Perfect Rib of Beef, plus Beetroot and all the Trimmings 13/9/14

Saturday's meal was a lovely one rib of beef weighing 1.2kg with the bone in, to feed 6 of us.  I wanted to try this way of cooking the beef, which is unconventional but makes perfect sense and perfectd results, and makes cooking much easier even if you have to start much earlier.

So I also cooked some cocktail sausages, onion rings, beetroot and roast celeriac as well as Yorkshires to go with it.

The recipe for the beef I adapted from The Food Lab on Facebook:

1. Heat the oven to 93C
2. Season the meat generously with salt and pepper, ideally 12-24 hours before cooking.  This allows the salt to dissolve and the liquid to be reabsorbed deeper into the meat.  Better than just sprinkling it on the surface just before cooking.  Leave at room temperature for a few hours.
3. Put the meat in the oven on a rack, fat uppermost, for 3-4 hours, until it reaches 49C (med rare), 57 (med).  [I cooked it to 53C which was perfect for me but slightly too little for some of the others.  Next time I would try 57C for a perfect medium.  1.2kg took about 3 hours to go from around 21C to 53C so expect a larger joint coming form the fridge to take much longer]
4. Once up to heat, remove and tent tightly with foil.  [The temperature shouldn't carry on rising much- with my attempt it rose from 53 to 54, then dropped to 52 after an hour]. The recipe says to hold it like this for half an hour but I found an hour was fine.
5. Increase oven temp to maximum (260-288C).
6. When ready to serve, put the meat back in the oven, fat uppermost, for 6-10 mins. [I did 10 mins at 250C].  Alternatively you could brown it in a frying pan, I suppose.
7. Carve and serve immediately.

Note- the beef was only one rib so I carved it along the grain as my knife was a bit blunt (!).  A bigger piece would have made it easier to carve across the grain.
The beauty of this way of cooking is that the meat is perfectly pink to exactly how you like it done all the way from just under the browned edge through to the middle.
One comment was that it wasn't as visually appealing. Because of the pieces of fat in the meat.  With rib you can remove the larger pieces of fat on carving, if it helps.

Roast beetroot
I also roasted some beetroot as an experiment.  Washed the whole beetroot, trimmed it to 1" at the top and fairly close at the bottom.  Tossed in oil an roasted for about 30 minutes.  I found it delicious but the children weren't so keen.