How to Make the Ultimate Dinner of Beef Top Loin Roast with Potatoes and Chopped Carrot Salad

[Music] today on america's test kitchen dan makes bridgette foolproof beef top loin roast adam reveals his top pick for metal spatulas and becky makes julia the perfect chopped carrot salad it's all coming up right here on america's test kitchen [Music] roast beef and potatoes served together on a plate that's classic roast beef and potatoes cooked together in the same pan that's a challenge but dan's here he's the king of roast beef and potatoes and he's going to show us a great way to make this happen i'm going to make it happen i promise we're going to start with a top-loin roast which is super beefy great for the holidays so the first thing i'm going to do is pat it dry so this is a five to six pound top loin roast okay we got our strip steaks from here to killer killer roast so i'm going to flip this over you can see this kind of side chain right here right we're going to cut it off and put it to good use in our recipe okay great and then i'm going to rotate it and i'm also going to take off this side usually has a bit of fat right here and i'm going to take that off as well we're going to trim it up so that it's a gorgeous even rectangle we know that even things cook really evenly and that's what we're after and then i'm going to cut these scraps into one inch pieces all right so i'm going to transfer these scraps to a bowl and we're going to refrigerate that along with the roast okay we've got a little more work to do on this guy here and what we're going to do now is cross hatch it that's going to do a couple of things it's going to access the meat for us so we can get salt onto it gotcha which is great it's also going to allow more fat to render as we cook and you get these crispy little edges on all of those cuts so i'm going to do about half inch apart about a quarter inch down we're going to hit the meat but not go into it great now i'm just going to rotate and go in the other direction oh diamond cut action yes so we're going to season this up now and i have two tablespoons of kosher salt and a teaspoon of ground black pepper i'm just going to do a little combo and time to season make it rain dan you're right and so on this side where we have these nice cuts now i'm going to try and work it in really rub it down to the meat great other side all right and that is the last of that now i'm going to use the old uh clean up your board with the beef technique i love the beef sponge yup just pick up all of that salt that came off the sides perfect okay so now we're going to wrap this in plastic transfer this to my baking sheet and i'm also going to wrap up my scraps perfect and so i'll refrigerate that for at least 6 hours and up to 24 hours takes a long time for salt to make its way into the meat and we want to really evenly season okay so dan's using a top loin roast let me show you where it is on the cow it's right here this is also known as the short loin and the top loin is guess where up here at the top right along the back now this is also the cut that you can get strip steaks from sometimes it's called a strip roast and it's a beautiful cut of meat it's got a nice fat cap on top lots of connective tissue marbling and juicy juicy beefy flavor it's actually comparable to prime rib but it's four dollars less per pound so when the holidays come around go check out the top loin roast okay so now it's time for my favorite part which is the potatoes and they're gonna basically steal the show with this whole recipe so i'm to start with five pounds of yukon gold potatoes they're creamy and buttery and they're going to get insanely tender and they suck up all the juices in this recipe so first i'm going to peel okay i'm going to trim the bottom quarter inch from both sides but we're going to leave these really big i'm just going to go right in half like this and that's it so we have a really nice brownable surface big roast big potatoes so then we're going to season these up i have a two teaspoons of kosher salt and a teaspoon of pepper do a little mix on these again okay great those are all seasoned up before they go into the pan we're going to take care of our beef here all right so i've got my roasting pan here with a quarter cup of vegetable oil on the bottom take my gorgeous roast it's going to go fat side down right in the center all right now the scraps if we browned this and roasted this to get all the juices out a bit so they could get into the potatoes this thing would be leathery and dried out right these scraps i can completely obliterate we're not going to eat them so i can use them to get tons of fond and then extract a lot of that into a great jew so i'm just going to sprinkle these around okay great so now i'm going to turn my heat on to medium and we're going to cook this for about 8 to 12 minutes until that fat cap is gorgeously browned we're gonna flip it over and get the other side and these scraps all the while will get nice and dark some beautiful browning you see the scraps are looking really good but the most gorgeous thing is this rose so i haven't touched it to this point yet it's just been on that fat cap side down so we're going to do a flip here and you'll get to see just how gorgeous ah yes a cap has become so that cross hatching you can see the big value to it now so we're going to let this go again the scraps are going to keep browning we're going to get some good browning on the bottom here probably about six to ten minutes okay all right so i'm gonna turn the heat off we've got such good browning all over i know it looks like we should be able to eat it now we're gonna have to wait a little bit longer that crackling on top looks beautiful so good so i'm gonna transfer the roast out over here to a plate set that aside and now i've got a slotted spoon in my saucepan over here we're gonna take the scraps out get them into