How To Cook Meat Part 2: Slow Roast, Smoke, Braise and Confit

When the temperatures outside drop, there is nothing I crave more than a pot of slow-braised meat. Whether it’s beef bourguignon, braised lamb shank or osso bucco, there is simply nothing better on a cold winter’s day than coming home to a house that is filled with the smells of cooking and warmed from the oven.

I spent a decade as a meat processor, charcutier, chef, and caterer. I consider meat cookery my specialty and the low-and-slow methods described in this post are my favorite to make. I love the transformation of ingredients, the layers of flavor, and the richness of the dishes produced by Slow Roasting, Smoking, Braising, and Cooking en Confit. I also love the practicality of being able to start a dish in the morning, focus on other things all day, and have it done for dinner time. Or to be able to cook large quantities of meat for a party the day or two before the event, reheat it, and not worry about it getting overcooked or dried out while it sits in the chafing dish.

This post does not contain recipes. This is a cooking lesson, an overview, guidelines, that can be applied to any dish you plan to make with these methods. There are links to recipes, so check those out for more specifics.

In How To Cook Meat Part 1, you learned about the “High Heat – Low Temp” methods of cooking meat: Grilling, Roasting, Sautéeing, Frying, and The Reverse Sear. In all of these methods, you use a high cooking temperature to achieve a relatively low target meat temperature between 120-165 F depending on the cut and your personal preferences. In these methods, you rely on the Maillard effect of browning for flavor.

Here, in Part 2, I will teach you how to Slow Roast, Smoke, Braise, and Confit. These Low Heat-High Temp methods rely on building and layering flavors throughout the cooking process. Low cooking temperatures over an extended time bring the meat up to a relatively high target meat temperature of 185 F or above. These methods are easy, dare I say “foolproof”? They utilize economical, tough cuts of meat and achieve more complex flavors in the final product. You will not need a probe thermometer or any other gadget to achieve perfection. The secret ingredient with these methods is time.

Part 2: Low Heat – High Temp Cooking.

Slow Roasting, Smoking, Brasing, and Confit

Low Heat – High Temp Cooking is what we use to achieve meat that is fall-off-the-bone tender. Think pot roast, pulled pork, delicious smoked pork ribs, duck leg confit, braised lamb shanks, chashu pork for ramen, and osso bucco.

The methods used for this type of cooking can be dry heat (roasting or smoking) or wet heat (braising, confit) but the goal is the same. What defines this type of cooking is the goal of reaching an internal temperature between 180-205 F; the point at which connective tissue breaks down into gelatin.

These cuts are tough and full of collagen-rich connective tissue. At temperatures above 180 F, this collagen turns into gelatin and melts into the meat fibers and the broth that make up the braising liquid giving the finished dish the quality of being full-bodied and deeply savory.

The long cooking times of 4-12+ hours ensure adequate duration for the osmosis of salt and flavor to occur throughout the cut of meat. Creating a dish that is fully seasoned all the way through.

Let’s get started…

Step 1: Select and Prep your meat

These are comfort foods. The cuts best suited to these low-and-slow methods are tough and economical cuts, a selection that harkens back to the days when we used whole animals butchered on the farm:

• shanks and hocks
• knuckles
• Osso Bucco (shank cross-sections)
• oxtail
• neck
• pork shoulder
• chuck roasts
• pigs feet and ears
• Poultry legs
• Whole birds
• pork belly
• ribs
• brisket
• bottom sirloin flaps

Once you have selected your cut, salt (or cure) the meat. Ideally, 1-2 days ahead of time, using about 3-4 grams (or 1 heaping teaspoon of Diamond Crystal) salt per pound and whatever other spices you would like to use. If you are curing your meat, follow a recipe and the specific timeline in it. For braises, I keep the seasoning simple. Usually, I simply salt the meat ahead of time, and then I add all the other flavors to the braising pot during the cook. For roasts and smoked meat, I use flavorful rubs. Here are some of my favorite flavor combos:

For Pork or Chicken

• brown sugar
• salt
• pepper
• ancho
• mustard powder

• minced onion
• minced garlic
• squeezed orange/lemon/lime
• oil
• achiote paste
• salt
• pepper
• cumin

• toasted fennel seed
• black pepper
• lemon/orange zest and slices
• sage
• rosemary
• garlic
• red pepper flakes (optional)

• herbs de Provence
• honey
• black pepper
• garlic (fresh or powder)
• mustard (powder or prepared)

For Beef, Lamb, and Venison

• Rosemary (ground or fresh)
• Garlic (powder or fresh)
• Mustard (powder or prepared)
• Black pepper

• Pepper
• Garlic
• Citrus Zest (optional)

Once seasoned, leave the meat uncovered in the refrigerator for 1-2 days. A longer time is best for larger cuts. Just before cooking, pat your meat dry with a piece of paper towel. Don’t rub all the seasoning off, just gently pat away any excess liquid. Leaving the meat uncovered to dry will help it absorb the smoke flavor by forming a pellicle if you are smoking it, and if you are roasting it or browning it before a braise, it will help to sear the outside.

