tender beef | ButcherBox

When you’ve got many mouths to feed, what cooking method do you turn to?

If you’re looking to impart big, bold flavors with minimal effort, then a slow cooker should be your go-to cooking device. Cooking meat low and slow breaks down muscle fibers and ensures a fork-tender, melt-in-your-mouth meal.

Often, slow cooking is as simple as throwing all the ingredients in the crockpot and letting it go—an ideal situation when you’ve got to prepare everything else for a crowd. Set up your slow cooker in the morning, and enjoy dinner later— a long cook time and no fuss!

These recipes use cuts of meat ideal for the slow cooker: Think pork butt, beef chuck roast, beef shanks, and more. With so many different flavor profiles and cuts of meat, you’ll never get bored of some of the best slow cooker recipes we’ve found, and neither will your guests.

1. Chef Yankel’s Smoky Coffee-Rubbed Pulled Pork

Want to serve fork-tender, juicy pulled pork rife with a sweet, spicy flavor? You’ll have to give this smoky coffee-rubbed pulled pork a try. When cooked low and slow in a slow cooker, this pork butt falls apart into melt-in-your-mouth goodness.

The trick is dry rubbing the pork butt the night before with coffee grounds, chipotle powder, smoked paprika, ground ginger, mustard powder, coriander, brown sugar, and salt. Refrigerating the butt overnight lets the flavors set in, while the low and slow cooking method further brings them out.

The best part? Use one ButcherBox pork butt, and this meal will serve six people.

2. Slow Cooker Chuck Roast

A busy family’s best friend, this slow cooker chuck roast recipe delivers a hearty, stick-to-your-ribs meal with minimal effort.

You can throw the chuck roast in the slow cooker in the morning while you’re preparing breakfast and have dinner ready to go by nightfall. This roast requires only a few spices for big flavor, including basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, and garlic.

Don’t skip the searing step—that’s where you really lock in flavor. Feel free to beef (pun intended) this roast recipe up with veggies like sweet potatoes and carrots for a complete meal.

3. Slow Cooker Beef Steak Tips

What are steak tips? Rife with robust, meaty flavor, these one-inch hunks of steak come from cuts of beef like the flank steak, tenderloin tip, and sirloin tip.

They’re lean, and delicious cooked as kebabs or in slow-cooked stews, like this slow cooker beef steak tip recipe. Creamy thanks to a combination of cooking sherry, broth, spices, and tapioca starch, these steak tips come together easily in a slow cooker. In fact, the only step is throwing everything into the slow cooker and, well, cooking. Mushrooms round out the meaty flavor of these steak tips. This is literally one of the easiest slow cooker recipes for beef we’ve found.

4. Asian Slow Cooker Pot Roast

Mix up your typical pot roast recipe with Asian flavors like soy sauce, garlic, and five spice. This slow cooker Asian pot roast is made with a sizeable chuck roast, promising to feed many mouths.

Potatoes and carrots further beef up the meal. It’s also packed with protein thanks to all that chuck roast, so you and your guests are bound to be satiated. Cooking it for 8 to 9 hours on low ensures a sweet-savory flavor that makes it difficult to put the fork down.

5. Slow Cooker Creamy Southwest Chicken

Need a meal that tastes rich and decadent but is actually healthy?

This slow cooker creamy southwest chicken recipe is the meal to try. Bold flavors abound with spices like chili powder, paprika, cumin, coriander, garlic, cayenne, and fresh lime juice. Coconut cream (or full-fat coconut milk, whatever you have on hand) makes this dish super creamy and indulgent. Feel free to serve this flavor-packed meal on a bed of veggie noodles, potatoes, or rice.

6. Slow Cooker Beef Shank Osso Buco With Lemon-Parsley Gremolata

Here’s a meal that will truly impress your guests. Beef shanks make for a more affordable option than veal shanks in this osso buco with lemon-parsley gremolata recipe. (If you don’t have a beef shank, this great slow cooker beef recipe a beef chuck roast, beef stew meat, and even short ribs can serve as a substitute for this cut.)

Braised low and slow in the slow cooker, this fork-tender beef meal is richly flavored with vegetables, white wine, balsamic vinegar, oregano, thyme, bay leaves, and cloves. It’s then topped with a lemon-parsley gremolata, which finishes the meal on an irresistibly bright and zesty note.

7. Fennel and Tomato Italian Pork Shoulder

Pork butt gets rubbed with Italian seasoning, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper, seared to pack in flavor and build crust, then cooked low and slow in a slow cooker. Add in balsamic vinegar-sautéed fennel and onions, whole peeled tomatoes, and carrots and you’re in for an unbelievable flavor explosion with this fennel and tomato Italian pork shoulder.