here and then we're gonna use them to extract into a really beautiful sauce love this idea okay so now finally the first time that potatoes and beef are going to meet in this recipe we have lots of great rendered beef fat here and we have these gorgeous potatoes with a flat side on there so they're going to go cut side down into the fat okay so now it's time to get some really beautiful browning on the bottom of these potatoes so i'm going to turn the heat back to medium i'm going to let these go i'm not going to flip them but i can check them every now and then with some tongs to see how we're doing we're looking for really good browning around the outside and it's going to take about 15 to 20 minutes so it's been 20 minutes let's check out one of our potatoes now sometimes they stick a little bit at this stage so you don't want to pry them off but if they come loose you can check really easily and that is gorgeous browning it's not fully browned all over but there's going to be more time for that so i'm going to turn off the heat at this point and then remove it from the heat let it cool down just a touch this is when we finally get our roast and our potatoes together we've been wanting that for a while but here's the thing is we want to cook that roast really low and slow right so we get medium rare meat from edge to edge really nice and juicy potatoes if you cook them at that low rate they never fully soften no no we're solving that problem by using a sheet of foil we're going to press right onto the surface trap steam in there which is going to be key and the roast is going to be sitting on top okay great so that's going to trap a ton of steam in there help those potatoes cook but we want some of the juices from the roast to drip down in there so we're just going to poke five holes right in the middle so our roast is going to go right in the center we're going to go into a 300 degree oven which is nice and low but it's going to get really steamy and cook those potatoes through perfectly this is going to take about an hour and a quarter and we're looking for 115 degrees in the center so now it is time to go back to our scraps and we're going to build a really intense sauce out of this that's going to help season those potatoes really nicely so we're looking for all kinds of beefy stuff here we've got our scraps we've got five cups of beef broth and we're going to add some aromatic quality to this with six sprigs of thyme and two sprigs of rosemary these are classic flavors for potatoes and beef it's awesome we're also going to bump up the anxious portion a little bit with some powdered gelatin so gelatin we know adds tons of viscosity and richness to broth and so this is two tablespoons of unflavored gelatin so it's going to cling to the beef later on and then four cloves of garlic that we just smashed lightly so i'm going to bring this up to a boil over medium-high heat and then reduce it to a simmer and we'll go for about 15 minutes just to extract as much as we can out of those scraps all right beautiful that smells good it smells great all right so we're going to strain it off the scraps have given up a lot of good beefiness and we'll just press on those solids get as much as we can out we're looking for four cups now if you end up with a little bit less you can add water to get back up to that but this looks perfect beautiful all right i'm gonna take this out and if you wouldn't mind popping that up to 500 degrees okay all right so we're looking for 115 degrees in the center of this roast and that is perfect got it all right we'll transfer our roast over to this carving board okay i'm going to let this foil do double duty as a foil shield for this nice little tent keep it warm very nice okay so now to our gorgeous potatoes it is now time to flip them oh wow look at that color isn't that beautiful these look gorgeous browning is absolutely beautiful but we're not done getting the beef into these potatoes so we have our gorgeous liquid that we made before we pour this in and around so we're gonna go back in that oven it's okay that it hasn't come up to 500 yet it's going to keep climbing we're going to cook this until the liquid is reduced by about half which takes 20 to 30 minutes look at these potatoes they're stunning they're stunning they're like little jewels in there these are perfect so i'm gonna very carefully they're incredibly tender transfer them over to our serving platter oh those are so beautiful so this liquid has done a lot for us with the potatoes but it's not done yet we're going to de-fat it so i'm going to pour it into this fat separator over here we're going to let that sit for about five minutes it's going to separate that fat out and then we can pour off the gorgeous ju underneath in the meantime we can carve up our gorgeous beef roast time to slice into our rested roast over here so we're going to about half inch thick slices beautiful oh lovely and look how evenly cooked it is as well isn't that gorgeous yep now i'm just going to transfer these over to our platter gorgeous okay great we'll come over here this is settled you can see that layer of fat on top so now i'm going to separate it out into this bowl and i love this fat separator just comes right out the bottom then we'll just leave that fat behind i'm gonna serve you the beef first all right which potato you want you pick i'm gonna give you two though you're not gonna want just one and a little bit of this gorgeous sauce you see how velvety that is that is lovely what's nice too is that a little bit of the potato starch has gone into the sauce to it so it has a bit more body ready to dig in let's tuck in all right you know it's called roast beef and potatoes right so i gotta start with the beef you gotta start with the beef i understand so tender so tender really well seasoned it's buttery make sure you get some of that crispy crust on the top there that fat cap