Video:How to Make British Roast Beef

Transcript:How to Make British Roast Beef

Hi, I am Elaine Lemm for the British and Irish food site and today I'm going to show you how to cook a perfect roast beef.

Tips for Choosing the Beef for British Roast Beef

For my beef I have chosen this wonderful piece of sirloin ‘cause it has this great layer of fat over the top and running through the meat it is marbled as well. You don't need to worry about the fat, fat is very important in the cooking of beef, it adds flavour and it adds moisture.

Cooking the Roast Beef

To start our cooking, this needs to be at room temperature so take it out of the fridge for about an hour before you're ready to cook. I'm going to put it into a roasting tin and then just give it a good seasoning with some pepper and some salt. This piece of sirloin weighs 2.2 Kilos and that's enough to serve about 8 to 10 people. I like to cook my beef around medium and to achieve that it needs to be cooked for 14 minutes for every 450 grams so that works out at roughly around 66 minutes for this piece of meat. It goes into the oven, to start with at 220 degrees Celsius for the first 30 minutes, then turn it down to 190 for the remaining cooking time.

Cooked Roast Beef

So there we are, a lovely piece of cooked sirloin. This has been cooked just the way I like it, to medium. It's been in the oven for just over and hour. Now the most important part of any perfect roast beef, is the resting of the meat. The meat needs to be wrapped in aluminium foil and just put to one side for about an hour. This will allow all the fibres in the meat to relax and again it will release up some of the juices. Very important, don't wash up your roasting pan. All these beautiful juices in the bottom, very necessary for your gravy. So there we are, the perfect roast beef.

Let the Roast Beef Rest

This has been resting for 60 minutes, any juices given up during that time will go into the gravy and as you can see, this sirloin is perfectly cooked. It's lovely and pink in the middle, it's still very moist and tender. Delicious.

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