Food You Can Eat: Eye of Round Roast

First things first:  I fucking hate Whole Foods Market.  I don’t mean I don’t like them a whole lot, or that I “dislike” (which is such a bullshit word) WFM.  I fucking HATE that place.  Contrary to the marketing, it is not the Happiest Place on Earth.  The organizational structure is set up in such a way that the store managers are able to run their locations like their own personal fiefdoms which means there is a shitload of politics that takes place in these stores.  Further, their whole schtick of being a totally healthy place to buy totally healthy foods is also bullshit.  They sell “healthy” packaged foods which have more chemicals and preservatives and other crap-that-the-human-body-was-not-designed-to-eat in them than any non-organic, non-vegan, non-pretentious-asshole food you can simply make yourself.  Peek behind the curtain, as I have, and you’ll learn that they also have a habit of violating all kinds of health codes—like when the meat department hands a bunch of unsold Thanksgiving turkeys over to the deli department to put in their freezers so they can make turkey casseroles for the hot bar for the next five months.  When they got purchased by Amazon, I laughed myself silly because those two shitty companies deserve each other.

That being said, there are a handful of occasions when I have no choice but to shop at that terrible, terrible store.  We grow leeks in our garden and Mrs. Butcher loves white sweet potato and leek soup, but the problem is that I can only find white sweet potatoes in Whole Fucking Foods Market.  The other time is when we have some kind of celebration dinner and we’ve either eaten through our Butcher Box, or the Butcher Box delivery cycle is off from the occasion.  Such was the case when I found myself going to Whole Shitshow to pick up a grass-fed eye of round roast.

A caveat before we get started:  This recipe is based on a four-pound roast, which is a lot of meat.  So, if you are just cooking for two, or simply can’t stare down a week of eating the same thing, then you’ll need to get a smaller roast and adjust the directions accordingly.  This is also a 24-hour recipe, so make sure you plan ahead and have enough space in the fridge.

Here’s what you’ll need:

4 Lb. Eye of Round Roast

7 Cloves of Garlic, minced or grated

1 Tbsp. Kosher Salt

1 tsp. Black Pepper

Fresh Thyme

Fresh Rosemary

2 Tbsp. Butter, melted

1 Tbsp. Olive Oil

Start by mincing or grating five of the seven garlic cloves.  I used my newly-gifted-to-me garlic grating dish, which was a great deal of fun, but can result in garlic coated fingertips.  Place the garlic in a mortar and pestle with the salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary and mash it all together until it forms a paste.  If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, use a shallow bowl and a sturdy glass and mash it together that way.

Rub the paste all over the roast. 

Then, wrap it tightly with plastic and put in the fridge to sit overnight.

About 90 minutes or so before you’re ready to serve, preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Pull the roast from the fridge, take the plastic off, and place it on a roasting pan—fat side down. 

Mince or grate the other two cloves of garlic and mix together with the melted butter and olive oil.  Pour this over the top of the roast as evenly as you can.  Stick a meat thermometer in the fattest part of the roast.

Pro Tip:  for easy cleanup, place parchment on the roasting rack and using a sharp knife, cut slits in the parchment where the holes in the rack are.  This makes the pan easy to wash and also lets the juices drip into the bottom of the pan so you don’t have to worry about it spilling over when pulling the pan from the oven.

When the oven is ready, put the roast in and set the timer to 15 minutes.  When the timer goes off, turn the oven down to 325 degrees and set the timer for another 40 minutes.  (If you’re using a smaller roast, you’ll want to make these times shorter.)  When the 40-minute timer goes off, check your meat thermometer.  It should read somewhere between 120-130 degrees.  If it hasn’t yet reached that point, give it another 10 minutes. 

Now comes the time when I have to give the usual lecture about beef doneness.  No, goddammit, you do NOT need to cook your beef into oblivion, unless you are irretrievably stupid.  This is particularly true for a roast like this one, for several reasons.  The first is that once you remove the roast from the oven you need to tent it with foil and let it sit for about 15 minutes before cutting into it so that the juices can be retained in the meat when you cut it.  During this resting period, the internal temperature of the roast will rise by roughly 10 degrees, which should get you between 130-140 degrees, which is medium-rare.  “But”, you say, “medium rare is duh-duh-duh-DANGEROUS!”  No, it fucking isn’t.  This is a whole cut of beef, not ground.  You’ll be fine and you’ll thank me for finally discovering what beef should taste like because it will not have had all the flavor blasted out of it by cooking it medium-well or well done.  Plus, if you’re making a roast this large and plan on leftovers, you need some room to work with when reheating it so you’re not dining on shoe leather.

After your resting time is up, slice the roast thinly and serve with all the shit you see in the featured image at the top of this post.  Moan with ecstasy at the near-religious experience of tasting beef the way it was meant to be eaten.