes Difficulty 3/5 Ingredients 22 Steps 34
Roast beef, or a roast dinner, is a traditional and classic meal across Britain, the Commonwealth, and Ireland, with the focus on some form of roasted meat, vegetables, gravy, and Yorkshire puddings. Roast dinners are traditionally served on Sunday, but can also be eaten throughout the week. The precise recipe of a roast dinner will vary considerably from person to person, so below is a broad overview of common…
Ingredients
Roast beef
- 1 joint (about 3 pounds / 1.5 kg) of good quality beef rib or rolled rib beef
- Extra beef bones (optional)
- ½ cup sifted all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon (5 ml) salt (rock salt preferred)
- 1 pinch of ground black pepper (as much as can be held between the finger/thumb)
- ¼ cup olive oil or other good cooking oil
- 2 cups water
- 1 onion
- 1 glass of full-bodied red wine
Gravy
- 1 teaspoon (45 ml) red jam (mix with a little water and strain out the seeds if using raspberry or blackberry)
- 1 pinch of nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon (5 ml) Lea and Perrin's Worcestershire sauce and/or Maggi stock cube
- 1 glass of red wine
Roast potatoes
- 3 lb (1.5 kg) potatoes (preferably Maris Piper)
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) goose fat
Recommended accompaniments
- Yorkshire pudding
- Roast parsnips
- Boiled or steamed green beans
- Cabbage with a little bacon
Condiments
- Horseradish sauce or creamed horseradish
- English mustard (preferably mixed from dry ground mustard. Colemans in the yellow tin is still the best)
Steps
Roasting
- On morning of cooking, take beef joint out of fridge. Let it come to room temperature.
- Preheat oven to 200°C (400°F). Put roasting tin in oven to heat; cast-iron is best. Add a spare onion to the tin if available.
- Combine plain flour, a little rock-salt and a good pinch of ground pepper. Wipe fatty edges of joint with damp cloth. Dust with mixture.
- Heat olive oil in a large frying pan. Sear fatty edges of meat until dark brown, holding joint with a fork. Brown the meat surface too.
- Add spare bones to frying pan. Brown well.
- Remove joint and bones from pan. Lower heat. Add red wine. Deglaze well. Wine may catch fire.
- Make a bed of spare beef bones in hot roasting tin, with a coarsely chopped onion, to raise joint off the bottom.
- Add a cupful of water. Pour deglazed pan contents, including onion, over joint.
- Place joint on bed or rack near top shelf of oven. Cook 15 minutes at 200°C (400°F) without opening oven.
- Open oven. Baste joint. Reduce temperature to about 180°C (350°F). Do not baste again.
- Cook per pound (~450g): rare 15 minutes, medium 20 minutes, well-done 25 minutes.
Resting
- Remove joint from roasting tin. Place on separate dish.
- Cover loosely with plenty of tin-foil. Rest about 15 minutes in a warm part of kitchen. If joint can stand up, sprinkle a very little rock salt on top.
Gravy
- Place roasting dish on stove (2 rings if needed). Heat juice a little.
- Add red wine. Deglaze thoroughly on high heat to evaporate alcohol.
- Add a little water (or vegetable cooking water) and Worcestershire sauce. Bring to a low boil.
- Stir in red jam, mustard and nutmeg. Add crème fraîche if desired.
- Keep heating, adding water (or cream or more red wine), until gravy thickens just a little. Sieve into a bowl.
Roast potatoes
- Peel potatoes. Trim to similar size. Keep peelings.
- Put potatoes in a large saucepan of boiling salted water with a little olive oil. Optionally add peelings in a muslin or cheesecloth sack.
- Meanwhile, heat goose fat in a large metal oven-safe frying pan.
- Boil potatoes 5 minutes only. Drain. Return to saucepan dry.
- Add flour immediately. Cover with well-fitting lid. Shake violently about 15 seconds to coat and roughen potatoes.
- Lift potatoes one by one with large metal spoon into hot goose fat. Roll gently 5–10 minutes until they take on a little colour.
- Drain oil from pan. Move potatoes onto a rack above a roasting dish in oven, about 1 inch (2.5cm) apart. Do not place flat on roasting dish.
- Bake with the beef at about 180°C (350°F), 30–40 minutes, until golden brown crust forms.
- About twice during cooking, take out tray. Turn potatoes about 90 degrees with a fork to cook all over. Work carefully; crust may have formed.
- Serve potatoes laid out side by side, not piled, to prevent steam making them soggy. Lay around beef joint if needed.
Serving
- Carve thin slices of meat. Serve with roast potatoes and 3 or more side vegetables such as roast parsnips, green beans, and cabbage with a little bacon.
- Serve with creamed horseradish sauce and Coleman's mustard. Yorkshire pudding also goes well.
- Without spare bones, place a roasting rack in the tin, or sit the joint on roughly chopped sweet vegetables (carrots, onions, leeks, a small amount of celery).
- Too much celery adds bitterness to gravy.
- Rest meat; juices diffuse back into the joint. Use rest time to make gravy and bake Yorkshire pudding if required.
- Make enough gravy for everyone at the table.
Source. Adapted from “Cookbook:Roast Beef” by Wikibooks contributors, revision of 2025-06-19, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Changes. Steps rewritten into short commands. Introduction shortened. Wiki formatting removed. This adapted recipe is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Photo. Sunday roast - roast beef 1.jpg by Jeremy Keith (Flickr user "adactio"), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia. Resized; otherwise unchanged.