Holiday Prime Rib

Holiday Prime Rib 2023.

A standing rib roast is getting awful expensive, but I was able to find a 4 bone (about 9 pounds) large end USDA Choice roast for under $65 at a local supermarket for holiday prime rib 2023. Now all that was left was to prep and serve the royal beast. (Got some inspiration from this NYT article [free link for nonsubscribers] which laments the fall in popularity of prime rib before concluding it’s as popular as ever.)

Decades ago I had a job at Victoria Station where I was responsible for steaks, managing the rib roasts and assembling a specialty shrimp dish. There is a thread somewhere online reminiscing about the “low and slow” cooking technique at Victoria Station but that’s not what I remember. We had a convection oven and cranked it up to 500 or maybe 550 degrees. Rib roasts were brought out of the cooler in the afternoon and we’d let them come  to room temperature before rubbing with salt and subjecting them to intense heat for I’m guessing 50 minutes and not much more. The steak grill was to the left of the vertical ovens so I’d frequently burn my arm flipping steaks and I still have a few scars to this day.

Cold prime rib for next day leftovers. Doneness from just rare next to the bone to crispy but not dry at the edges… exactly what I was aiming for.

I followed the same technique for my 2023 holiday prime rib, with a few tweaks. Pre-salted the night before for a dry brine, then rubbed in cracked pepper on all surfaces as the oven was warming up. (I had actually planned to use the reverse sear method which is trending and possibly fine, but I discovered an hour before planned serving time that the slow cooking phase takes up to 4 hours, d’oh!) At 50 minutes the temperature was only 106 degrees and 118 is recommended for a roast that will be rare to medium rare after resting, so I gave it 10 more minutes. The result was superb.

I had forgotten till I cut into the roast that we had frequently undercooked our prime ribs at Victoria Station when demand outran supply. We had a pass with some sturdy heat lamps, so an undercooked (i.e. bloody) slice would spend a few minutes there before going out. And it didn’t hurt that the restaurant had yellow lighting that made every cut of beef look perfect.

I was moderately interested in the jus described in the NYT Cooking recipe, a gravy made with a little of the pan juices stiffened with beef stock and flour. But in the end I served as is traditional for me (and was standard practice at Victoria Station) with sour cream mixed with a healthy portion of Sau-Sea horseradish. Delicious, and leftover sandwiches the next day were even better. UPDATE: with a little prodding from Chuckeye Dave, I recalled that we actually did have a container of au jus made from a concentrate at Victoria Station. It was kept warm on a corner of the steak grill and we would spoon a little onto each serving of prime rib as it went out.