Cooking a Christmas Roast with the Super-Fast Thermapen

I’m Randy Owen, owner and founder of ThermoWorks. It’s about a week before Christmas and we’re here today to talk about Christmas dinner and how the Thermapen can bring you near perfection in a Christmas roast. We’ve got a boneless rib roast that we’re going to do today. This is about a four bone roast, maybe a little more about 11 inches in length. We have tied it in a circular way so the mass is a little more even. It will heat more evenly through and be a little more even in color. And doneness from one side to the other.

Now I am not a trained chef. I do know a little bit about temperature measurement and heat flow. And what I know about cooking is come from watching television programs. Good Eats by Alton Brown, America’s Test Kitchen with Christopher Kimball. And today we’re going to follow some of their tips for a beautiful rib roast. Now this has been on the counter for about three hours. Uh, equilibrating we would say thawed coming right out of the fridge. It was probably 30, 33 degrees Fahrenheit. You can see now in the center it’s 43 few inches closer to the end, 45 back at this end, 44 so we’re fairly even throughout from one side to the other. We’ve already rubbed it with olive oil and a rubbed it with herbs, a course, kosher salt and fresh ground pepper and we’re ready to Brown it. We will brown the roast on the stove

before putting it in the oven. You’ll see one of the reasons why in a minute, so let’s get that ready. We’ll pre heat the pan.

Yeah, I’m starting to heat with just a little dribble of olive oil so we don’t have any sticky and there’s of course, plenty of fat still tied to the outset. We’ll let that heat, wait til your oil is just about smoking and then we’ll insert the roast for Brown. Okay. Pans hot enough.

Hearing it sear. Then we’ll give that a good routing. All sides turn is we go and it’ll be ready for the oven in a few minutes. Okay,

we’ve got it there. It’s brown. Just lightly all over. Took just a few moments. I’m going to take it out, set it on the rack. We’ve browned it in the pan. We planned to cook it in the same pan just so that we save on doing dishes. Wipe the excess

oil. Okay. It was just in the pan. We’re ready to go. Now. We’ve only just barely brown on the outside. We don’t want to cook any of the meat. The idea is to get them medium rare from end to end without white grease surrounding the meat. So we’ve browned, only the outer layer with high heat ready to go to the other.

All right, we’re ready to put the roast in the oven. We have it set to a fairly low temperature of 200 Fahrenheit. It is set to convection roast. You can do this in a conventional oven. It would take just a little bit longer. The convection process does create a more human heating process in the oven, but at low temperatures, that’s less crucial anyway. Uh, because there’s less risk that you will overheat or burn the rose in particular parts. Uh, you want to set the row so then it’s more or less than the center of the oven. Uh, we’re ready now to put it in and we’ll come back and check it later with this and then to see how the heating’s gone. Okay. It’s been three hours. Uh, it’s time to check again. I think we’re, we’re fairly close to being done. Got a Thermapen ready? 123, 122. I think we’ll take it out now. Uh, during resting it will come up the ends a little bit more medium, but we’re still a good range. Let’s take it out and set it on the

counter.

Now let’s talk a little bit about the Thermapen and its ability to measure temperature. You’ll notice on the green one here, we’ve taken the tenths of a degree off the display. This is a simple setting you can do. It’s found in the battery compartment. You’ll notice when we insert the Thermapen in the roast, it’s almost

instant. It doesn’t even take our advertised three seconds. It zooms right to the, the temperature and barely moves perfect for measuring the roast across its leg. You can test a piece of meat and several places for doneness instantly. The red one here we have set with the tenths of a degree activated. The truth is this Thermapen is just as fast as the green one, but you will see a little more activity because of the tenths changing for reading about the same,

but you can see the display changes a little more than it does on the green one. Let’s try a little experiment. We’ll position both these Thermapen probes in the same place. The red one shows the 1/10 of a degree. The green one, the whole degrees they’re reading approximately the same, rounded up about 75 it’s insert them both in the roast, same depth, almost the same place. The truth is they’ve reached the reading almost at the same time, but the red one will seem to change a little bit more because of the tenths of a degree or moving. Now this isn’t the way we calibrate Thermapens in the laboratory. We use a precision controlled stable temperature bath that is uniform throughout the liquid to 0.005 degrees Celsius or better. A roast of course is a solid and these probe tips are probably about one degree apart, where they’re positioned right now, not the best place to calibrate it. Here’s another interesting lesson that we should, should take a peek at. The meat will not be the same temperature through the whole depth as I insert it further, the temperature will change as we come back out

through the center of the roast. The temperature will get lower and then higher again as we come near the top surface. That was closer to the heat during the cooking process. You can see particularly with the tenths activated, the display doesn’t lock in, which we wouldn’t want it to do. We want it to tell us exactly what the temperature is, where the tip of the probe is at the present time. Now let’s look at it with the green one. We have less information in this display because we’ve turned the tenths off, but it still functions very much the same way. We go deeper. The temperature changes it back out through the center toward the top where it’s higher and we see where the need is a little more done. That’s part of the beauty of the Thermapen.

Okay.

The accurate and fast measurement, the sensitivity will tell you more about the food you’re cooking than any other instant read thermometer.

Okay. Let’s temp the roast loosely. We’ll be looking for seven or eight degree rise in temperature during the the resting process as the juice is settled back into the fibers of the meat this way they won’t spill out as readily on the cutting board point when we go to carve. All right, so we’re finished. The rest looks like we’ve come to a final temperature. 129, 130 maybe 128 at that end. 131 now. We’ll carve! It smells wonderful. A nice consistent, rare to medium rare color throughout. No overcooked band. Beautiful. Terrific consistency. There you go. Ready for every meat lover, if you like it better, done, cook it a little longer. Shoot for maybe one 30 before pulling it from the oven. It’ll rise to 138, 140 if you prefer a little more medium.

There you go.

The beauty of having a Thermapen at Christmas dinner time.