Drunken Garlic Pot Roast...a No Fail Hit

There's not much here to indicate scale, but the pan above is a large turkey roaster, and those are three four-pound beef blade roasts, immersed in beef stock and beer. Why was I cooking 12 pounds of beef, you may ask? Because a family member on Mr. P's side was celebrating a milestone wedding anniversary, and it was a potluck, and I was asked to bring a meat dish. And this one is great. I've made it three or four times since last summer, and it's always a hit.

The original recipe is here at Genius Kitchen, so I will not need to repeat it. However, I will tell you that I have never followed this recipe to the letter (sorry!). The reason is that I've always made it in large quantities for large crowds, and the original recipe calls for something like 2.5 pounds of beef. Which is not so very remarkable but the 24 cloves of garlic is. You read that correctly.

So, say you wanted to triple the recipe, which I did the first time I made it. I didn't have 72 cloves of garlic on hand, and if I had, I wouldn't have wanted to peel them. But I did have 40, so that's what I used. And it turned out great. I think we did 60 cloves in the above recipe, and those were all hand-peeled too (thanks, Celeste and Adam!). Next time I make a recipe this large, I'll probably use the minced garlic in a jar--although there will always be purists who say it just isn't the same. I know it isn't the same; it can never be the same as fresh. But it takes a long time to peel 60 or more cloves of garlic.

Oh, and I usually brown AND cook my roasts in my 7-quart cast iron pot. (I loooooooove cast iron--our great-grannies knew their stuff! I'm happy to see it regaining popularity year by year.) But as large as my pot is, it would not accommodate 12lb of beef, so I seared each roast in the CI pot, and slow-cooked them in the turkey roaster. This recipe (Genius Kitchen) is for a slow cooker, but I have always cooked mine in the oven at 325 degrees F, and they are usually done in a couple of hours.

The fun part about this recipe is that the taste changes every time, depending on what type of beer or ale you use. So far, I've used everything from non-alcoholic types, to Molson Canadian and Budweiser, to these:

I like that the liquor store sells many of these imported beers by the can, so that if a brew is not to your taste, you don't have a whole case on your hands. I'm looking forward to trying this recipe with Guinness. Bon Appétit!
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