Step 2: Cook Your Meat

Whether you are using dry heat or a wet heat cooking method there are 3 very basic and intuitive concepts to keep in mind.

• The lower your cooking temperature, the slower your cook time. Conversely, the higher your cooking temperature, the faster your cook time will be.
• The internal temperature of the meat will never be higher than your cooking temperature. So, if your finishing temperature goal for a smoked brisket is 205 F, you could in theory set the smoker to 205 F for 48 hours and still end up with a brisket that is 205 F. Now, at that length of cooking time, it may be dryer than you want it and you may have blown through $100 in smoker pellets, but the temperature would be 205 F.
• The larger the piece of meat, the longer your cooking time will be. Stew meat cut into 1-inch cubes will cook much faster than a 4 lb piece of chuck roast.
• The meat is done when it pulls cleanly away from the bone (if bone-in) and when a fork inserted into the meat pulls out effortlessly with no resistance.

With all of these methods, the meat will pass slowly through the temperature range of 90-130 F. At these temperatures, enzymatic processes speed up and have a tenderizing effect similar to dry aging meat.

How to Slow Roast

This is a dry heat method in which meat is cooked in the oven with temperatures set to 180-325. This is a good method for large fatty cuts like beef short ribs, baby back ribs, pork belly, and brisket. Anything you would cook slowly on a smoker can be cooked slowly in an oven. The only difference will be the smoke flavor or lack thereof.

You can literally just throw a well-seasoned piece of meat on a sheet pan at a low temperature (180-200), forget about it for most of the day, and end up with a mouth-watering final product for dinner, but if you want to put in a minimal amount of effort for maximum return, you may choose to wrap the meat in tin foil once it has achieved a browning of the exterior, perhaps with sauce, cut onions and other vegetables that will be served alongside it. Putting a water reservoir in the oven will help keep the meat from drying out.

How to Smoke Meat

You can use your smoker for high-heat methods covered in Part 1 or for low-and-slow cooking. But in this section, I’m talking about low-and-slow smoking with cooking temperatures between 180-325.

I use a Traeger Smoker and Grill and I love it. I use it all the time. But no matter which smoker you have, the principles here will be the same. Just follow your specific smoker instructions for the preheating and pellet/wood requirements.

You will get the most “Smoke” at the lower end of this temperature range. I always start smoking at 180-200 for several hours, then turn the smoker up to 250-325 F for several more hours to finish the meat off. For ribs, pork butt, or brisket, I wrap them in tinfoil at the time I turn the temperature up. There’s a lot of debate out there on whether or not to wrap the meat, so play around with it and see which method you like best. I wrap mine.

You can smoke a large piece of meat like a pork butt or brisket overnight at 180-200 F and then continue cooking it all day at those temperatures for an 18-24 hours smoke. The result would be an amazing smokey and tender delicious piece of perfection. I typically do not do this because occasionally, when my smoker is in the lowest temperature range and especially when it is very cold outside, it will turn itself off. If this happened overnight, you could end up holding a large piece of meat in the danger zone for many hours and lose a lot of time on your cooking and possibly the whole thing. Or if you live in colder climates, you could wake up to find a frozen solid piece of meat on your smoker.

FOOD SAFETY NOTE: If you do smoke meat overnight, make sure it is a whole muscle that has not been rolled and tied (NOT meatloaf, uncured sausages, porchetta or pancetta, or stuffed pork loin). The long amount of time that the meat will be in the danger zone could create the conditions for botulism poisoning in some products. Make sure your pellets are fully stocked so you don’t run out in the middle of the night.

You might be thinking that this is all very vague and “how long do I smoke a pork shoulder for pulled pork?”. You want specifics! I get it. Truth be told though, it just depends. The flexibility and intuitive nature of these methods are what I love most about them.

For instance, you can cook a pork shoulder for pulled pork in 8 hours around 250-300 degrees or you can cook it for 12 hours at 180 for the first half and 225 for the second half. If your cooking temperature is the same as the target meat temperature, you really can’t overcook it. You can however undercook it and that is the biggest mistake people make with these types of cuts. You know the meat is done when the meat has pulled away cleanly from the bone and a fork inserted in it meets little or no resistance.