8. Crockpot Cajun Pork Butt with Jambalaya Rice

Low and slow, once again, is the preferred cooking method for pork butt in this crockpot Cajun pork butt with jambalaya rice recipe. Cajun spice, paprika and veggies like colorful bell peppers pack in flavor to the jambalaya rice, while a similar seasoning blend flavors the meat.

The pork juices are the ultimate flavor booster, especially when used to plump up the rice.

For more of our favorite recipes from ButcherBox Head Chef Yankel Polak, check out our recipe page and YouTube channel.

We talk a lot about industry naming and labeling, and for a good reason: There are many confusing beef cut names, quality grades, and beef industry marketing tricks. Consumers are likely to have no idea that there are differences between USDA prime beef, organic steak, and grass-fed, grass-finished meat.

One brand name that has been used by the beef industry, steak restaurants, and fast food joints alike is “Angus.”

Angus beef is often used to designate a better quality product. But in fact, the term doesn’t have anything to do with quality grades, far better marbling, superior taste, or even beef that is raised to some sort of stringent requirements. If anything, the term Angus may be nothing more than a way to charge a higher price for beef that is quite ordinary, yet, in limited supply. In fact, Angus is so prevalent, both McDonald’s and Burger King have served their own “Angus” burgers at one time or another.

If Ronald McDonald and the King are slinging a product, that should be an indicator that a product is not quite what you might expect.

What exactly is Angus beef?

Angus is a term used for any beef that comes from the specific type of cattle known as the Angus breed. There are two types of Angus: Black Angus and Red Angus, and both can trace their roots back to Scotland.

According to the American Angus Association — which claims to be the largest beef breed organization in the world — a Scot named George Grant imported four Angus bulls from Scotland to Kansas in 1873, where he cross-bred the naturally-hornless, black-hided bulls with Texas longhorn cows. The Angus Association asserts that the original bulls came from the herd of a man named George Brown from Westertown, Fochabers, Scotland — to be specific. Also, the breed used to be called Aberdeen Angus, but some of the Scottish roots seem to have been lost through the whims of beef marketing interventions.

The black cattle ended up being quite resilient; they were able to last the winter better than other breeds without losing much weight. And although Grant died a few years after arriving in the United States, his legacy left a lasting impression. Between 1878 and 1883, twelve hundred Angus cattle were imported to the Midwest from Scotland. Today, it is the most common breed of meat-producing cattle in the country.

In 1978, a group of Midwest ranchers formed the Certified Angus Beef brand, setting up an organization to give specific certification to some Angus producers. This label has nothing to do with how the animals are raised or fed. To get the Certified Angus classification, a producer must meet ten standards related to tenderness, marbling, and flavor.

So, is Angus beef any better?

Likely, you’ve seen the term Angus — as well as Black Angus or Certified Angus beef — on restaurant menus and at the grocery store. The implications made by the brand are that consumers are getting a superior product — and likely, paying a higher price for it. However, Angus is far more common than you might realize.

The difference, according to the American Angus Association, has to do with the better taste. It asserts in much of its marketing advice that the “Angus breed is superior in marbling to all other mainstream beef breeds.”

Angus has become the prevalent type of beef found in America; it is also the marbled, rich-flavored type of beef the Americans have gotten used to over the past 50 years as the brand has flourished.

However, even the advice given by the American Angus Association on how to raise Angus cattle will demonstrate the differences between Angus beef and cattle that are grass-fed or organic and raised humanely. The AAA recommends producers’ use of “a corn-based, high-starch ration” of feed to fatten up the cattle and has other guidelines for Angus feedyards, vaccinations and more.

Unlike ranchers obsessed with making sure their cattle flourish on grass-fed diets, enjoy grazing on a pasture, and don’t receive antibiotics and hormones, the goals of Angus producers are quite different. The ultimate goal of the Angus arm of the beef industry is to raise the fattest cattle that will result in the marbled, tender beef that consumers have grown accustomed to, whether this profile of beef is good for their health or not.

So, now you are armed with a little more information on what the term Angus beef means when you next encounter the term on a grocery store label or at a steakhouse. In reality, Angus is little more than any other American brand like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. It certainly doesn’t imply any benefit to your health, and, to our mind, the branding doesn’t make it taste better than a grass-fed, grass-finished cut of beef.

Tag Archives: tender beef

8 of the best slow cooker recipes for beef, chicken, and pork we’ve found