I was reflecting the other day on how growing in skill and confidence in the kitchen is a bit like bungee jumping.

If you are going to have a new experience, you have to actually jump to see if it will turn out how you expected.

But all to often I find myself giving certain recipes a pass by telling myself, “what if it doesn’t work out?”

Taking the plunge

So I’d heard of this particular recipe for a few years now but was hesitant to give it a try for a variety of reasons:

• This recipe seemed TOO deceptively simple.

• I was skeptical that it would ever turn out.

• It had this "too good to be true" vibe to it.

In fact, I was so unsure of myself I actually made a back up dinner (enchiladas) just in case it was a total flop.

So, the timer went off and I pulled it out of the oven. It didn't look like much honestly. I tented it with foil, let it rest and went about making my side dishes.

After a rest, I set it on the cutting board and as I started to slice I literally said under my breath, "please be good, please be good".

And I carved off beautiful slice after beautiful slice of perfectly rosy, juicy roast beef. The meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender.

Now I've made loads of pot roasts in my life where the meat slow-braises in liquid until shreddy and fork-tender. But there's no way in heck to slice something like that. It just makes a mess of all these tiny muscle fibers.

I wanted to make roast beef. The kind that makes all these pretty, even slices like on fancy food blogs. The kind I could thin slice to make roast beef for lunch meat or french dip sandwiches.

So how did I do it?

I started with a Beef Eye of Round roast - a cut that is very lean and flavorful but is not known for being tender (this muscle on the hip sees a ton of work). I let the roast sit out for an hour to come to room temperature.

I did a little trimming to take off some extra fat then placed the roast on a foil-lined, metal roasting pan and liberally seasoned it with salt and pepper. Then put the roast straight into a preheated (and screaming hot) 500-degree oven.

Yep, 500 degrees.

Just thinking about a temperature that high for grass-finished beef where the dogma is "low and slow" made me cringe!

Once the roast was in the oven, I reduced the temperature to 475 degrees and cooked for 7 minutes per pound. My roast was 5.85# so I set my timer for 41 minutes.

(Oh I turned on my oven fan to vent too!)

After 41 minutes, I turned the oven off but did not open the oven door. Then I reset the timer for 2.5 hours.

Talk about willpower - absolutely no peeking is allowed with this recipe!

I even put a post-it note on the door saying not to open before 5 pm to keep nosy Nathan from poking around.

After a 20 minute rest covered with foil, when I started carving, the slices were perfect. Rosy pink in the center but not slimy and raw and unlike prime rib, no weird fat globs.

I'm so excited about this recipe and I've added it to my ever-expanding list of "things I want to cook for a dinner party, you know, whenever that happens again..."

However, there is one HUGE caveat. This recipe does not work reliably in gas ovens - they cool off and vent the heat away too fast. If you want to try this recipe with a gas oven, instead of turning the oven off, set the temp to 150-170 degrees. Trust me. There's thousands of reviews for this simple recipe across the internet and all the 1-star reviews are from people with gas ovens.

If you’d like to give this rule-breaker roast beef a try, you can download the printable recipe by clicking HERE. It really is that easy :)