it is it's almost like prime rib in the center there i've got a few bites of beef in before i go into the potatoes because i'm afraid once i tuck in here i might not go back you might not go back all right so you can use a knife but it's almost unnecessary there's no resistance there just on the crust itself once you're into the potato no resistance it's so beefy like i know it's a potato technically speaking mince don't beefy i think at this point it's actually meat it's turned into meat yes that's so good these potatoes melt in your mouth are you still in the beef camp or did you come over to the potato side i will always have one leg planted firmly in camp beef okay but uh my other two legs are in potato all right two to one that sounds good thanks dan welcome this beautiful meal starts with a top loin roast trim season and refrigerate the roast brown on the stovetop arrange halved yukon gold potatoes in the pan and then cook them until browned cover with foil place the beef on top and cook in the oven meanwhile simmer beef broth herbs gelatin and those beef trimmings to make a beautiful sauce while the roast rests cook the potatoes in the sauce and then slice the roast and serve so from america's test kitchen to your kitchen beef top loin roast with potatoes i think it should be potatoes with beef top liners i completely agree [Music] often referred to as a flipper or a turner a metal spatula is an essential kitchen tool and adam's here to tell us more we have two different styles of metal spatulas as you can see this group here are all fish spatulas you can tell because it's got a slightly longer and slotted head it's also tapered in shape and they are sort of the darling of the restaurant kitchen also our favorite in the test kitchen the second group are more conventional metal spatulas you can see that the heads are shorter and squarer so we have ten total the price range was four dollars and fifty cents up to about fifty dollars not four on these spatulas so our testing squadron used all of these models to turn over pancakes and eggs also big hefty half pound pub burgers nice wide delicate fish fillets that were pan frying and home fries they were all in various pans and skillets of different sizes from compact to spacious they also used them to transfer sugar cookies off of a hot baking sheet onto a wire rack and then a second group with different dominant hands also used them to turn over pancakes just to see how they work for lefties and righties let's talk about the business end or the head first so the fish spatulas as a group have longer heads that are tapered the average length was about five and a half inches and that was great for providing support for all kinds of wider foods like the pancakes or the fish fillets it wasn't necessarily the case with these that have the shorter stubbier heads the average was about four inches pick up that one for instance all right what happened there is if the testers got a little too vigorous when they were moving a pancake or a cookie sometimes it hit the back of the head and got a little dent in it oh yeah that is quite a distinct angle right there on the handle now while you have that one another issue was how flexible or rigid these things were check out the flexibility just try and bend there's none exactly i'm really having to press pretty hard that one was really hard and that made it a little trickier to maneuver under delicate foods and then there's this one why don't you try that all right that's a flexible spatula that one is a little too flexible for most of our testers it's 0.2 millimeters thick easy to maneuver under delicate foods but sometimes it buckled when you got a really heavy pub burger on there now why don't you try this this is the fish spatula perfect isn't that nice the fish spatulas sort of hit that sweet spot in terms of rigidity and flexibility they were about 0.8 to 0.9 millimeters thick that was great for sliding under delicate foods but also gave enough support for heavier foods the handles were also important on spatulas and i want you to try that one down at the very end all right well the handle's fine but it feels like the spatula head's in a different county exactly the testers thought that the longer ones of the conventional spatulas were just too long they were eight to nine inches long and it put their hands too far away from the action try that one yeah it's perfect your hands well away from the heat source but it's close enough so you can actually maneuver the spatula where you need it to be and all of these fish spatulas handles were between four and a half and five inches long and that was again a sweet spot for our testers gotcha so you are in fact holding our winning spatula that's the wusthof gourmet 12-inch fish spatula it's about 50. all right so it's an investment but you buy it once and you buy it right it's definitely an investment this was our previous winner however right on its heels was this guy testers also named this one as a best buy it's the miu france flexible fish turner slotted it's about seventeen dollars it's a lot less expensive than the winner and it was second only to the winner performed almost as well so you can save a couple bucks there yeah i do like the feel of this one a bit better though you have champagne taste you know it so there you have it the fish spatulas take the day and our winner is the wusthof gourmet 12-inch fish spatula and it runs about 50 but we do have a good runner-up it's the miu france flexible fish turner slotted and it'll cost only 17 [Music] i've never been a fan of carrot salads in fact i absolutely hate them those wet shreds of carrots tossed with sweet raisins and doused in mayonnaise yuck so when becky started talking about this new carrot salad that she thought was terrific i was intrigued it really is a groundbreaking recipe okay and i promise there's gonna be nothing damp or clumpy about it okay