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I recently made roast beef that cooked for ~ 8 hours. I took it out of the crockpot and let it sit for about 10 minutes. Then I sliced it into pieces and we ate it. It was pretty good. The leftovers were packed away. The odd thing was the next day at lunch, the meat, which seemed uniformly brown the day before, was now a nice pinkish color in the middle (keep in mind I had cut the entire thing, so the slice I'm eating is brown on the outside and pink on the inside, maybe 1/2 thick). It also seemed much more tender.

What happened here? The leftover roast seemed much better than the meat from the night before. I am discounting the probability that the roast beef fairy came by and swapped out our leftovers with better ones. Should I have let the roast rest longer? What is the procedure for letting something cooked at such low temperatures rest anyways? It's not like a steak that was cooked at high temperature on a grill.

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    The roast beef fairy does exist, well maybe... I just find that when you're cooking food you become slightly desensitised to the flavours and aromas and that when you tried the dish from cold or reheating it will be a quicker process and the taste will be fresher.
    – tonylo
    Sep 6, 2010 at 2:52

1 Answer 1

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Let it rest anyway. Even at low temperatures, the juices will be flowing through the meat. Resting stops this process.

As for the strange colour-changing meat, I suspect you just weren't observant. Meat that has gone brown will not spontaneously go pink again.

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    Unless, of course, the roast beef fairy came by and swapped it.
    – Corey
    Sep 5, 2010 at 19:22
  • Well I'm pretty certain I didn't, so...
    – daniel
    Sep 5, 2010 at 19:24
  • The color thing was weird - but I sliced the entire thing into pieces all at once. For it to not have changed it would have had to have been striped inside or something, as each slice was brown on both sides but somehow red inside. As for resting - How long is appropriate for a roast? Sep 5, 2010 at 19:51
  • 15 minutes or so is a good guideline. Tent with foil, leave on the counter. This also has the benefit of giving you time to make your gravy etc.
    – daniel
    Sep 6, 2010 at 8:06

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