Today's roast and another cooking thread - roast rib of Aberdeenshire beef

Caporegime
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Hello all, today I made roast rib of beef for a very satisfying Sunday dinner.

Here's how it was done!

Meat, on the bone of course. Not the world's finest beef, but it did the job:

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Other bits:

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Less obvious bits in the above pic include chicken stock for the gravy in the blue tub, concentrated beef stock in the little plastic container, clarified butter for searing the outside of the joint, and a bouquet garni of 1-2-3 bay rosemary parsley. I didn't tie the bouquet or use muslin, as the gravy was being strained anyway. It's also easier to distribute the flavours when the herbs are loose, if the bouquet isn't going in liquid to start with.

Let the beef cool to room temperature for a couple of hours. Season well with sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper (ideally sea salt flakes).

Creat a vegetable trivet from the onions, carrots, garlic, shallots, and herbs:

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Add the butter to a heavy pan over a high heat, and sear the beef on all sides to create a nice flavoursome crust. Don't use normal butter as the milk solids will burn. If you don't have or don't want to make clarified butter, use a high smoke point oil, such as vegetable or ground nut. To a point, the higher the heat the better. You need an ultra hot pan to get the necessary crust.

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Place the beef on the vegetable trivet and add the herbs. As the beef cooks, its juices will mix with the vegetables and create a nice gravy base at the bottom of the pan. Put the tin in a pre-heated 210 deg C oven. After 10-15 minutes, turn it down to 160 for the remaining cooking time.

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Now for the roasties! Boil them for five minutes, then drain and toss them hard in the pan with the lid on to fluff the outsides. Then score the potatoes with a fork. This will help them absorb more fat and get the outsides crispy.

Leave to dry on the side. They need to be dry before we start to cook them or they'll spit like a mofo. Use towel if necessary, or just boil them the day before and put them in the fridge overnight (covered).

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Almost registering rare, not long to go:

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Back to the potatoes...two teaspoons of goose fat, one of clarified butter in the bottom of a hot roasting hit. Put it over a med-high heat:

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Season the potatoes and get them in the hot tin. Sear the outsides and spoon the hot fat over them. Then into the oven at 200 degrees C.

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Beef out of the oven. Get it resting in a warm place for at least half an hour.

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Put 2 tablespoons of flour into the pan and stir the whole lot around to absorb the juices and cook off the flour:

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Add a little bit of water if it's too dry, just to help the uptake of flavours.

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Add 1/2 - 3/4 bottle of red wine. I used a £3.50 job from Tesco, many people are of the school of thought that just because you are cooking with it, this doesn't mean that the wine should be cheap. Make your choice, but my feeling is that the main flavour from the gravy comes from other sources.

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Now add the chicken and beef stock and cook for another few minutes, before pushing all the goodness through a sieve to catch stuff you don't want to eat.

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Now that the gravy's in a saucepan, check for seasoning and texture. I keep a blond-brown ('peanut butter') roux in the fridge / freezer at all times for flavouring and thickening sauces and gravies. A roux is basically a fat of some kind + flour. I use clarified butter with normal flour. This beats corn flour etc. as a thickener in every imaginable way! You can fill an ice tray with it and it will keep for months. Making a roux is another thread, but this is what mine looks like:

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Carved; it was pinker than it looks your honour!

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Served:

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Let us now kneel before the mighty cow :D.
 
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Looks nice Robbie, few things:
Did you make the clarified butter yourself? I've tried a few times, and can never seem to get rid of enough milk - it just seems to take for ever. I've heard you can use a coffee filter to make your life easier. Any tips? When I can find it, I use ghee instead. I love bearnaise sauce, but have given up trying to make it because of the issues I have with clarified butter and can't find it in any of my local supermarkets and the jarred version just isn't the same I'm sure you'll appreciate.
Your roux is awfully brown, mad.

You ever done a Beef Wellington? I'm going to do one next month using foie gras and truffles. Any tips? Probably going to serve it with black & red caviar. (Yeah, that's right. :D)

Yes I made the clarified butter myself. I heated it (unsalted as mentioned, you can season later if required) up gently until some of the solids started rising to the surface then skimmed these bits with...a skimmer (that's not meant to sound sarcastic!). Make sure not to overcook the butter. If it goes brown, start again.

Then I poured the top layer of melted butter into a glass bowl and passed the last dregs through some cheese cloth. The time before this I used a cafetiere and some filter paper, but cleaning the cafetiere was a pain so I changed tack this time.

I've never tried Ghee but I have heard of it. Even though it costs more, Ghee probably works out the same because, for me at least, there's ~25% wastage when clarifying butter.

I've heard you can also use the tactic of putting it in the fridge and cut off the top layer when it's solid, but I haven't tried this.

Yes the roux is brown, as mentioned this reduces its thickening properties but creates a lovely smooth texture with more flavour than a blond roux. I've not cooked a proper beef Wellington before so I can't help you there, though it looks like you have a pro giving you tips!

Can't stop laughing at this. Imagine asking for a bouquet garni of 1-2-3 bay rosemary parsley.


1-2-3? what the...

You don't ask for this, you get it yourself! Makanouchi is correct, 1-2-3 is the ratio of bay - rosemary - parsley in a classic bouquet garni.

Do you just discard the trivet vegetables after sieving the juices? The roasted carrots looked good.

Yep I chucked the veg away. Not sure if I'd want to eat them as they were mushy by that stage.

Also how do you guys find the time to take pictures at each stage of the cooking process? I'm determined to give it a go sometime to post on here & a blog but often I'm too busy prepping, stirring, adding things and worrying about timings to remember to do it.

As mentioned, do as much prep as possible beforehand. This helps immensely even if you're not documenting it! Also make sure your dishwasher is empty. The pictures take two seconds literally so I just leave the camera on on the side and grab it when I need to.

I watched Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Dinners today and he did a roast dinner in about 26 mins...it looked better than this. And he cheated too, he literally fried the beer and potatoes, so strictly speaking it wasn't a roast as the only thing went into the oven was the yorkshire puddings.

Still, that doesn't look that great, the veg looked over cooked, the beef looked over cooked too.

How did it taste?

Well there's a few reasons why it looked better than this...not least the fact that he's a talented professional chef with a production team behind him :p.

It tasted really very good, the beef was full of flavour and the gravy and potatoes were spot on. The veg wasn't over cooked but the beef was, which is criminal really. I got it out of the oven when the beef was registering just below rare and left it to rest in a warm place (in the microwave which was warm from the grill having been on earlier) and obviously it carried on cooking more than I intended. It was pinker than it looked in the photos though.

haha i would have gone to a carvery for the price of the meat but thats just me...

Every single time? So you're never going to cook a decent bit of beef in your life as you will go to the carvery instead? Each to their own, I guess :o.
 
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