What Is The Best Cut Of Meat For Pot Roast?

One great pot roast is worth five bad ones. Every bite of burnt-tasting beef with the consistency of old carpet is instantly forgotten once you get a taste of the good stuff: unctuous, melt-in-your-mouth texture with rich, beefy flavor and silky brown gravy. It's enough to make you want to put it in your meal rotation, whether as a set-it-and-forget-it slow cooker dish on weekdays or as a Sunday evening show stopper. But "pot roast" is the name of the dish, not of the cut of meat; what, then, do you pick up from the supermarket in advance of this tasty meal? In short: nothing lean, nothing tender.

Any good pot roast is cooked low and slow. It has its roots in a number of European peasant dishes, such as boeuf a la mode from France and sauerbraten from Germany, which made use of older, tougher cuts of meat, which are rich in collagen, by braising them in liquid. The low temperature allows the collagen to gradually render, or melt, going from tough and gristly to silky and tender. A cut like beef tenderloin has very little collagen to render, so cooking it at length would result in something sad, dry, and gray. But fattier cuts, from parts of the cow that got more exercise, will handle it just fine — making it (a slow cook) a fine way to tenderize your beef.

Unlike tenderloin, which comes from the steer's rarely-exercised upper back, chuck roast comes from its shoulder muscles, which results in a collagen-rich cut of beef. When it comes to pure beefy flavor, chuck roast is difficult to beat — there's a reason it's such a popular cut for beef stew, for those moments when Dinty Moore doesn't cut it — and its veins of fat will result in a particularly rich, decadent pot roast. Plus, weighing in at just a few pounds, chuck roast is a perfectly manageable serving size for your dinner. You'll just have to shred it instead of slicing, because it doesn't take to a knife very well.

Brisket also makes for a fine option, with its dense marbling and collagen-rich meat demanding a low and slow braise: Jewish families everywhere can attest to how tasty it becomes after enough time in a Dutch oven. Just make sure you ask for the flat rather than the point or the deckle, and unless you're cooking for a big crowd, maybe don't cook a whole one. If you're in a pinch, you could also use a bottom round or an eye round cut, but these aren't quite as dense in collagen as chuck round, and as such don't have as rich a flavor.