Now Instant Pot-ready: Layered Pot Roast with Anchovies, Capers and Garlic

This hearty pot roast made with capers, onions, garlic and anchovies, Grillades à L’Arlésienne, comes from the South of France. Here, it gets an Instant Pot makeover. Recipe below.

OUR HANKERINGS FOR THIS DELICIOUS ROAST always come at the most inopportune times. As in when we don’t have two and a half hours for it to roast after we’ve done the simple prep work. So it was time for an Instant Pot makeover.

The roast in question is a French recipe we first shared back in 2009, thick slabs of chuck roast layered with onion, capers, parsley, garlic and anchovies, then roasted. No browning the meat or cooking any sauce—just layer the ingredients in a casserole, then pop it in the oven. It is based on a recipe from Backroad Bistros, Farmhouse Fare: A French Country Cookbook. Author Jane Sigal toured Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy and Provence to collect recipes—and stories about the land, people, shops, restaurants and chefs. She found this recipe in Arles, in the South of France.

As we’ve said before, the Instant Pot is not, well, instant. Once you say go, it needs time to come to pressure, time to cook and time for the pressure to release. Still, it reduced the cooking time from the original two and a half hours in the oven to about one hour. If you’re okay dining latish, it now becomes weeknight fare—or something you can put together on a busyish Saturday or Sunday.

And now the elephant—um, anchovy—in the room. Do use them, or as we do here, the more convenient anchovy paste. Anchovies will disappear into the dish, delivering an umami quality that mere salt can’t add. In fact, between the anchovy paste and the capers, you probably won’t have to add salt to this pot roast.

Cooking it in the Instant Pot produced a subtler, more nuanced dish than roasting it in the oven. Both versions were delicious in their own right.

Finally, if you don’t have an Instant Pot, or you do have two and a half hours you wouldn’t mind using to warm up your kitchen with the oven, you’ll find the original recipe here, along with a little back story on Arles, its history and culinary influences.

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Layered Pot Roast with Anchovies, Capers and Garlic (Grillades à L'Arlésienne)

Hearty pot roast gets nuanced, delicious flavor thanks to capers, onions, garlic and anchovies in this simple dish from the South of France.

Course Main Course, Meat

Cuisine French

Servings 4

Ingredients

• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons capers, drained and chopped
• 1/4 cup fresh chopped flat leaf parsley
• 2 teaspoons anchovy paste (or 4 anchovy fillets packed in oil, drained and minced—see Kitchen Notes)
• 4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 2- pound boneless chuck roast, cut crosswise into 8 slices (see Kitchen Notes)

Instructions

• In a bowl, combine the onion, garlic, capers, parsley and anchovies.
• Pour 2 tablespoons of the olive oil into the Instant Pot. Arrange 4 slices of the meat in the bottom, cut sides up. Top with half of the onion mixture. Arrange the remaining meat slices in a single layer on top of the first and top with the remaining onion mixture. Drizzle the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil over the top.
• 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.
• At this point, you can serve the dish, but the flavor actually improves if you refrigerate it overnight and reheat it. You can heat it on the stovetop in a sauté pan.

Kitchen Notes

Anything fishy about the anchovies? Mincing the anchovies, or using anchovy paste as we did, will help them completely blend in, adding a nice umami.

A chuck roast by any other name. The original recipe called for boneless beef rump. After doing a little research and finding that the flavor and potential toughness issues were similar to chuck roast, I went for the more readily available cut. If you can find a nice thick chuck roast rather than the flatter slabs some stores offer, go for that.