Meat and potatoes
(***Scroll down to skip dorky science rant and get straight to cooking meat — recipe for Prime Rib.)
I sometimes operate on the presumption that certain myths are no longer prevalent and common knowledge is common knowledge. For example: I’m hoping that the vast majority of anyone reading this realizes that a piece of steak, take a rib-eye for example, is NOT a good approximation of a water balloon. Why make this comparison? BECAUSE PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK THAT MEAT ACTS LIKE A WATER BALLOON. “Sear to lock in juices” is a phrase so many people love to hear because it sounds sexy and delicious but if you REALLY THINK ABOUT IT it makes no sense whatsoever. What the hell kind of process would solidify the outer layers of meat into an impenetrable barrier of juice-holding plastic? Same with the idea that poking your meat with a fork makes it leak juices and get dry. I’ll tell you this: the inherent juiciness of a steak is directly proportional to the highest temperature at which it is cooked. I’m sorry well-done-ers, but it’s simply science. At the end of the day, you can eat your steak how you want it, but allow me to explain exactly why “medium-rare” is the hoity-toity fancy-pants standard of meat consumption.
First, the red juice many people who prefer cardboard steak despise is not blood. When blood cooks, it turns into a dark black, thick jelly that would be very obvious and strange (unless you’re one of the many cultures around the world that regularly serve blood-pudding type dishes, using the coagulating properties of blood to thicken stews). That red liquid you see is dissolved myoglobin and other proteins in water which experts have creatively called myowater. Myowater comprises of like 75% of meat and accounts for most of the moisture we talk about when we say meat is “juicy.” Myowater is key, and along with rendered intramuscular fat, provides us with the delicious juiciness we crave when we bite into a perfectly cooked piece of meat.
Meat is comprised of many bundles of muscle fibers, lets compare them to a bundle of wet fibers — special ones that react to temperature, getting tighter and smaller the hotter it gets (because that’s what happens to proteins when they heat). Heat meat far past 165 degrees F, and you do the equivalent of tightly wringing the bundle of yarn as hard as you can to squeeze all the water out (and into the grill/pan/oven to evaporate). On the flip side, however, I also have bad news for people who fall into the “wave that meat in front of a fire a couple times and call it done” camp. Anywhere from 115–120 degrees for a rare steak leaves it with a slippery, chewy texture. At such a low temperature, the muscle fibers will still be slippery, and barely any of the intramuscular fat will have rendered (melted). Since fat is where all the flavor compounds we associate with beef come from, a medium rare steak will taste beefier than a rare one, the melted fat coating our taste buds better than they would have otherwise.
I could probably go on for a few more hours: but allow me to save you the trouble of all that annoying food rant and cut it short here:
Prime Rib
So lets get to making a freaking Prime Rib. Here’s what you’ll need:
Prime Rib: Get this from your nearest butcher, grocery store, or stray cow. Prime Rib doesn’t necessarily mean that the meat you’re buying is Prime grade. Those are two different things entirely. A Prime Rib, sometimes called a rib roast, comes from the ribs on the back of the cow, numbers 6–12, specifically. It’s literally the same part of beef that a rib-eye steak comes from, it just hasn’t been cut into individual steaks yet. You can usually find them in cuts of 3–4 ribs, plan on feeding about two people per bone (that generally comes out to one pound of uncooked roast per person)— or if you’re like me then about two rib sections per…well, just for me (four pounds of meat for one hangry person).
You’re also going to need plenty of salt — and if you want to make a chimichurri sauce: garlic, fresh parsley and oregano, olive oil, and vinegar.
LETS GET TO COOKING
OKAY I LIED. You’re actually going to have to prep and salt this sucker overnight for the best results, and if you’re paying this much money for a Prime Rib I should hope you’re not rushing this and cooking this as you frantically read blogs about cooking Prime Rib. So lets get to PREPPING.
Step 1.
Make diagonal cuts across the fat cap of the roast, about a couple of centimeters deep. If you grabbed a ruler to go measure that, then more power to you, but you’re also a nerd.
Rotate the roast 45 degrees, or rotate your knife 45 degrees, or basically just look at the picture and realize that I want you to make more cuts perpendicular to the first ones, making a diamond pattern across the roast.
Step 2
Salt the crap out of it. I don’t know what your own mental image of a proper amount of salt is, but I’m talking about a snowy coating of copious amounts of salt — you have to realize that you’re also seasoning the inside of the roast as well, through a process 4th grader you might remember as osmosis. However, this takes time, and a saturated surface, so salt the meat thoroughly until you can tell the surface won’t dissolve any more too easily.
