How to make a standing rib roast -- and the world's greatest leftovers

The traditional showpiece of the American holiday meal is either a roast turkey or a giant ham. If you really want to impress someone, go instead for a standing rib roast. The recipe is about as simple as can be and the preparation is even easier. The key is a simple preparation of the best cut of meat you can get.

You may look at the length of the directions and wonder how I can say it's easy. It's because there aren't very many steps that each step is so important. And when you're working with a $60 piece of beef you don't want to miss something, so I've included lots of detail along the way.

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Ingredients

1 (3-bone) standing rib roast, loin end
1/2 cup rendered bacon fat
1 lb fatback (optional, see below)
kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper

Directions

When ordering the rib roast, ask the butcher to leave about a quarter-inch trim of fat over the whole roast. If you aren't able to place a special request, or if the trim is too close and there are large parts of the meat showing through the fat, you'll need enough fatback to cover the whole top. The one I got was in between: enough fat to not need the fatback, but not enough to trim.



Here you can see the three bones across the bottom.



If you get one with a thick layer of fat, trim it in one continuous piece right where it joins the meat. Leave it attached at one end of the bones. It should form a flap that covers the entire roast. If it had a narrow "low-fat" trim, arrange one or more pieces of fatback so they cover the entire roast, then set the fatback to the side.

Now that you have the meat exposed, coat it liberally with kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper. Do the bone side, too.



Fold the flap of trimmed fat over the meat, or cover with the fatback. Tie the roast at each bone. If you've never tied a roast, ask your butcher to show you how. If you don't tie it, the fat will curl back as soon as it starts to cook and the exposed meat can dry out. I wish I could show a picture of this, but like I said mine was trimmed too close.

Finally, place the prepared roast, bone side down, on a rack in a shallow, stovetop-safe glass or earthenware casserole dish, or a flat baking sheet.



Insert the probe of a digital meat thermometer in the top of the roast, so that the tip is as near the center as you can get. Here I'm measuring to make sure I hit the center.



Then I insert the probe and connect it to the thermometer.



Set the thermometer for 120° -- or as close as your thermometer will go, mine doesn't go below 122° -- and place the roast in a 200° oven. The wire on the probe lets you keep an eye on the progress without opening the door. Digital thermometers with remote probes cost less than $20. If you're cooking a $60 piece of meat, don't guess – buy the thermometer.



Now comes the hard part: Leave it alone. Don't check on it. Don't baste it. Don't open the door to see how it's coming. All you need to know is when it hits 122°. Work on the side dishes. Make the horseradish cream sauce. Entertain your guests. At this low temperature every time you open the door and let the heat out you'll be adding nearly a half-hour to the overall roasting time.

When the thermometer reads 122°, take the roast out and wrap it with heavy aluminum foil. Here is what it looks like now. Note that it has given up almost no juices.



And here it is covered. I just ripped the foil to go around the probe. DO NOT remove the probe. You will lose more juice through the hole than you would believe.



Turn the oven up to 500°. While the oven is warming up, you will see the temperature on the roast continue to rise. When the oven hits 500°, or the roast hits 130°, remove the foil, remove the layer of fat (which I didn't have) and put the roast back in the oven. Keep an eye on it to see when a nice crust has formed. It should be less than 10 minutes.



Remove from the oven (you can turn it off now), and transfer the roast to a cutting board. Leave the probe in. Put a serving platter in the oven to warm up. Cover the roast with foil again and let it rest for 20 minutes, or until you see the temperature peak and start heading back down, whichever comes first.

To carve, turn the meat upside-down on the cutting board and cut away all the strings, if you didn't remove them with the fat before finishing the crust. Using an electric knife or filleting knife cut all the bones away from the meat in one piece.



Hide the bones where your mother-in-law won't find them before you get to them. (Hi, Nancy!) They make an excellent chef's snack.

Turn the meat back over onto the cut side where the bones were. Carve slices up to a half-inch thick. You should typically get about two slices for each bone so use the width of the bones as a guide.



