Ina Garten's Pot Roast Gets Its Depth From This Seasoning

A pot roast is just about one of the coziest meals a person can make, ideally imbued with all the love that comes from home cooking. Luscious flavor, however, is not necessarily a given. Once you sort out what seasonings belong in a pot roast and other tasty ways to zhuzh up your beef with minimum effort, the search for even more enhancing elements can continue forever. But multi-platform food-world celebrity Ina Garten has a simple addition to complement anyone's pot roast style: chicken bouillon.

In an episode of her popular Food Network show of the same name, Barefoot Contessa, as Garten came to be known, tossed a chicken bouillon cube right in with her pot roast. Her recipe calls for a lot of other fine ingredients, like red wine, cognac, and the expected botanicals. But in the clip, she only called out the bouillon cube for its intensifying flavor. Imagine the best chicken stock you've ever made or had, rich with meaty poultry taste and punchy with the flavors of garlic, ginger, miso, herbs, and spices. Well, all that gets packed into one little golden bouillon cube, a petite ingredient that has a big impact. And this is all before she even puts the meat in.

A really good pot roast requires a lot more care and consideration than something like a fancier (and obviously more expensive) filet mignon. That latter chop can be exquisite with little more than salt, pepper, fat, and a quick sear over high heat. Pot roast, however, requires low and slow cooking to reach peak tenderness and careful flavor-building to reach its full savory potential.

As with most great preparations, Ina Garten browns the roast on all sides before roasting. This activates the Maillard reaction that brings forth all that luscious color and robust, savory notes. Although it seems tedious to keep turning your slab of meat, the actual cooking comes much later in the oven. Whether you're using Garten's holy trinity of mirepoix as a classic base, along with her additional veggies, alliums, stock, herbs, spices, and olive oil, the crucial bouillon cube is the secret ingredient to maximize the umami. You might be able to swap something like rosemary for your own preferred herb, for example, but only the bouillon cube imparts this much umami quality in such a convenient little package. To finish, the baking is happily hands-off once it's all in the pot. Serve with mashed potatoes and green beans to really hammer home all that cooking affection.