Barbecued Pulled Beef Sandwiches
By: Cynthia Furey
Published: Sunday, February 21, 2010 - 11:23am

Ingredients




6 strips bacon
2 pounds beef chuck
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup brown sugar
salt and pepper

1 onion, chopped
2 cups to 3  of barbecue sauce
Hamburger buns or Hawaiian rolls

Preparation

1 Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a rimmed cookie sheet with parchment paper. Lay bacon strips over parchment. Bake pan for 10-15 minutes, or until bacon is crispy. Remove from oven and let cool on pan. Reduce oven heat to 250 degrees and leave oven door open while you dress the beef. 2 Drizzle olive oil over the bottom of a medium roasting pan. Place meat in roasting pan, and coast with sugar (you want kind of a thin crust). Season generously with salt and pepper and cover with onions. Tent pan with aluminum foil. 3 Roast meat for 3 to 4-1/2 hours, or until beef is fork tender and can be pulled apart easily. Remove from oven, and set aside to cool slightly. Meanwhile, chop bacon into small-dice bits. 4 When meat can be handled, shred apart and add barbecue sauce and bacon. Mix until evenly coated and bacon is distributed. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and add more barbecue sauce if you will. Serve hot on toasted buns or Hawaiian rolls.

About


We are so funny about our food. I love the enthusiasm and the ritual of a summer barbecue as much as the next person, but I miss the days of throwing some meat on a grill – naked of any bells and whistles or what have you – and just going with the flow. Some of the best steaks I’ve had are the meat-plus-fire kind, minus any marinades or sauces.
So when I’m making pulled pork or beef, I like to season it only with salt and pepper before it goes on a grill. No secret ingredients. When I bypass the grill and make it in the oven (gasp!), not even the purists seem to notice.
I like to serve this pulled beef slider-style with sweet Hawaiian rolls and grilled pineapples. (You can also sub pork shoulder for beef.) If you’re going this route, you may need to season your beef again, after you add barbecue sauce. And with the addition of bacon (seriously, why not?), you get some of the salt you need to cut through the sweetness. As for sauce, I haven’t had a chance to perfect my own (yet another ritual in itself), so I experiment with the gazillion bottles of sauce out there to try. I like Stubb’s barbecue sauce, for a more vinegary North Carolina taste.