15 Ingredient Additions To Upgrade Your Pot Roast

One of the many enticing qualities of pot roast is that, despite being incredibly delicious and juicy, it doesn't require much effort once you prepare and place it in the oven to cook. Of course, you can keep an eye on it, but it's not like other dishes where if you turn your back for one second to put a dish in the sink, it burns or becomes overcooked, terribly chewy, and inedible. The whole point of pot roast is that it needs a lot of time to cook to soften up, making it an almost melt-in-your-mouth type of meal. You can get a knife to pull it apart, but you don't need to twist your wrist with a steak knife to cut it.

When trying to find a few ingredient additions to upgrade your pot roast, there are plenty of approachable and intriguing options to include. Beef stock and root vegetables like carrots and potatoes are frequently used in pot roast dishes, but other options, such as Dijon mustard or harissa, might be refreshing picks. From popular ingredients to unique ones, we'll cover a great scope of things to boost the taste of your roast.

Give your pot roast a flavor upgrade with harissa. This Moroccan spice is often a mixture of red chili peppers, olive oil, lemon, and sea salt, while some brands might have roasted red pepper, cumin, coriander, caraway, garlic, or mint. You'll find both a liquid sauce made with an oil base or a dry spice blend when searching for harissa. This harissa beef pot roast version uses the oil-based one along with vegetable or chicken stock and additional oil to create a liquid. This blend of flavors and spices can enhance your pot roast giving it a spicy twist without being over the top.

It has some spicy components, but it's not as though you threw in a pound of habanero peppers. Find harissa at the international market, online, or perhaps at your local grocery store in the international aisle. It provides a light red color to your liquid simply because of the peppers and spices inside. This beef pot roast recipe also has toasted cumin and caramelized lemons to make this a roast like you've never had before. This is the perfect dish to impress guests as it strays from the average.

There are quite a lot of marinades out there, whether you make it from scratch or purchase it from the store — and soda is a popular addition because it helps to break down any protein or connective tissue in the meat. This fizzy addition is the hack to offer tenderness to meats and roasts because of its phosphoric acid. You can use Coca-Cola or a similar brown soft drink. For best results, use Mexican Coke that's made with real sugar, but you can always use what you have on hand.

Whichever soda you choose, keep it simple with a plain soda pop. You don't want vanilla soda, root beer, or anything that might be too overpowering for your pot roast. Make a simple but fantastic pot roast recipe with beef chuck roast, Coca-Cola, chili sauce, and garlic that you place in the slow cooker for 6-8 hours. This is one of those ingredient additions to upgrade your pot roast that might seem a little bit odd at first, but when you learn the background of why it's used, it's a no-brainer.

If you're ever at a loss with how to give something a flavor improvement, your best bet is to give it fresh herbs, particularly aromatics like rosemary, thyme, and bay leaves. These types of herbs add levels of enhancement to pot roast, from taste to scent to texture. All these aspects can make a big difference in turning a sad roast into a rich, scrumptious one.

You'll see both fresh and dried thyme in many meat and fish dishes, such as bone-in ribeye, beef stew, or Chilean sea bass. It has an earthy flavor that can be peppery, herby, and sometimes sweet to perfectly complement the taste of your pot roast. The subtlety of dried bay leaves is often used in longer-cooked meals with a broth or liquid component to release the nuanced notes of menthol and pine. These aromatics can be added along with any broth for either the full length of the cooking process or toward the end. This sensory addition is a feast for multiple senses and can give body to meat, vegetables, and broth in your pot roast.

There are certainly many ingredient additions to upgrade your pot roast, and dill pickles might be quite an unexpected choice. They add a briny element that can round out your pot roast in the best way. Much like the Mississippi pot roast has pepperoncini peppers, dill pickles have a similar element: they're tangy, which is a beautiful contrast to such a luscious meat. But don't just leave the pickles as the only ingredient added, as you'll want to include some typical pot roast ingredients like herbs, mirepoix, wine, or whatever your particular recipe calls for with the addition of the pickles.

Unless you're a pickle fiend, don't overpower the dish by adding a whole jar of pickles and its juice. It's up to you if you prefer whole pickled, diced, or want to use pickle slices or spears. Add this ingredient along with the meat and any veggies, so everything can simmer and cook for a few hours. This might seem like a kooky ingredient, but it provides a sharp vibrancy to an otherwise rich dish.

This super tender herb and fig pot roast recipe is all about the sweet sauce, kind of like how barbecue works so well with ribs. The sweetness of dried figs is complemented by red wine, beef broth, and browning liquid for a unique mixture to cook your pot roast in. After the cooking process, the figgy liquid ultimately gets blended via an immersion blender into a smooth sauce. While it calls for additional figs to be added after this, omit the whole figs if you aren't a fan of the grainy texture or chop them into smaller pieces. The cooked and blended figs create a delicate flavor that gets enhanced with the addition of the dissolved brown sugar. 

Unlike a fruit like a pineapple that takes over anything it touches, the figs bring a fruitiness that, while sweet, remains subtle and not cloyingly syrupy. Plus, it's balanced out with savory elements like beef broth, garlic, and herbs for a well-rounded meal. This meal requires a little bit more preparation with sauteing the vegetables, deglazing the pan, and adding the figs and sugar, but once you get through these steps, everything gets cooked slowly over 3.5 hours.

Cloves are an ideal choice to keep in the spice drawer because they have a lot of range; they can be used in sweet dishes or savory depending on what you pair them with. So while you might be used to seeing cloves in baked goods, it's nothing new to add them to meat-based dishes. For example, you often see cloves inserted into ham during the holidays, but it's used in many other dishes across the world, like Vietnamese pho. This powerful spice packs a lot of punch in its petite form by adding flavor and aroma when cooking, and when you're hunting for ingredients, cloves can be a top choice to make a boldly flavored pot roast.

If you find that you are a clove lover, hold back from generously adding them in because the oils can become a bit astringent when added in excess. Use a sachet d'épices so you're not fishing out pieces of clove from the other chunks of spices and ingredients — this keeps them all in one place. Balance the boldness of the cloves in your roast with the spiciness of fresh ginger, the umami taste of soy sauce, or the roasted coffee taste of a stout beer.

Don't leave out the root vegetables from your pot roast. Root vegetables, specifically potatoes, carrots, turnips, and parsnips, are used time and time again in this meat dish since they soak up a lot of flavor from the juices, herbs, and fat from the meat. Too much liquid is a huge mistake when making pot roast, so you might want to factor in the water content of the vegetables. Since potatoes, carrots, turnips, and parsnips won't contribute much in terms of water, you could even it out by also including high-water-content ingredients like celery, mushrooms, or tomatoes. 

Another great part about including root veggies is that they provide a much-needed vegetable component to balance your meal without having to go out of your way to cook something on the side. Sometimes, you make pot roast all in one dish so you don't have to spend the whole day in the kitchen to whip up something. Potatoes are a carbohydrate component that can be filling rather than using something like rice, and other root vegetables like carrots can give a pop of color to the dish as well as nutritional elements.