As it's the holiday season, I thought I'd share my favorite standing rib roast recipe.
As those of you who know me can attest, I love beef. I especially love rare roast beef. There is nothing worse than cutting into a $100 roast to find it brown and ruined. This recipe will guarantee that won't happen.
For this most part, this Alton Brown's method of cooking, but with a little (and optional) twist.
This recipe will work for 2, 3, 4 or even 5 (wow!) ribs. Cooking time is approximate and is based on a 4 rib roast, but NEVER use a timer to cook your roast! Instead, use the internal temperature as measure by a good digital thermometer.
Also, I highly recommend finding a good butcher and hand picking your roast. Be sure the roast is from the loin end, and look for marbling. Marbling are those white lines of fat inside the red portion of the meat. That stuff is pure gold. The more marbling, the better the taste.
One last tip is to make sure your oven temperature really is what you think it is. Buy a oven thermometer and test it at various temperatures to make sure everything is accurate. This is in addition to your digital meat thermometer.
Total Cook Time: About 60 minutes per rib. (40 minutes per rib in a convection oven.)
Ingredients: A high quality rib roast (loin end), canola oil, salt, pepper, other seasonings according to preference.
Steps
- 1 to 4 days ahead of cooking, tightly wrap the roast of beef with paper towels and place it in the fridge. This will be essentially a poor man's dry ageing. This will remove moisture from the roast and greatly increase its flavor. Don't do more than 4 days, though, and be sure to keep your fridge in the 34 to 38 degree range. Also, change the towels on a daily basis. When you're done, the roast might smell a little funky. No worries! If it does, just give it a quick spray down with cold water and pat dry. Trust me! :)
- Approximately 4 hours (for a 4 rib roast, 3 for a 3 rib roast, etc.) before cooking, remove the roast from the fridge, remove any paper towels, and wrap it tightly in aluminum foil. Place the roast on a counter, or even better, on a large metal surface. The metal will act as a heat sink and will bring the roast to room temperature. I use an inverted iron skillet.
- Just before cooking, liberally cover the entire roast with canola oil, including the bones. Heavily salt the roast (about .5 -to 1.0 teaspoons per rib), and apply pepper and any other seasons you like. I enjoy Crazy Jane's Mixed Up Pepper. For added goodness, cut shallow flaps out of the fat layer on top of the roast and place a little bit of duck fat under them. Trust me, it's amazing.
- Here is the optional part. If you're planning on making gravy with the drippings, Alton's standard recipe will leave you a bit disappointed. Because he cooks low and slow and only cranks up the heat at the very end, you'll be left with very few drippings in your pan. So if you want drippings, preheat your oven to 500 degrees. Once preheated, place the roast (on a rack and in a pan to catch drippings) in the oven, uncovered, for 10 minutes. This will prime the fat layer and result in a lot of drippings later on, but it won't cook the roast very much.
- If you completed step 4, turn the oven down to 200 degrees and open the door for a minute to cool the oven more quickly. If you didn't complete step 4, preheat your oven to 250 degrees. Cover the roast with heavy duty foil. Once preheated, turn the oven down to 200 degrees and place the roast (on a rack and in a pan) in the oven. (You didn't forget the foil, did you?) Be sure you have your digital thermometer embedded in the thickest part of the roast, and as far away from the bones as possible.
- Cook the roast until the internal temperature reads exactly 118 degrees F. Not a single degree more or less. In a normal oven, this will take about 45 to 60 minutes per rib. In a convection oven, it will take about 25 to 35 minutes per rib. But don't cook based on time!!! Use your thermometer! Immediately remove the roast and heat the oven up to 500 degrees. (Yes, even if you already did step 4.)
- With the roast outside of the oven, wait until it has reached an internal temperature of 130 degrees. Sometimes larger roasts just won't make it. That's fine. But wait until the temperature hasn't risen in at least 2 minutes, or has fallen at least 1 degree, before placing it back in the oven. Place the roast, uncovered, back in the oven for about 10 minutes, or until the outer layer looks nice and brown.
- Remove the roast and place on a serving platter or cutting board. Leave it uncovered. I usually let it rest for another 10 to 15 minutes before cutting.
- ENJOY!
If you use this recipe, let me know how it turns out! :)
I am writing this from my new Zune HD! Thanks Jess!
Riddle me this.
Let's say you want to perform a simple select statement from a table in a database. And let's say that table has a primary key, meaning that it has a clustered index on some column. let's say, the ID column. And let's say you do a select of some or all of the rows in that table.
Can you say for sure that the resulting data set will have one and only one entry for each primary key in the source table?
The answer is: it depends. :)
Most people would think, and I can understand why, that if you have a clustered index on a table, and you do something simple like SELECT * FROM myTable, that you'll get one result for each row in that table. But that's not always the case.
Imagine that the table you're selecting from has an index, and that index is on the column "Lastname". And imagine that your select statement is something like: SELECT ID, Lastname FROM myTable. It's fairly likely that your query will take advantage of the index since it "covers" all the data in your query.
So what's the issue? Well, let's say when you start your query, the index data looks like this:
ID, Lastname
3, Allen
1, Downey
4, Jacobs
2, Richardson
So now your query starts reading the rows out of the index. You've read "Allen" and "Downey" when all of a sudden, somebody changes the last name "Allen" to "Kelly". Since "Kelly" comes after "J" and before "R", the new index data looks like:
ID, Lastname
1, Downey
4, Jacobs
3, Kelly
2, Richardson
But wait, what happens? You just finished reading through Downey, but now Allen (who I guess got married to Mr. Kelly) is going to be read again. In other words, the output from your select statement will look like:
ID, lastname
3, Allen
1, Downey
4, Jacobs
3, Kelly
2, Richardson
We have a duplicate primary key value in our output, and 1 more record than currently exists in the original table! What gives?
Well, it's just the way things work. When the database engine starts reading data, it reads it in the order of the underlying data source. If that happens to be a source whose order can change, all bets are off.
If you don't want this to happen, you need to use a more strict isolation level for your query. In SQL Server, the minimum isolation level required to prevent this stuff is Repeatable Read. If you don't want to change isolation levels, you can essentially accomplish the same thing by using a TABLOCK hint on your select, although SQL Server might decide to ignore this hint.
So why don't we see these issues all the time? Well, part of it is a timing issue. You need to be performing a query on the exact set of data that happens to include a row that's being changed, and your query must be against a data set that is ordered on one or more columns with changing values. (That's why I used an index in my previous example, since it's very rare for a primary key on a table to change.)
Duplicate rows aren't the only issue. Using our previous example, what happens when Jacobs is renamed to "Clark"? That row would be moved to before Downey, and if I had already read past Downey, I would miss it. In other words, your results would be entirely missing the record with the ID of 4.
So watch out people!
Oh, and for the love of baby jesus, don't use the NOLOCK hint if you care at ALL about the consistency of the resulting data. Seriously.
.that I voted for Barack Obama.
