Shredded Beef in the Slow Cooker

Take out the roast, in this case I’m using a chuck roast, at least a day in advance to preferably fully thaw the roast before cooking. However, I have tried making this receipt with an almost completely frozen roast, and it has turned out. However, I find that it's better if you do thaw the roast in advance.

In this case I’m using a chuck roast which is going to have a little more fat that say a rump roast and thus will release a lot of its own juices as it cooks, adding a lot of great flavor. But you can also do this with a rump or sirloin tip roast and have great results.

Remove all the packaging from the roast and place it in the slow cooker. I then add enough water to the slow cooker to come up about half-way on the roast. Preferably use room temperature water to start. I then put a good helping of salt and pepper on the top of the roast. You can be quite liberal with it since this is a large amount of meat. Up to a teaspoon of salt and maybe half a teaspoon of pepper I find is about right but adjust to your own personal tastes.

Sometimes I’ll also throw a bay leaves or some fresh herbs I can remove after roasting, but frankly for this recipe the meat stands all on its own without any fancy additions.

Turn the slow cooker on for its longest setting and put on the lid. Mine goes up to 10 hours, and I find anything shorter doesn’t quite do the job of getting this really tender. I usually flip my roast about halfway through the 10-hour cooking, but this is necessary. When the roast is about 1-hr from the end, I will take out any bones and then use two forks to shred up the beef.

Then replace the lid and let it cook until done. You can also wait until the cooker switches to warm after done and shred at that point. Either way, you want to let the shredded meat cook another 30-60 minutes all submerged under the water/juices. 

To eat, we love to just take the shredded meat and all its juices and eat as a sandwich on a great bun. We commonly just put it in a bowl and east as it. Sometimes we’ll drain some of the juice off and mix in some barbeque sauce if we’re feeding a large group as an alternative. 

I also love to put the plain shredded beef and its juices on a bowl of pasta as well with a sharp hard cheese like pecorino or Parmesan. There are really a lot of options to spice this up and it’s really simple to make.