Crock-Pot Roast Beef

I love my Crock-pot. I suppose I could live without it if I had to, but it makes life so much easier on busy week days.  Unlike a lot of folks I know, I use mine all year long. It’s great for soup and chili in the winter, but also great for sandwich meat and desserts all the time! It also doesn’t heat up my kitchen in the summer!

One of my favorite go-to crock-pot meals is roast beef with potatoes and carrots … that’s winter comfort food for me.  Italian beef (or venison) is another favorite.  On an especially hectic day last week, I started off in the morning making roast beef sans carrots and potatoes. Instead, I ended up with the most perfect shredded beef and an accidental French onion soup! It was a very happy accident!

Five Ingredient Roast Beef

I started off with a 3-pound beef roast that I covered with beef stock, dry red wine, a packet of onion soup mix and a little Worcestershire sauce.  Eight hours on low and it was to die for … my house smelled painfully yummy all day! It was all I could do not to test taste every few minutes. Okay, I admit, I tested it a few times in the afternoon.

I didn’t anticipate it being blog worthy, so my photos were kind of last-minute.  I also intended this to be served up in roast beef hunks and not shredded, but, plans changed! We used the meat for sandwiches on toasted buns for dinner, then had the meat on open faced sandwiches the next day.  So good!

I always use toasted bread for sandwiches like this because they are messy and the juice soaks through rather quickly.  A good sturdy hoagie roll would have been great, too.  

The flavor of the meat … and the resulting broth … was incredible. I think I’ll add sliced onions the next time and serve the broth in crocks with toast and melted cheese … it really was the perfect French onion soup flavor! 

Cooking meat in a crock-pot

Just a reminder to always use raw or browned meat in a crock-pot, and use smaller hunks of meat than you would in your oven (3-4 pounds). Never try to use frozen meat of any sort.  The cooking process in a crock-pot is not adequate enough to fully thaw and cook a frozen hunk of meat.  Essentially, the meat won’t thaw and raise to the proper temperature fast enough to prevent food borne illness … and you don’t want that to happen!