Beef Short Rib – braised and roasted

Jackie and I were driving home after a weekend away and found a lovely Kilnford farm shop in Dumfriesshire.  Specialising in grass fed Galloway beef, and farmed by the owners – it seemed churlish not to take some meat home with us.  After we had finished popping some choice morsels into the bag – we spied what was simply described as Boiling beef and very keenly priced.  So 2 pieces of what is more usually described as Short Rib were also acquired.

There are lots of BBQ recipes for beef short rib – I find many of these over spiced and too reliant on added rubs and glazes for their flavour.  We wanted to try something very simple to tease the tastes out of this lovely grass fed beef.

The plan was simple.  Allow the meet to come to room temperature, uncovered to allow the outside of the meet to dry.  A light dusting of our standard meat rub was added – which is largely salt and pepper with a little garlic powder and paprika, but dominated by the salt and pepper.  The meat was then ready to go.  We were going to cook this on a bed of chopped onions, quickly fried till translucent as a simple trivet to support the meat.  The meat was sat on this in a cast iron roasting dish and a little white wine and stock added to the onions.

The meat was roasted/pot roasted in this way in the Big Green Egg, set up for indirect cooking at 110C with a little cherry wood for gentle smoke.  The BGE allows what is actually ‘lid off’ cooking to allow smoke flavours into the food, but with very little of the drying of the food that you would get if cooked this way in a conventional oven.  We were expecting to cook for around 12hrs,  so the BGE was set up with our CyberQ Cloud – to allow the temperature of the EGG and the meat to be monitored and controlled.

Every couple of hours we checked that the onions were not drying out and if necessary a little water was added – other than this there was little or nothing to do.  The Egg was only ever opened for this which was when pictures were taken.  Once the core temperature of the meat was approaching 90C the temperature of the Egg was raised to 140C and the roasting dish with the onions was removed.  

Some of the juices from the roasting dish were decanted into a small container, these were already reasonable viscous, but if not these could be reduced slightly in a pan over some direct heat.  The ribs were places directly on the grill and basted with these juices repeating 4 or 5 times over a 20 minute period.  They were then removed and wrapped in foil and placed in a conventional oven at 50C until needed – if you were ready to serve straight away they could have simply been wrapped and left to stand for 10 minutes or so before serving.  Serve on a bed of the roasted onions ………delicious!

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