Slow Cooker Beef Roast

Tender roast beef is slowly cooked to perfection in this Slow Cooker Beef Roast recipe. The whole family is sure to love this dish!

Cuts Of Beef For Beef Roast In The Slow Cooker

For this Slow Cooker Beef Roast, we want nice slices of beef with great pot roast flavors. My favorite cut of beef to use for this is a boneless chuck roast. A chuck roast is sometimes called a chuck steak, so the label might say that instead. Even though it says steak though, this cut of beef is best braised or slow-cooked, and not grilled. That’s because it’s a tougher piece of meat with great marbling. The slow cooking will break the toughness down while melting the fat to give you deliciously fork-tender meat. Note that you are looking for a chuck roast or chuck steak, but not chuck eye steaks. Those are different and are actually best grilled, not slow-cooked. If you have chuck eye steaks, here is how to cook them.

As alternatives to the chuck roast, here are some other cuts that will work in the slow cooker:

• Brisket is a great choice for cooking in the slow cooker, since, like the chuck roast, it also has that marbling. It can be pricey though. Here’s how to cook Brisket in the oven if you prefer that over using the slow-cooker.
• A Round Roast (Rump Roast or Bottom Round Roast) can be used in this shredded beef recipe. It’s much leaner though and can end up dry even when braised. The leanness means that it will slice well though. If you go with a round roast, make sure to make the gravy at the end of the recipe to help with the dryness.
• Eye of Round, is lean like the above Round Roast and will have similar issues. Make the gravy for sure.

If you have a Prime Rib or Beef Tenderloin, you won’t want to slow cook them. Instead, use this this classic Roast Beef recipe. The Rump Roast and Eye of Round mentioned above can also be used for the classic roast beef.

Note that if you want slow-cooked beef but you don’t want to use a crock pot, there are delicious alternatives. You can make a classic oven pot roast like this, or cook your beef roast in the Instant Pot.

How To Make Slow Cooker Roast Beef

First, season your beef roast all over with salt and pepper. Get your Crock-Pot or slow cooker out and add in the onion, garlic, fresh thyme, and diced tomatoes with juices. Then you can nestle the roast into the vegetables. Pour a cup of broth over top.

Cook the roast on low for 6 hours, or on high for 4 hours. Then you’ll carefully use tongs to remove the just the roast. If you’d like to skim excess fat off the top of the braising liquid, you can at this point. Pour the liquid and veggies through a strainer, capturing that delicious liquid in a bowl. You can discard the vegetables at this point and return the liquid to the slow cooker.

Make a slurry with flour and beef broth and pour it into the slow cooker to thicken the braising liquid into a gravy. Add the roast back in at this point too and cook on high until the sauce has thickened, around 10 minutes.

Remove the roast and slice against the grain before moving the beef to a serving platter. Serve with that delicious sauce you just made and enjoy. You can even make some Creamy Horseradish Sauce to serve with as well for an extra level of flavor.

Do You Have To Sear The Roast Before Slow-Cooking?

So, a lot of recipes have you sear the beef in a hot pan before putting it into the slow cooker. I wondered if this actually made a difference to the finished roast and so I did a side-by-side comparison for taste-testing. I seared one roast and didn’t sear the other and then cooked them in separate slow cookers. After that, we all dug in and did a taste test.

The result is that the seared roast had a bit more color on the outside, but there was no actual crust since that had been dissolved by the steam in the slow cooker. There also wasn’t a detectable difference in flavor. Both roasts were delicious. I therefore say that you can absolutely save yourself the time, effort, and the extra pan to wash and skip this step.

However, I do have an optional recommendation. If you want a bit of a crust, you know, some of that brown caramelization on the outside of the roast, you can do what is called a reverse sear on the roast. I’ve done the reverse sear on other roast beef recipes, and also roast pork, and even roast chicken (with extra-crispy skin!), and it’s one of my favorite roasting techniques. What you do is to put the fully-cooked roast into a very hot oven or under the broiler to brown up AFTER it has finished cooking. Then you get a nice bit of browning and caramelization that doesn’t steam off during cooking.

Simply take the roast out of the slow cooker and pat it dry with paper towel. Turn on the broiler. Then, put the roast on a broiling pan and set it so that the surface of the meat is about 5-6 inches from the broiler. Broil until nice and dark on top, 5-7 minutes. Remove from the oven, slice, and serve.

Do You Have To Rest A Pot Roast Before Slicing It?

No, and here’s why. When you roast a piece of meat using a dry roasting method (like in the oven), or when you cook steaks, it’s typical to let the roast rest so that the juices settle down and don’t come spilling out when you slice the meat. With a pot roast like this slow-cooked beef, this isn’t really an issue. The meat has already become so loose that the juices aren’t under as much pressure in the meat. So if you slice into it right away, they don’t come bursting out.

You absolutely can rest the meat before slicing, but it isn’t going to make as much difference as with a dry-roasted piece of meat.