Corduroy Orange

When you’re roasting a hunk of beef or lamb, it’s sometimes tough to know the best time to pull it from the oven. You don’t want to open the door every five minutes to check its progress—that drops the oven temperature and delays the roast’s finish. On the other hand, you don’t want to ignore it for too long—especially because it will continue to cook a bit once you pull it from the oven; you can usually expect the internal tempurature to rise another ten degrees once you pull it out. So, how then to plan the timing (and the rest of the meal) so that the roast reaches perfection when everything else is ready to go?

Many recipes and meat packages offer approximate cooking times. These are helpful hints, but shouldn’t be relied upon as gospel, especially because they can vary widely (e.g., 15-30 minutes per pound, as one recipe I just read recommends—that’s a big spread!). Other factors play a large role in how long your roast will take to cook.

If your roast has a bone in it, you can anticipate it will cook somewhat more quickly than if it is boneless because the bone conducts heat to the center of the roast. On the other hand, if it has a thick cover of fat, it will cook somewhat more slowly because the fat insulates it.
If you’re cooking other things in the oven, you’ll likely be opening and closing the door a fair bit. Every time you open the oven door, the temperature drops by at least 40-50 F. Try to open the door as little as possible in order to expedite the cooking time. When you do open the oven door, be quick about what you’re doing. For instance, if you need to baste the roast, don’t do it with the oven door open and the temperature continually dropping. Instead, put the roast on the stove top, close the oven door, baste the meat, and then return the roast to the oven.

The thickness of your roast is also a key factor in its cooking time. Two pieces of meat registering the same poundage won’t cook at the same rate if one is twice as thick as the other—so, if your roast is long and thin, anticipate that it will take less time per pound than if it’s thick and round. Because the shape can have such a large influence on the cooking time, it’s perhaps the most important thing to note when you’re estimating cooking times.

As your estimated finsihing time approaches, you’ll want to check the roast’s temperature with an instant-read thermometer in the center of the roast. The list below indicates the temperature at which you should pull the roast from the oven if you want it to serve at a particular grade of doneness. After it is removed from the oven, tent the roast with foil, let it rest for 10-15 minutes, and then carve and serve.

RARE: 120-125 F

MEDIUM-RARE: 125-130 F

MEDIUM: 130-135 F

MEDIUM-WELL: 135-140 F

WELL: 145-150 F

Remember that the outer slices of your roast will be more done than the center slices; your roast will display a continuum of doneness depending on its size and where in it the slices are taken from.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Cooking Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.