Ina Garten Sears Beef With This Pantry Staple For A Thick And Luxurious Pot Roast Sauce

Pot roast recipes often begin with the beef — whether that's chuck roast (considered the best meat for the job), brisket, or round roast – being seared in a hot pot to create a browned crust and leave caramelized flavor behind. Once vegetables and liquids are added, that residual flavor is scraped up and creates a sauce. Ina Garten's recipe for pot roast, which she shared with Food Network, is no different, but she goes one step further and coats her meat thoroughly with flour before browning it. Not only does it create a lovely browned crust on the meat, but any flour that clings to the bottom will essentially thicken the sauce into a sort of wonderfully flavorful gravy. But Garten doesn't stop here to ensure a rich serving of gravy.

After the roast has been seared, the vegetables sweated, and the liquids added, she cooks all the ingredients in a pot in the oven until the meat is fall-apart tender. She takes half of the cooking liquid and soft vegetables and purees them before adding them back into the pot. This texture adds a little more thickness to the dish while keeping all of the flavor of the meat and veggies. Finally, right before serving, Garten mashes a little butter with more flour, then adds this to the sauce so the butter slowly melts and the flour incorporates, creating a luxurious, silky gravy.

Pot roast isn't the only dish Ina Garten treats with a flour dredge before browning. Her beef stew recipe, also shared with Food Network, utilizes the same method, except the beef is cut into bite-sized chunks. As someone who has made this stew recipe several times, I can attest that the amount of flour that is left behind in the pot after caramelizing the beef chunks is plenty to result in that signature thick sauce that beef stew is known for. I've never had to add additional thickeners, nor does Garten recommend doing so in her recipe.

On the other hand, when she makes both her beef bourguignon and coq au vin recipes, the Barefoot Contessa first browns her beef and chicken, but this time without a flour coating. She, instead, does her mashed butter with flour technique to stir in towards the end of the cooking process. As an alternative to flour, you can also use cornstarch for thickening your sauces and gravies, but you'll only need half as much as you'd normally use in flour. Additionally, arrowroot and potato starch will make your sauces richer.