Stracotto (Italian Pot Roast) (Page 464) with Creamy Polenta (pg 322)

Parental Warning, this article contains depictions of raw meat and graphic language describing the the use of meat products.

Stracotto in Italian means "overcooked," which is an ideal recipe in my book:  How can you go wrong?

For some reason all pot roast recipes that contain classic Italian ingredients, like garlic, tomato, and red wine are labeled Stracotto.  As Stracotto recipes go, this one is pretty basic-- no basil, no mushrooms, no fennel all of which I've seen in other versions.  You could add any or all of that if you want. I think olives would be good too, but mom would never concede to that.

Fortunately, we have half a cow in our freezer so we had the perfect roast available.  This one was small, probably less than 2 lbs with the bone and a goodly amount of fat.  The recipe calls for a boneless 4lbs cut of meat, but that's a lot of meat.  If you are having a crowd of meat eaters, this would be perfect.

Browning of the roast

The Trinity

There is nothing complicated about this recipe, if you've ever made a pot roast of any kind it's the same formula:  Brown the meat, add carrots, celery, onion and then put liquid in the pot and cook it forever. Then drink the bottle of wine while you wait for it to overcook.


But, this is Stracotto so it does not stop there and the wine is going in the pot instead of in your glass.  The next step is the really good part-- Chop garlic, parsley, rosemary, fresh sage together to make a nice paste. It helps to have an herb garden, but if you don't you can use dried.

The key ingredients: chopped parsley, sage, rosemary and garlic

The fabulous smelling garlic parsley and wine

After browning the meat, set it aside and brown the vegetables in the fat, (remove some of the fat or your sauce will be greasy) add the parsley/garlic mix to the browned vegetables in the pot and fry it up with the tomato paste and a little bit of the wine.  This smells so amazing you may want to stop and take a taste.  For vegetarians, I think you could add some olives and large portobello mushroom caps at this point and skip the meat. (Beth, you should try this and see how it works. Probably only need to put it in the oven for an hour.)


For those who are here for the meat, add the meat back in after the vegetables and wine, parsley, garlic combo has become almost dry.  Throw in the rest of the wine and the tomatoes and a couple of cups of broth.  If you don't have broth you could just add water, or just use the whole bottle of wine.

Put it in the oven or leave it to simmer on top of the stove for 3 hours. You could probably even go longer if you want, just make sure it doesn't boil dry.   When you take it out the roast should nearly fall apart and the liquid will be thicker, but probably not thick enough for gravy, so set it on a burner with the meat removed from the pan and boil it furiously until it thickens. This takes some time, maybe 15 minutes or more.  Be patient, it will thicken and when you think it can't get thicker let it go another five minutes and it will be even better.

Boil it furiously until it thickens

The final product 

We made the creamy polenta on page 322, to go with our roast.  Highly recommend this.  The gravy is a little acidic because of all the wine and tomatoes, so the cheesy polenta goes really well with it. My only quibble with the results were I thought it was too acidic and a little greasy.  Part of that could be the wine we used was not as heavy bodied as the Barolo, they recommend, and our roast had a lot of fat on it. This is why you want to pour off as much fat as you can after you brown the roast, or to complicate it further you could take the gravy out of the pot and separate some of the fat before reducing it. Not worth the trouble, unless you have unlimited time on your hands during a quarantine or something similar.

Ed, Julie and I all give this a 5/5. Ed had it two nights in a row and raved both times.