19 Festive Christmas Roast Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is the best cut of beef for a Christmas roast? ›

1) Beef Tenderloin

If you love filet mignon, this is the holiday roast for you. Use our beef roasting guide as a resource to help perfectly cook this savory meat to your liking.

Traditional Christmas dinner features turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, and vegetables. Other types of poultry, roast beef, or ham, are also used.

Preheat oven to 450°F232°C. Place ball tip roast, fat side up, in roasting pan and season with salt and pepper. Cook in preheated oven for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 325°F163°C and continue cooking until roast reaches desired doneness, approximately 55 minutes for medium rare (125-130°F52-55°C on thermometer).

Tenderloin Roast

The most tender beef roast that is well known for being lean and succulent. Easy to carve with its fine texture. Learn more about this beef cut here.

The Top Contenders: Strip Loin & Sirloin

You can easily recreate nearly identical results of a ribeye with considerably less cost. The Strip Loin Roast already resembles Prime Rib's flavor thanks to its proximity to the ribeye. Additionally, Strip Roast has no large pockets of fat, making it easier to trim.

An ordinary Sunday roast often is the only course served, roast meat, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, 2 or 3 veg and of course gravy. Maybe with a bottle of wine. Christmas dinner however will usually be 3 courses, starter, mains and a dessert.

You should cover a beef roast with kitchen foil for at least part of the cooking time. This stops the roast beef from drying out too much during cooking.

Is it better to use olive oil or butter on prime rib? ›

Use Olive Oil Instead

If you are searing a roast with butter before or after cooking it, it is more likely to burn due to its low smoke point. Instead, David Rose recommends home cooks use olive oil or grapeseed oil to lessen any chance of the roast charring.

Tenderloin. The most tender roast of all—it's under the spine— with almost no fat or flavor. It's tapered in shape, the middle being the "center cut." The labor involved and waste produced in trimming and tying a tenderloin drives up the price.

The traditional choices were beef, venison and wild boar, but the Tudors also ate a range of wild animals and birds that we wouldn't eat today, including badger, blackbird and woodco*ck. Turkeys first came to England during the Tudor period were seen as an exotic delicacy.

In America, Christmas dinner resembles Thanksgiving – there is turkey or ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy. For Jewish people living in America, the tradition is to eat Chinese food – with most Chinese restaurants open on the holiday.

Overall, turkey is recommended over ham for nutrition. However, this is based on sodium content. Ham is very high in sodium, but it is rich in zinc, potassium, and iron. Ham has been used for generations to add salt and flavor to other dishes.