The Most Valuable Tip For Choosing Vegetables For Pot Roast

There are so many reasons why a good pot roast is a family favorite. It turns cheaper cuts of beef into fall-apart tender meat, it's hearty and warming on a winter's night, and best of all, it requires a fairly hands-off cooking process once you get it into the oven or the slow cooker. But if you want your simmering pot roast to be as low maintenance as possible, it's important that you choose your vegetables carefully. Despite what some recipes might tell you, if you dump all the ingredients in at the beginning, you're going to end up with a lot of mush.

Root vegetables will stand up best to the long cooking process, and it's why potatoes and carrots are such popular choices for a pot roast. But even these should be added halfway to avoid them being overcooked by the time the meat is done. Choose potatoes like Yukon gold that will hold their shape better after cooking. Likewise, skip the baby carrots, and look for carrots at least a half-inch thick and cut them into large even chunks.

The long slow cook that makes for the best beef is just too much for some vegetables, no matter how low the temperature is. Tender vegetables such peas, green beans, zucchini, and fresh mushrooms will be desperately overcooked, so if you do want to use them, they need to be added towards the end.

If you still want to add a variety of vegetables to your pot roast, you can group them by cooking time to make things a little easier (and minimize the number of times you're opening the oven). There are actually some vegetables that you'll want to add right at the beginning — think anything that you want to melt into the sauce, like onions, garlic, or in the case of this herb and fig pot roast, the figs. If you're looking to add some serious umami depth to your pot roast, you can also add dried porcini mushrooms.

Hard starchy vegetables (potatoes, carrots, rutabaga) and soaked dried beans can be added halfway through cooking — this is the case whether you're making your pot roast in the oven or a slow cooker. There's no need to try stir them into the dish, simply layer on top of the meat. In the 30 minutes of oven cooking (or last hour for a slow cooker), you can add your tender vegetables, or any canned beans. Last minute additions should be any fresh greens or herbs, which just need enough time to wilt.