Standing Rib Roast at my Favorite Time of the Year

Written by Cheffy

It is nearly impossible to serve a great standing rib roast without having a keen eye on your meat thermometer. DO NOT OVERCOOK IT! The fool proof method is to use your oven probe set to 120° shutting off the oven.
- Cheffy

Most reliable roast recipes suggest a two-tiered cooking approach.  First, you sear the meat over high heat in order to create a golden brown and delicious crust.  Then, you drop the temperature so that the roast can finish low and slow.  This is a fine philosophy and yet fatally flawed, because the higher the heat involved the more proteins in the meat are damaged, therefore the more juices lost.  If we give it all this high heat at the very beginning, we’re going to have more juice lost through the cooking process.  So flip it: Start the roast at a balmy 200°F and bake until it reaches a certain internal temp, then jack the heat up high to get a nice crust.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one temperature for a rib roast, that narrow range of joy between 127° and 132°F called medium-rare.  I’m going to count on about 10 to 12 degrees of carry-over, so I’m going to set the alarm on my thermometer for 120°F.

Once upon a time, doneness was believed to be a factor of weight, time, and oven temperature.  This led to many a discouraged cook and disappointed diner, because this formula cannot factor in the most critical piece of information in meat cookery: the shape of the meat.  And since that’s a rather fuzzy piece of logic, I think it’s best to skip the time thing altogether.

The only way to know what’s going on in your meat is to take its temperature.  There are a lot of different meat thermometers to choose from, but I like the probe style that can stay inside the meat throughout the cooking process.  I like knowing what’s going on.  Positioning the probe is crucial: Set the probe dead center and drive it down into the middle of the mass of meat, making sure you don’t hit any bones.

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