Speeding up, umami-ing up and downsizing a meaty favorite: Instant Pot Pot Roast

The Instant Pot makes this weekend indulgence weeknight quickish; a secret Asian ingredient makes it irresistibly savory. Recipe below.

WE’LL START WITH THE DOWNSIZING. When you’re trying to eat less red meat, pot roast can be a challenge. First, it is one of the most delicious forms of red meat there is, meaty, robust, fatty—and yes, a little chewy. Second, most chuck roasts weigh in at three to four pounds or more, not exactly a dainty cut.

We are eating less red meat these days, cooking it less often and having smaller portions when we do. But we do love pot roast. Which led to the recent impulse purchase of a 3+ pound chuck roast. In the old days, we would have happily powered through it in multiple meals, sandwiches and late night snacks.

Not this time. Before cooking, we sliced the roast in half. The half you don’t see cooked above is now carefully wrapped and stowed in the freezer for some future meaty adventure. The half we cooked (again, see above) made one dinner for two and a lunch for two.

Let’s talk speed now. Our usual approach to cooking pot roast is low, slow roasting in the oven. It fills the kitchen with the most wonderful aromas as it cooks for three to four hours. The down side is that it cooks for three or four hours. To us, this is where the Instant Pot comes into its own. Not in cooking hard boiled eggs in five minutes (plus the time to pressurize and depressurize—in other words longer than it takes to boil eggs on the stove), but in greatly reducing the time it takes to turn delicious but tough cuts of meat into delicious, tender meals. For pot roast, the Instant Pot rule of thumb is about 20 minutes per pound.

Which leads to another advantage of downsizing your pot roast. For a 1-1/2- to 2-pound roast, the cook time is about 40 minutes, which means you can put your carrots and potatoes in at the beginning and cook them the whole time. They will come out wonderfully tender, but not turned to mush. For a 3- to 4-pound roast, you need to partially cook the roast, depressurize the Instant Pot, add the vegetables, then re-pressurize, cook and depressurize. That makes the whole operation a lot less instant.

And finally, a secret for upping the umami. Healthy-ish lifestyle website Greatist says, “Umami is that unforgettable savory sensation that makes so many foods—like meat, tomatoes, cheese, and yes, even Doritos—so irresistible.” This fifth sense of taste, beyond salty, sweet, bitter and sour, was isolated and named by a Japanese chemist in 1908. The Japanese word umami roughly translates into deliciousness. For more on umami, check out Greatist’s Crash Course: A Beginner’s Guide to Umami.

Meat is a savory food in its own right, but there are various ways to boost that savoriness that merely adding more salt won’t do. Many pot roast recipes call for Worcestershire sauce. This flavorful, fermented condiment was first made in Worcester, England, in the early 19th century. According to Food52, it gets its “unique flavor from a combination of vinegar, molasses, anchovies, garlic, tamarind extract, chili pepper extract, sugar, and salt, along with other undisclosed ‘natural ingredients.'” Did you note anchovies in that list?

That’s why we like fish sauce. Anchovies—and other small fish and krill—are the main ingredient in fish sauce, a fermented condiment that is a staple in East and Southeast Asian cuisine. Fish sauce is often added to dishes to up the umami without imparting a fish flavor. So when we saw Worcestershire sauce—which we don’t routinely have on hand—popping up in many recipes, we reached for fish sauce. It delivered a savory, non-fishy umami to our pot roast brilliantly.

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Instant Pot Pot Roast

The Instant Pot makes this weekend indulgence weeknight quickish; a secret Asian ingredient makes it irresistibly savory.

