How The Cook The Perfect Roast Beef: Julia's Step By Step Recipe To Cook Topside Roast Beef With Yorkshire Puddings
Sep 30, 2025
Roast beef with Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes and gravy.
This recipe turns the humble Topside into something spectacular. By roasting it extremely slowly in a low oven, it stays perfectly pink and tender. I wouldn’t recommend doing this recipe without a meat probe - you need the accuracy of it because the whole recipe rests on the beef being cooked to the correct temperature. They only cost about ten pounds so treat yourself if you haven’t already and never overcook anything again!
Serves 4
Ingredients:
For the roast beef:
1 x 1kg Pheasants Hill Farm Grass-Fed Beef Sunday Roast Topside
2 tbsp English mustard
Salt and freshly ground pepper
For the Yorkshire puddings:
140g plain flour
4 medium eggs
Salt and pepper
200ml milk
For the roast potatoes:
1kg Maris Piper potatoes
300g beef dripping
For the gravy:
1 tbsp of plain flour
175ml of dry sherry
500ml beef stock
Optional vegetable side – I chose purple sprouting broccoli.
Equipment:
Meat temperature probe
2 x 9 cup muffin tin
Method:
1. Preheat your oven to 90 degrees C. Take your beef out of the fridge for an hour to allow it to come to room temperature.
2. Smear the topside all over with English mustard and season well with salt and pepper.
3. Place the topside directly on the bars of the oven with a roasting tin on the shelf underneath to catch the juices. Set a timer for 1.5 hours to check the temperature with a probe.
4. To make Yorkshire puddings whisk the flour with eggs until it forms a thick batter. Season with salt and pepper. Add milk slowly to prevent lumps and whisk until the batter is the consistency of single cream. Whisk to incorporate lots of air bubbles then pour into a jug and rest until needed.
5. Prepare the potatoes by peeling and cutting into triangles. Par boil in salted water for 5 minutes then drain all water. Pour back into the pan and shake with a lid on to rough up the edges (this helps to make the potatoes extra crispy). Leave the pan with the lid off to dry out the potatoes until ready to roast.
6. Keep temperature probing the beef. It will be medium rare when the probe reads between 55-60 degrees Celsius. When the beef is ready, remove from the oven and rest under two layers of aluminium foil in the roasting dish that has been catching the juices.
7. Turn the oven up to 220 degrees Celsius.
8. To roast the potatoes, put 200ml of beef dripping in a large roasting dish and put in the oven for 10 minutes until smoking hot. Carefully put the potatoes into the hot fat and turn them so they are well coated. Season with salt and pepper and put in the hot oven for 30 minutes.
9. To make the Yorkshire puddings, put 1 tsp of beef dripping into each section of the muffin tin. Heat this for 10 minutes until smoking hot. Carefully pour the Yorkshire pudding batter into each hole, filling each ¾ of the way up. Place back into the oven and cook for 16-20 minutes until they are golden brown and risen. Remove from the oven, put the Yorkshire puddings on a plate uncovered and keep aside until ready to serve. You might need to pop them back the oven for a minute before serving so keep muffin tins handy.
10. After 30 minutes, turn roast potatoes and cook for another 15-30 minutes until golden and crunchy.
11. Cook any extra vegetables you want, I blanched some purple sprouting broccoli, tossed in butter and kept warm until needed.
12. To make the gravy, completely wrap beef in the foil and set aside. Put the roasting dish that the topside has rested in on to a low heat and add 1 tbsp of flour, whisking to scrape off all the beef browning and any resting juices. Turn the heat up to high and add 1 glass of sherry, whisking rapidly to make a thick paste. Then add a ladle of beef stock at a time, whisking so no lumps form. Reduce the gravy down to a thick consistency then taste for seasoning then add salt and pepper as needed. Strain through a fine sieve into a small saucepan and keep warm.
13. Remove roast potatoes from the oven once they are golden and crispy. Don’t cover!
14. Pop your Yorkshires back into the oven while you carve the beef. Carve your beef on a carving board into ½ cm slices.
15. Serve beef with the Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, veg of choice and lashings of gravy.
