You Need To Add A Spoonful Of This Dessert Staple For 10X Better Pot Roast

Savory, tender pot roast is a meat lover's dream. The rich beef topped with flavorful gravy, along with fragrant veggies and fluffy mashed potatoes, sends your taste buds to the culinary promised land. It's not a difficult dish to master, either. However, if you're not using a common baking staple — cocoa powder — to level it up, you're missing out on a way more flavorful experience.

When people hear "cocoa powder," they generally start daydreaming about desserts, like three-ingredient chocolate pudding or fudgy brownies. But its bold, earthy bitterness adds depth to savory dishes like chili and pot roast as well. Because it is packed with cocoa solids, it doesn't take much cocoa powder to impart deeper complexity to pot roast, which can be achieved in one of two ways.

One method is to use it as part of a seasoning rub before you sear the meat. For a 3-pound roast, add about a tablespoon of cocoa powder to a blend of spices such as garlic powder, Italian seasoning, salt, and pepper, and liberally coat the entire surface of the roast. Then sear it as you normally would for roughly three minutes per side.

Another technique is to add cocoa powder directly into the braising liquid that eventually becomes a flavorful gravy for the pot roast. Using this approach, just 2 ½ tablespoons of cocoa powder are enough to build that sophisticated profile you're looking for. Still, like any dish, it's all about balance, and there are plenty of pantry staples you probably have on hand that will harmonize wonderfully with cocoa powder.

If you're unfamiliar with using cocoa powder in savory fare, choosing the right kinds of seasoning and spices to mesh with the pantry staple might throw you for a loop. But there are plenty of dishes you can look to for inspiration, like chili or a mole sauce. In the former, the chocolatey ingredient integrates with seasonings like cumin and chili powder, along with herbs like oregano, to create a symphony of flavors in the dish. Dried chile peppers used to make mole also work well when combined with cocoa powder, establishing a blend of bitter, savory, and spicy.

One way people like to make a pot roast more flavorful is to add coffee to the gravy mixture. Coffee and cocoa powder go together like PB&J, and the mingled earthy and bitter notes work just as well in a pot roast's braising liquid as they do in a mocha latte. Umami-laden Worcestershire sauce adds even more depth to the dish while balancing the bitterness of cocoa powder.

Dark beers can also complement cocoa, but a more traditional pairing is red wine. As both ingredients feature tannins in their profile, they work together to tame the richness of the meat. Additionally, the bold, fruity flavors in a cabernet sauvignon (which some claim is the absolute best kind of red wine to use for pot roast) offset the bitter notes in cocoa powder, creating an elaborate, harmonious supporting cast of flavor that helps the meat shine as the star.