Striploin roast dinner made wonderful – Herb Crust

So leading into New Years 2022, our local grocery shop put on an incredible sale for a striploin roast.  At $7/lb for a 4 pound roast, I know I had to get one.  We did takeout Greek for new years eve, which was good but a bit of a letdown, and so I wanted to kick things up for our family dinner on new years day.  

I googled around but really didn’t fine any receipts on line for striploin roast that looked all that special, so I decided to wing it with a typical herb crust seasoning, and put the whole thing together using a reverse sear style cooking method.  Here’s the details. 

Striploin Roast Ingredients

• 1 Striploin roast roast – aim for 3+ pounds (5-6 is even better) and the best grade of meat you can afford 
• Roughly 4-5 table spoons of Olive Oil
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 tablespoon of fresh thyme (we had some in the fridge)
• 1 teaspoon of dry rosemary (I would have preferred fresh, but it’s January so nothing doing.  Not, this was scaled back to prevent the dried spice from overwhelming the flavor
•  1 teaspoon of sage
• Lots of kosher salt and black pepper.  
• 1 tablespoon of onion powder

Note: Flex all these proportions up if you get a bigger cut of meat or really want a think flavorful herb crust. 

Striploin Roast Prep Directions

Quickly chop the spice roughly so they grind better and then add all of the ingredients (except the beef) to a mortar and pestle.  Grind everything out to make a smooth paste.  Nothing special here, just use your judgement.  The goal is for the paste to coat the striploin roast, and so aim for a reasonably thick consistency that will allow you to coat it on and not have it slide off easily during seasoning or cooking. 

You are shooting for a spice paste and not a marinade, so start by adding half of the olive oil at the beginning, and then grind everything out.  Finish the paste by drizzling in the remaining olive oil progressively as you mix, so you can stop adding oil when you get the right consistency.  

For prepping the striploin roast cut of beef, I didn’t really do anything fancy – it came largely trimmed from the store and I just did a few small cleanup cuts.  If your roast hasn’t been prepped for you, then do all of the normal stuff for beef, including cutting off any silvering and aiming for a fairly smooth uniform shape overall. Keep that big beautiful fat cap in place, it’s critical during cooking to create flavour, develop pan juices for a gravy (if you want that) and prevent the roast from getting dried out. 

I put the spice paste together about 4 hours before meal time, applied it to the meat, and allowed the meat (with spice on) to rest at room temperature the whole time. 

This did a few things,

1) Got the meat to room temperature, which is essential for even roasting. 

2) Effectively applied a wet/dry brine to the piece of beef, kicking up the flavours a ton. I added a sprinkle of extra kosher salt on top of the paste to really get the dry brine going. 

3) Allowed the flavors of the spice paste to soak into the outside layer of the beef. 

Striploin Roast Cooking Directions

For cooking, place the beef fat cap side up on a cooking sheet, help up by a roasting tray (so there is some airflow under the meat and it gets hit fairly evenly with heat). 

I used a reverse sear method – this is where the meat is cooked low and slow to doneness, and then placed in a hot oven to sear at the end (ie, the opposite of the typical approach, where the sear is applied first, followed by a period of low heat). 

I roasted the meet at 325 for 15 minutes / lb, and then removed it from the oven while the oven heated up to 450 degrees.  Once at temp, I put the meat back in for 15 minutes, watching it closely to monitor both the internal temperature, and how the seared outside was progressing.  All in all things went pretty well – I hit more of a medium, where as I prefer rare, and so next time I do this one, it’s probably going to be 14 minutes per pound. 

It’s a great lesson to keep an eye on your internal temperatures when doing a roast -here’s a link to a handy chart I found online.  Note, Rare is 125-135 (and you have to always plan for at least 5 degrees of carry over cooking). 

All in all – this roast dinner was a real crowd pleaser – I added in some easy green salad to make it a light meal overall (new years resolutions were still fresh in everyone’s mind), but you could easily pair it with some roast veggies or mashed potatoes.  Enjoy!