Course Main Course

Cuisine American

Servings 2 for dinner, with leftovers

Ingredients

For the dry rub

• 1 teaspoon onion powder (not onion salt—see Kitchen Notes)
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder (not garlic salt—see Kitchen Notes)
• 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

For the roast

• 1-1/ 2– 2 pound chuck roast 2 inches thick (or more)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil plus more if needed
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2/3 cup dry red wine
• 1-1/3 cups reduced-sodium beef broth
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce (or Worcestershire sauce—see Kitchen Notes)
• 3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into big pieces
• 3 potatoes, about 1-1/2 pounds or so, peeled and cut into big pieces
• salt
• 2 bay leaves

Instructions

• Make the dry rub. Mix ingredients together in a small bowl. This will make more dry rub than you need. That is a good thing. You can use it on chicken, on pork chops… or on that other half of chuck roast in your freezer.
• Season the chuck roast generously on both sides with the dry rub, rubbing it into the meat with your fingers.
• Set your Instant Pot to sauté and let it heat for about a minute. Add the oil and let it heat for a moment. Brown the chuck roast on both sides until nicely browned, 4 to 5 minutes per side. Transfer to a plate.
• Drizzle in more oil, if needed. Add onion and cook, stirring frequently, until it is slightly softened, 2 or 3 minutes. Add garlic and cook, stirring constantly, for about 45 seconds.
• Turn off sauté function and add wine, broth and fish sauce to the pot. Using a wooden spoon, stir and scrape up browned bits—this will probably take some doing, but stick with it.
• Return chuck roast to the pot, along with any accumulated juices. Add carrots and potatoes to the pot around the sides of the roast. Season lightly with salt and tuck the bay leaves into the liquid.
• Seal the Instant Pot and set to pressure cook on high for 40 minutes. When it has cooked for the 40 minutes, let it do a natural release on its own for 10 minutes, then carefully turn vent to the venting release position. Allow all of the steam to vent and the float valve to drop down before removing the lid.
• Transfer the pot roast to a serving platter and slice it across the grain. Discard the bay leaves and, using a slotted spoon, arrange the vegetables around the sliced roast.
• At this point, you can quickly thicken the sauce using cornstarch and water, if you like (see Kitchen Notes). Or you can plate servings of roast and vegetables, and spoon the unthickened broth over them, which we did. Serve.

Kitchen Notes

Onion powder and garlic powder, not salt. As the names imply, onion powder and garlic powder are dehydrated onion and garlic, respectively. If the name says salt, that is the main ingredient. Don’t use that.

Fish sauce. This useful condiment is available in Asian markets and in many supermarkets. If you can’t find it, substitute Worcestershire sauce.

Want to thicken the sauce? Tent the roast and vegetables with foil to keep warm. Set the Instant Pot to sauté. Mix 2 tablespoons of cornstarch with 2 tablespoons of cold water in a small bowl until completely dissolved. Spoon a few tablespoons of the warmed broth into the cornstarch, a little at a time, stirring to combine; this will keep it from clumping when it hits the pot of broth. Gradually stir the cornstarch mix into the broth and cook for about 5 minutes, until the broth thickens into a sauce.

Liz's Crockery Corner. Marion here. This charming cartoon of a platter is something I bought in mid-Michigan, possibly at a farm auction, decades ago. It was registered for manufacture on July 9, 1883 by Edge, Malkin of Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent. The name of this pattern is Tonquin, and it’s an example of the Aesthetic style.

You know Aestheticism for originating the idea of art for art’s sake—that a thing is valuable primarily, and even solely, for its beauty. The movement began in the 1860s as an elitist revolt against industrialism and mass production. Visually, it’s heavily influenced by Japanese art—a result of the opening of Japan to the West in 1853. Some of the finest Aesthetic pieces are what we today call art pottery—ceramics with Japanese-inspired botanical designs, like chrysanthemums, iris and sunflowers, and other “Oriental” motifs—pheasants, cranes and particular geometric shapes, with no other function than to be a gorgeous decoration for your home. 

This platter is not one of those exquisite pieces. Inevitably, commerce had its way, and versions of these motifs wound their way into the mass production of straightforward, practical objects. When you look at this platter, you see a sketch of a tropical lagoon—bamboo, herons, water, and cartouches with lots more bamboo and birds and geometric shapes. It’s simple—almost crude: a rough reference to Japonisme and Aesthetic style. This platter is modest. The people who bought this platter would not be able to afford an exquisite vase thrown by a master, or a fireplace surrounded by hand-painted tiles, or an ebonized cabinet with red-lacquer shelves,  but they possibly had heard of such things, and maybe even longed for them, or the idea of them. They wanted a beautiful thing in their lives. When I look at this platter, that’s one of the things I think about.