If it’s 3 pm and you just realized you want to cook ribs or pot roast for dinner, resist. You are better off just salting it and waiting till tomorrow to cook it…. or using an Instapot.

How to Braise

With braising, you submerge the meat in a cooking liquid and cook it just below the boiling point (185-212 F depending on elevation) for 3+ hours. Braising is my favorite method. It is the intersection of meat cookery and soup making. Two of my favorite things to do. All summer I look forward to cooler weather so I can start braising again. I love that I can start a braise in the morning before my kids are up, all day long it will fill my house with the tempting smells of the dinner to come. In the afternoon I’ll add some vegetables and by 6pm I’ll have a deeply satisfying meal with layers of complex flavors on the table all with relatively little effort. Often a one-pot meal.

With low and slow dry heat methods you want to use fatty cuts, with braising you can use cuts that are leaner but still full of connective tissue and if there’s bone marrow in them, that’s a plus. The cuts I use most often for braising are lamb shanks, pork or beef osso bucco, and chuck roasts. Other cuts that work well are poultry legs, short ribs, and ham.

As with all of these methods, there is a lot of room for flexibility and variation, but these are some general steps to achieving a perfect braise:

1. Salt and season your meat. Let sit and dry (uncovered in the fridge) for 1-2 days.
2. In your brazier or dutch oven, thoroughly brown the meat on all sides in oil, fat, or butter at medium-low heat. The tendency is to skip over this part or to do it quickly. This is really the only browning you’ll be getting, and that flavor is essential to the final dish. I’ll spend 20 minutes browning a pot roast.
3. Remove the meat and add the vegetables and aromatics you will use to season the broth. These vegetables will be discarded or will just melt into the broth. These are not the vegetables you will be serving alongside your meat. I will typically add some combination of onions, garlic, tomato paste, dried chilis, and sometimes carrots and celery that I will later strain out. Sauté these until you get some caramelization.
4. Stir in about 1/2 cup – 1 cup of liquid to deglaze the pan. Brandy, whiskey, wine, beer, sake, vodka, and vermouth all work well. Reduce this by half. You could also skip this step.
5. Add the meat back in. Add water, broth, tomato sauce, other liquid seasonings to come 1/2-3/4 up the meat. Add more salt, spices and herbs. Heat this liquid to a low simmer.
6. Transfer the pot to the oven. If cooking at 250 F or above, leave the lid ajar or off. If cooking between 180-250 F, cover it with the lid.
7. About 1-2 hours before you plan on removing the meat from the oven, add the vegetables that you would like to serve alongside it. Some combination of these: small potatoes, carrots, celery, peppers, turnips, parsnips, beets, mushrooms, onion, leek, cabbage, and fennel. Leaving the vegetables in large pieces will allow them to cook for 1-2 hours. Dicing them small, they will only need to cook for about 30 minutes. The more vegetables you add, the more it will drop the temperature of the broth and slow the cooking down.
8. Once the meat is fork-tender, remove the dish from the oven. Let the meat rest in the liquid for 20 minutes or longer before serving it. Cool and store the leftovers in the liquid.

How to Cook en Confit

Confit is a method of poaching seasoned or cured meat in fat! Sounds amazing huh? It is! Even more amazing is how practical it is. The cooked meat is cooled in the fat that it is cooked in. The fat forms an airtight seal that preserves the meat for months under refrigeration. In fact, it “ripens” and develops more complex flavors in the weeks after it is made. To use the confit, you simply grab a piece of the meat from the vat that it is being stored in, put it in a skillet, and brown it off in the oven or on the stovetop.

Duck leg confit is the most well-known confit and it’s one that I made often during my time as owner/chef of The Farm Table. I was once told by a customer that my duck confit rivaled Bouchon’s, a Thomas Keller restaurant. That was one of the best compliments I have ever received!

You can confit anything. I’ve made many variations of pork belly confit, tuna in olive oil confit, and turkey confit…. Generally, you make confit out of small, individual portions of meat. Tough cuts of meat you will cook low-and-slow to break down the connective tissue. Leaner and more tender cuts (like turkey breast or tuna) you may cook to a lower internal temperature between 140-165 F.

Cooking en confit will produce an incredibly silky, flavorful meat. Aside from the decadence of meat prepared this way, there are also some very practical benefits to this method. You can make a big batch of duck legs or pork belly, and then have it on hand for the weeks or months that follow for a quick, ready-made “prepared” food for busy weeknight dinners.

You can make a big batch of meat ahead of an event and reduce your prep the day of. In the past, I’ve made turkey confit for Thanksgiving. The turkey was done the week before the main feast, making the prep for the rest of the meal a cinch. The turkey only took about 20 minutes to reheat and the skin was super crispy and delicious.