you're gonna love it i'm so excited so we're gonna start with the dressing really simple we have a quarter cup of olive oil we'll add a third of a cup of fresh orange juice okay a little bit of sweetness yup two tablespoons of white wine vinegar and now just a tablespoon of honey not too much again there's no mayo no mayo is a good start you trust me right i totally trust you quarter teaspoon of orange zest okay teaspoon of salt and half teaspoon of pepper all right so right off the bat it's a vinaigrette not a mayo based dressing right so we're off to a really good start right yeah well that's different right away yes this is really fresh really bright i think we're also going to set a record today with the fastest recipe that we've ever done oh really we're going to be done in five minutes here all right that's my kind of thing all right so our dressing can hang out for a minute okay and now we're going to move over to the food processor i have three quarters of a cup of blanched hazelnuts that we toasted in the oven for a little while and if you can't find the blanched type you can go ahead and toast them with the skins on and then just rub those skins off with a towel okay and it's okay if some skins remain on there so we'll chop these up in the food processor 10 to 12 pulses here [Applause] okay so let's take the nuts out oh that smells good oh i know toasting the nuts really brings out their oils and their flavors yeah all right so i'm putting that right back on the stand here you don't need to wash out the bowl or anything and now we have some fennel that we're going to chop up there's no crazy chopping here we just need to get this broken down a little bit i'm just removing the floor there that little triangle piece just a tiny bit tough so we'll take that out and then we'll just chop this into one inch pieces put that in doesn't need to be perfect at all all right 10 to 12 pulses with the fennel all right so you can see that's pretty fine this salad is actually fun to eat the textures are really interesting and now believe it or not we're almost done we just have one more thing to chop all right you're winning me over with speed here that's okay great what we're going to do is we're going to just chop the carrots in the food we need process really fine fluffy texture that's kind of like tabouli this is a pound of carrots if you can you want to try and find the carrots with their green tops attached like this so this is really simple just trim off these carrot tops now do you use these for anything you can you can make pesto out of them you can chop them up and put them in salads kind of like an herb well i know you're good about using every inch of your vegetable that's right so we don't want to waste those so i'll put these in my purse really no one throw those away okay and now we'll just chop these guys up you're leaving the skins on i know isn't that awesome you don't have to peel them oh my goodness in most recipes we find that the skins are a little bit tough and they have a slight bitterness yeah but we actually like that in this recipe it's counteracted by the honey and the little bit of sweetness that i put in and then you end up with this perfect balance interesting so now we'll just take our pound of carrots and i'm just gonna chop them into one-inch pieces this just makes them process evenly in the food processor all right so that's one pound of carrots without the tops gotcha so now we want to grind these up it's going to take 10 to 20 seconds and we're looking for a tabouli-like texture [Applause] into the bowl so those are a bit finer than the fennel yes that really looks like tabbouleh right oh it does okay so now i have a quarter cup of minced chives and this is one thing you don't want to chop in the food processor it'll just turn all green and muddy so we chop these by hand pretty all right and now we'll add half of our hazelnuts and our dressing wow the honey and the orange if all these flavors are going to come together what's got me right away is the texture of the carrots this seems good i mean when have you ever had a carrot salad like this never i know never all right let's get this in the serving bowl okay now i have another quarter cup of minced chives here put those on and the last of our hazelnuts all right what do you think about that i think this is not like a carrot salad i've ever had before and you don't have to let this sit and let the flavors meld you can eat it right away it's ready to go not bad for five minutes work [Music] i can't believe i've been missing this my whole life that is really good it's crunchy but there's you you said the texture so i was paying attention the texture of the carrots is slightly different than the fennel than the nuts and it's that trio of textures makes it fun you said fun i thought you were kidding but this is a fun salad it really is good the toasted hazelnuts and the orange the freshness from the chive becky i am blown away blown away that i would actually like a carrot salad this much this is going to knock the socks off guests because it's so unusual and so delicious yes i hope you invite me to your party [Laughter] so there you have it carrot salads have gotten a makeover to make this start with a simple dressing made with olive oil white wine vinegar and some orange zest leave the peels on the carrots and use a food processor to chop them into small pieces to finish toss in some chopped fennel toasted hazelnuts and sprinkle with chives so from america's test kitchen to your kitchen a surprising new recipe for chopped carrot salad with fennel orange and hazelnuts i'm in thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 75,653

Keywords: americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated, cooks country, roast beef, beef roast, beef loin, healthy salads, dinner ideas, recipes

Id: UyK95uDjzD4

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021