Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com and welcome to our cooking grass fed beef series. All right, today we’re doing a Top Round London Broil using this delicious grass fed beef. This beef came from Steve Normington from Normington farms in New Hampshire which we are going to first safely defrost. So, when you get frozen meat like this very important you have to slowly defrost it.
So, what I’d like to do is get a big bowl, some paper towel, put the roast right on top and we’re just going to put that in the fridge for two days, it’s going to take about 48 hours to thaw. You want to thaw nice and slowly—this microwaving, thawing and running underwater, you know there are shortcut methods but not recommended. So, what you see here is about 3½ pound piece of top round. Once it’s been safely thawed, we are going to cut this in half, so I'm going to set it up on each side because I'm going to get two recipes out of this and we’re going to make one slice down directly through the center and that’s going to give us two thick pieces because. Those are about two inches thick. What we’re going to do is we're going to take the 2/3 of the part that doesn’t have connective tissue and we’re going to make what's called a London broil.
That bottom part where you see that extra kind of connective tissue fat so you see that, we're going to trim that right off and the knife will go right between those muscles so they’re really easy to trim, right, you just kind of feel with your finger where that muscle is separating. All right, let's try with the other piece, so you see that. I can kind of push my finger right in there and it just like a natural separation. So, what that gave us is two pieces of top round that are commonly referred to as London broil, just means a thick top round steak boneless of course and then I have about a pound and a half of top round stew meat that I'm going to make a nice meat sauce out of.
So, onto the London broil, I'm going to make a really simple balsamic marinade, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, some nice fresh sliced garlic and of course all these amounts are on the site and a lot of black pepper. I'm also going to put in some dry Italian herbs, all right give that a good mix. We're going to dip the steaks in the marinade. Make sure it’s coated on both sides. And then with the tip of the fork, we’re going to kind of puncture this and poke it so that the marinade really can get in there. So, you're going to want to poke that on both sides, contrary to popular belief marinating does not tenderize meat and I'm talking about acidic marinade, the vinegar marinades.
All right, it flavors it. It doesn’t tenderize it unless you have some kind of yogurt or dairy product in there. And then we're going to wrap this in plastic and refrigerate it, marinate it overnight. Now, you can go last, you can go four or six hours if you have too but I think it’s better overnight so we’re going to cover that, put it back in the fridge then we are ready to cook.
All right, we're going to preheat our broiler on high. I'm going to take a sheet pan with some foil and a little just baking rock and that’s going to get lift the meat up off the pan and broilers little better. So, I'm going to put one of those steaks down. I'm going to do one at a time. In fact if you want since you get two steaks out of that roast, you can do one with one marinade, one with another, really versatile. Salt and pepper very well both sides.
So, I have my broiler set on high and I'm going to broil this about eight inches from the heat for approximately six, seven minutes per side for this piece, this shape, this size. It really will vary so you're going to have to go not by the times I'm giving you but by temperature. All right, very important you don’t overcook grass fed beef because it is very low fat. One of the huge advantages of eating grass fed beef is the low fat content, so you got to cook it a little rare.
So, when I'm shooting for here, I took it out when it was 120 and that’s a little on the rare side for what you normally see from medium rare but I'm going to cover this with foil for 10 minutes and that went up another five degrees so that was like 125 when I was finished. After it’s rested, you simply cut it across the grain so you look for the way to grain other meats running so I found that and you cut directly across that nice, thin strips. You can how juicy and tender and medium rare that is, so nice.
So for me, the keys to a delicious top round London broil style a nice marinade, cooked in medium rare, let it rest thoroughly and then slicing a thin across the grain, you serve that with those natural juices and incredibly delicious flavorful and really easy way to cook grass fed at top round. And if you don’t like medium rare meat and you don’t want to do the London broil method, I'm going to show you what to do with those pieces we trimmed off. You could also use top round to make a great meat sauce so stay tuned for that video.
So, I hope you give this a try and I hope you start cooking with grass fed beef, it’s a great extremely healthy product. All the ingredients for this particular recipe are on the site and as always, enjoy.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services