Another benefit is all of the by-products that you end up with. The first one is aspic. This is a concentrated, heavily seasoned jelly that can be stirred into broths, potted meats, paté, or warm vinaigrettes. The other byproduct is seasoned fat. Whether duck fat or olive oil, it can be reused to sauté or drizzle on bread or make the next batch of confit. You can use the same fat for several batches of confit until it becomes too salty. I once had a meal in Missoula, MT in which the restaurant made a “tomato” confit with sage and then used the sage-y olive oil as a bread dip with fresh cracked black pepper. It was simple and surprising and nearly 15 years later I still remember it.

These are the steps to making confit:

1. 2-4 days before cooking, season the meat with about 8 grams of salt per pound (or 2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal Salt) plus any other seasonings you would like. Garlic, whole black peppercorns, cloves, fresh thyme on the sprig, sage leaves, rosemary, etc. If you are making a big batch and plan on storing it for more than a couple of weeks, you may want to use curing salt as well. 1 gram per pound. Leave the spices whole, garlic crushed (not minced), and fresh herbs on the stem. This makes it much easier to rinse them off later.
2. Halfway through the seasoning time, turn the meat over so the meat on the bottom is now on the top and redistribute the brine (salty juices) that has formed in the bottom of the container.
3. At the end of the seasoning time, rinse the spices off of the meat and allow the pieces to dry on a rack, or by patting dry with a paper towel.
4. In an oven-proof container, place the meat in a single layer or double layer. If you can’t fit it all in two layers, you need to use a larger container. You want the meat to fit snug in the container. The more empty space you have, the more fat you will need to cover the meat. This adds to the cost.
5. Preheat the oven to 180-200 F.
6. In a saucepan, heat the oil or fat to about 150-200 degrees. Keep in mind that the fat won’t” boil”. If you heat it to the point where there is a lot of movement in the fat, you are probably close to 350 F and it will fry and splatter in the next step.
7. Pour the hot fat over the meat. It needs to completely cover the meat. How much oil you need will depend on the size of the container and how tightly packed the meat is. As a general guide though plan on 1 quarts of fat for every 5 lbs of meat. Gently slide a spatula or wooden spoon down the sides of your oven-proof container to get the air bubbles out.
8. Cook the meat in fat, uncovered, in the oven until done. I cook duck legs at an oven temperature of 180 F for approximately 12 hours (overnight). For pork belly confit, 8 hours at 200 F or 4 hours at 250 F works well.
9. Remove the meat from the oven. Set a strainer over a storage container. Use a turkey baster, suck up all the aspic from the bottom of the container, and squirt it through the strainer into the storage container. You may need to prop the confit dish up at an angle by placing a rolled-up towel under one end. Or see the note below and skip this step.
10. Allow the meat to cool in the fat. Refrigerate it until ready to use.
11. To use the confit, grab pieces out of the vat using clean gloved hands or sanitary utensils. Reheat. You can also make easy rillettes (potted meat spread) using confit, aspic, and fat.
12. Place the vat back in the oven for a couple of minutes to melt the fat and reseal the confit. If you use olive oil, this step isn’t necessary.

NOTE: You may choose to transfer your meat to a different (sterile) storage container or vacuum seal it in user-friendly portions. If you do, simply transfer the meat to the container or vacuum seal bag once cooled to room temperature, and ladle the fat off the top to cover the meat in the new container. In a vacuum-sealed bags, you only need about 1/2 cup of fat in each bag. If you do this carefully, the aspic will stay on the bottom and when you have transferred all the meat, you can pour the rest of the liquid through a sieve and reserve it for another use.

Low Heat-High Temp Recap

In High Heat-Low Temp cooking you are trying to reach an internal temperature between 120 F-165 F. In the low-and-slow cooking methods of Low Heat-High Temp cooking you are striving to reach an internal cooking temperature between 180 F-205 F. Notice that nothing good happens between 166-184 F., This is the dead zone. If you missed hitting 165 F on your roast chicken, you might as well open a bottle of wine, put your feet up and let it keep cooking until it reaches 185 F.

You don’t need a thermometer to know when meat cooked this way is done. There are visual tests. It’s done when the meat pulls cleanly away from the bone (when bone in). Chicken legs will wiggle easily in the hip socket. And a fork inserted into the meat meets little to no resistance and pulls out easily.

The best cuts to use for slow cooking are tough, economical cuts with lots of fat and connective tissue. No matter the method of cooking, meat should always be seasoned in advance to allow the salt to permeate the whole cut of meat. And the meat should be dry when you start cooking it.

Don’t rush it! With these methods, the worst thing you can do is undercook the meat.