Hi everyone, so today was my day for jumping on Tim Picot’s beef bandwagon. I’m not a big meat eater, my husband is and have never been successful when trying to do beef in the oven so stopped trying. So yesterday I tried to get some Topside in Tesco – they only had generic Beef Roasting Joints in the chiller aisle, so I went to the butchery counter and was told, they don’t do Topside there and I would have to select a generic joint from the chiller. What they also said, and I quote, was that ‘it could be topside, silverside, it could be anything’. I’ve tried Silverside before following a suggestion on this group and it was awful, really tough and ended up in the bin. So to me, the different cuts matter. Finally managed to get some Topside in Sainsbury’s, but only ones that were 500g, so bought 2 as Tim’s are usually 850g-1kg and was going to cook them together tomorrow for lunch. Today I decided to try one as a test, rather than potentially spoil them both tomorrow. So I preheated my slow cooker (an old retro Tower one) on HIGH. Made the gravy using Bisto gravy granules and 500ml of boiling water into a saucepan and literally brought it to the boil. I seared the beef in a little bit of garlic butter, sunflower oil and just one sprig of fresh rosemary cut into three.
I seared the beef all over for about 10 minutes. I put the boiling gravy into the slow cooker, another fresh sprig of rosemary and the beef and then turned it down to LOW. The gravy didn’t come anywhere near halfway up the beef (it’s a fairly large slow cooker). As this was trial and error I decided to leave it and see what happened. After 30 minutes I turned the beef over for another 30 minutes and then removed it from the slow cooker and wrapped in tin foil for 30 minutes, fully expecting to have to put it back in the slow cooker. But it was cooked perfectly for us and I’m not really a fan of pink beef – I was trying to get it right for my husband. Also, my husband likes his meat carved quite thickly, whereas I like it quite thin. I thought I would share the results and just to reiterate that for me, the the cut of beef is important as is the weight and cooking time. In fact, the more information the better for me because I have a tendency to be quite anal about things like that, especially cooking related. Although we use the same ingredients, many of the slow cookers are really varied. Sorry this is such a long post but hope it may help someone else. I, like many others will never do it any other way.