We had a wonderful, wonderful day, and I hope you all did, too. I’m just going to write about a little moment on the side because I’m never going to remember the details next year any other way. Maybe do 325 next time.
Hunk-o meat, we call it. If he wants a large cut he cooks it, an arrangement going back to when his widowed retired dairy farmer grandmother filled a large grocery bag with part of a cow out of her freezer and sent it home with us. T-bones? Broke newlywed students are supposed to know what to do with those?!
We’d gotten a James Beard cookbook as a wedding present and he had fun learning and in retrospect, I think that’s what his grandmother was going for all along.
We rarely eat beef these days. We’d rather the Amazon not be bulldozed for it. But at Christmas he likes to go big–even though it would just be the two of us this year, because hey freezers and leftovers and faster meals later and all that but whatever, he just really wanted that beautiful rib roast.
Start it high, Beard says, then after so long you turn it down.
He did all that.
Only… he had set a timer for the amount of time at 425 and later, since I was in the kitchen anyway, could I change the oven to 325–nah, make it 350 when it goes off.
Sure.
There’s the timer timer and the oven timer and he’d set the wrong one. The oven was now off. I turned it back on. No biggy.
It was about 20 minutes before I went, wait a minute…
I always use the lower oven because I am not a fan of standing on my tiptoes in front of major heat to see into the top of the thing.
He’s 6’8″ with a back that has opinions. There would have to be a really good reason before he’d ever use anything but the top one.
Duh. I turned his back on but it had already lost about half its heat. It, of course, went into full blast mode to make up for it.
Also, now the timer was and had to be the one on the thermometer and I couldn’t hear it at all, though I did hover nearby and rescued it at two degrees above what he was aiming for.
We really thought we were doing okay.
There is only one way to describe the result.
The beef.
It felted.
I think, on further reflection, that we ought to be able to measure felting levels and call them Kevlars.
Chicken and fish, I tell ya.
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My grandmother had a fool proof recipe that called for high temp for half an hour, I think. Then you turn off the oven and don’t open the door, just let it sit … for hours. You turn the oven back on to a lower temp and cook based on the number of ribs (or equivalent).
Perfectly pink all the way through. Just make sure your oven works properly! We had to use the microwave for backup one year.
Comment by Anne 12.26.22 @ 5:10 amI’m fond of a good steak, but I am perfectly happy to let a restaurant cook it for me! Too easy to mess it up on my own.
Comment by ccr in MA 12.28.22 @ 7:51 amLeave a comment
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