I’m not kidding, salt that meat and rub it in, using the cuts you made earlier to season it more deeply. Really rub the salt into every nook and cranny you can find, trust me. There’s a lot more going on when you salt meat than seasoning. Cliff notes version of the science is that the salt alters the muscle fibers and results in a more tender, juicy piece of meat that is harder to overcook.
Step 3. WAIT
Now that it’s well salted, you need to give that NaCl a chance to work its magic and into the meat. Let it rest uncovered overnight in your fridge. Maybe throw out that pizza box full of stale pepperoni to make room or something.
Get Patrick Albarico’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
ONE DAY LATER, YOU’RE READY TO COOK
Now then, if you were listening earlier, you’ve learned that searing to lock in juices is frankly a silly and out-dated concept. Taking this new knowledge and a basic understanding of physics and heat transfer allows us to optimize the amount of perfectly medium rare meat we have to eat. See J Kenji Lopez-Alt’s article on meat cooking myths for a more in-depth and technical explanation of the reverse sear and how it’ll change your meat cooking forever! The basic premise is that you start your meat in a low temperature oven, which allows the entire roast to come up to temperature evenly, resulting in less of a temperature gradient in the end. This is how you get the delicious edge-to-edge perfectly cooked medium rare meat that makes carnivores swoon. At 200 degrees, a three-rib roast will take around 3–4 hours to come up to temperature but FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T JUST USE A TIMER USE A THERMOMETER. You can buy relatively cheap probe thermometers that you can leave in the meat while it’s cooking, and even set a convenient temperature alarm to go off when it hits the right doneness. Aim for: 120F for rare, 130 for medium-rare, 140 for medium, you get the idea…160 is well done and anything beyond that is basically making sawdusty charcoal sadness.
Take those herbs you bought and mince them up super fine with superb knife skills, a food processor, mortar and pestle, giant hammer or what have you. Season it with a little salt and pepper and pour some olive oil to make it into a delicious garlic-herb paste.
When your meat comes out of the chill box, you should notice a distinct lack of salt. As you can see in this picture, the meat looks like it has a different texture and, besides some flecks of salt on the fat cap here and there, it’s obvious that the meat has absorbed most of the seasoning fully. This is good. Very Good.
Now take your herb paste and rub that all over the meat. Once again using your fingers to stuff it all up into all those nooks and crannies. Pretend it’s that hot person you like and the herbs are massage oil and they asked you to rub massage oil all over their body. (Just don’t forget you’re working with food here and get too carried away)
If you have one of those thermometers I’ve told you about, then stick the probe deep in the center of the roast, being careful not to touch the bone. Set your temperature 5 degrees BELOW your desired temperature because it’ll continue to rise a little after the alarm goes off. I set it for 120 to warn me, and then I used a smaller, more accurate thermometer to check on it every 5 minutes until it hit 130 because I’m a dork like that and don’t trust the cheap probe thermometer’s accuracy. You don’t have to be as anal as me, it’ll probably be just fine as long as you have a thermometer of some sort. Without a probe alarm thermometer jawn thing, just start checking her after 3 hours or so with a handheld one. Thermometers guarantee delicious cooking- you should invest in a good one. True dweebs would get this one.
POST ROAST
Once the roast is at temperature, you should end up with something dry like this, which is perfectly poised to get a crispy browned crust (a function of the Maillard reactions and NOT caramelization: sugars caramelize, NOT MEAT).
WE’RE ON THE HOME STRETCH ALMOST DONE NOW
Take it out and let it rest underneath a foil tent so it stays relatively warm. Let it rest for at least 40 minutes and even up to a few hours — convenient if you have late guests and stuff since from this point, all it takes is 10 minutes from oven to table.
While she’s resting, crank your oven up to blast furnace temperature, AKA as hot as you can get it without burning down your house. 500–550 should be what you aim for. Conveniently, it’ll take about 40 minutes, or about how long you have to rest the meat anyway, for the oven to come up to temperature. After it’s preheated it’ll only take like 8 minutes for you to sear the surface of the roast.
The best part about low temperature cooking is that the whole “resting your meat” thing, which is true, doesn’t actually apply in this case. Resting accounts for the temperature gradient between the outer layers of the meat and the inner layers. When you cook it gently in a low oven like we did, this temperature gradient is effectively nil, meaning you only need to let the roast think about what it’s done for a few minutes before carving.
MONEY SHOTS:
