How to Cook a Sirloin Tip Roast
Sirloin tip is lean, cheap and completely unforgiving of a long cook. Cooked right it is the best value roast on the animal.
Sirloin tip comes off the round end of the sirloin. It is very lean, which makes it cheap, and the leanness dictates everything about how it has to be handled.
Do not braise it and do not roast it long
There is almost no fat and not much collagen. A long cook has nothing to melt and nothing to convert, so it simply drives moisture out. This is the exact mechanism in why is my roast dry, and sirloin tip is its most common victim.
The method
- Salt it and leave it an hour.
- Sear the outside hard, in a pan or a very hot oven.
- Drop the temperature and roast it until it hits medium rare and no further.
- Rest twenty minutes.
- Slice it as thin as you can manage, across the grain.
Thin slicing is doing real work
On a lean, firm roast, slicing thin shortens the muscle fibers mechanically, which is the same job a long braise would do chemically on a fattier cut. It is not presentation, it is the technique.
“We used to just kind of not try to outsmart God, let the animal do what it's supposed to do and stay out of the way.”
Gray Shipley
“You think more farms should adopt knowing your numbers, managing your farm, like a business.”
Gray Shipley
“But, well, they don't cooperate. It's not in your control the weather and the animals staying in their fencing where they're supposed to be. And predators and all kinds of hiccups that make it more challenging than you think.”
Gray Shipley
For quantities when you are feeding a group, see roast beef for a crowd.
Bone-in standing rib, if the occasion justifies it.
View ProductHow do I cook a sirloin tip roast?
Roast it hot and briefly to medium rare at most, then slice it very thin.
- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
- Food Thermometers, USDA FSIS
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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