The Roast Clock

Salty and Clever · the clock

What time does it go in?

A roast is the one dish on the table with no give in it. Everything else can be reheated, held, or made the day before. This cannot, and so it decides what time everybody eats.

Pick the roast, put in its weight and the moment you want it carved. It works backwards — including the part almost nothing prints, which is the temperature to take it out at rather than the temperature you want it to end up.

Pick a roast.

Working backwards

Carryover, and the oven it leaves you

The number no recipe prints

Every roasting chart on the internet tells you the temperature you want the meat to reach. Almost none of them tell you the temperature to take it out at, which is the only one you can actually act on.

Meat keeps cooking after it leaves the oven. The outside is far hotter than the middle, and that heat carries on moving inward for as long as the gradient lasts, so the internal temperature climbs on the counter. It climbs by a different amount every time, because it scales with the mass of the thing and with how hot the oven was.

A three-pound tenderloin out of a 425°F oven climbs about five degrees. A fourteen-pound turkey out of a 325°F oven climbs about seven. A rib roast out of a 250°F oven climbs less than either — which is most of the argument for cooking it that low. A gentle oven makes a shallower gradient, a shallower gradient makes less carryover, and less carryover makes the finish predictable.

Pull temperature is the target minus that number, and it is the single most useful thing a thermometer will ever tell you. Everything else on this page is arithmetic. That one is the cooking.

The number this is aiming at

For poultry it is 165°F in the thickest part of the breast, which is the USDA figure, and this page is built to land on it rather than to duck under it. Pulling a turkey at 158°F is not undershooting the standard — it is arriving at the standard on the counter instead of in the oven, which is the whole difference between a bird that is safe and a bird that is safe and still worth eating.

That only works if you check. Probe the thickest part of the breast and the inside of the thigh without touching bone, and do it again after the rest. Carryover is a strong tendency, not a promise: a smaller bird, a colder kitchen or a draft over the counter all take degrees off it. If it reads short after resting, it goes back in a hot oven for ten minutes, and the roast will forgive you far more readily than the alternative.

Beef and lamb are a different question, because a whole cut is only contaminated on its surface and the searing handles that — which is why a rib roast can honestly be served at 130°F and a turkey cannot. Ground meat has no surface left, so it follows the poultry rule rather than the roast one.

The rest is not a delay

Resting gets treated as dead time to be endured while the gravy is finished. It is the opposite. It is the largest block of empty, hot, uninterrupted oven you will have all day, and it arrives at exactly the moment the potatoes, the rolls and the thing that needs color have nowhere to go. Plan something into it before the day, while you still have opinions.

The exception is on this page too. A low-roasted rib roast wants the oven back at 500°F for ten minutes at the end of its rest, so that window is not free at all — and that collision is why a rib-roast dinner runs late so reliably.

Roast	Oven	Min / lb	Reference	Rest

These are the same figures our paid tools run on, generalized per pound rather than fixed to one size. Somebody who owns both should never find two answers.

This is one dish

Everything above is the roast and only the roast, which is the easy half. The hard half is that it shares an oven with four other things that all want a different temperature at the same moment.

Also free: the salt calculator — a dry brine is a percentage of the raw weight, and that page does the arithmetic in whichever salt you own. The board calculator, the bar calculator, the scaling calculator.