Take your warmed serving platter from the oven and reassemble the entire roast onto it.



If you got a lot of juices from the carving and your cutting board has a channel for catching the juice (look two pictures back) use this to make an au jus. Divide the au jus and the horseradish cream sauce into individual bowls before bringing them to the table. Serve the meat from the platter at the table.

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World's greatest leftovers

The next morning, cut the ribs apart. Place one on some foil in the toaster oven for about five minutes at 400°. Let it cool a bit and gnaw on it like a caveman.

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For lunch, take out the leftover prime rib. (Yup, that's what it is: prime rib. No wonder it's so good.)



If you look at the cutting board you'll see where I learned you shouldn't use an electric knife on a wooden surface. Oops.

Carve off a piece about a quarter-inch thick.



Get some onions going in a very hot pan lubed up with melted bacon fat.



Toss them a bit so they get a little brown all around.



Add the prime rib and let it cook for about 30 seconds to a minute without touching it. Add a little kosher salt.



It's ready to flip when a quick shake of the pan makes it move around. At first it will stick to the pan, but as the surface caramelizes it will break free. Yay for the Maillard reaction. Flip it over and give it another 30 seconds to a minute.



Split and lightly butter a French or crusty Italian roll, and throw it in the pan to toast it. If there's still a good bit of bacon fat in the pan (like I had) you can skip the butter. You just need it moist enough that the bread doesn't stick to the pan.



Remove everything from the pan and assemble. You can add cheese, but it really doesn't need it.



I wouldn't think this was ruined if you replaced half the onion with an equal amount of mushroom. But for goodness sake, don't bury the prime rib in vegetables. This sandwich is all about the meat.

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For breakfast the next day, fry it up the same way as the sandwich, but without the onions. Add a couple of eggs, sunny side up with kosher salt and plenty of cracked black pepper.



And if this is your third straight day of eating prime rib -- it was for me -- plan on having a salad for lunch. You'll need it.

Home-made basil pesto year-round

Tell people that you've got an herb garden and you'll get some funny looks. Most of them think herbs are those dried flakes you get in little plastic bottles in the grocery store. They seem to add more color than flavor half the time. Why on earth would you go to all the trouble to grow your own?

Now that grocery stores are starting to carry fresh herbs more people are getting turned on to the huge flavor you can get from fresh. But even the best handling puts at least a couple of days between harvesting and cooking. I haven't done any blind taste tests, but the herbs I've brought in from my yard always seem to be more flavorful than anything at the store.

One of the easiest I've found to grow, and most useful, is basil. You only need one or two plants to supply all you'll need for an average size family. If you think it's going to be a little tiny thing and plant a dozen of them (don't ask me how I know this) you're going to have a huge harvest by the end of the summer.

Fortunately, it's really easy to turn all the leafy goodness into pesto. And pesto freezes nicely, so you can have fresh summery flavor throughout the year.

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Ingredients

fresh basil leaves
extra virgin olive oil
fresh garlic cloves
kosher salt

Directions

Strip enough leaves from the basil plant to fill a loosely-packed cup. A little stem left in won't kill you, but the texture will make you fee like you're grazing. Put the leaves in a food processor with one clove of garlic, one-half teaspoon of salt, and one tablespoon of olive oil. Don't bother measuring the oil, you'll be adding more as you go.

Run the food processor until the leaves are mostly chopped. Take the lid off and scrape down the sides with a rubber spatula. Keep repeating the cycle of adding a little more oil, processing, then scraping the sides until you have a thick green paste. Not quite as stiff as peanut butter, but more than mayonnaise.

Your one cup of leaves will probably reduce to less than a quarter-cup, including the oil. If you have a big processor you can do several cups at a time.

Storage

Now comes the great tip. Get some plastic ice-cube trays at the local dollar store. Don't try to use the same ones you use for ice. You'll never get the flavor out of them. Fill them with pesto and freeze them overnight.

To remove them you'll probably need to do a partial thaw. Fill the sink with about a half-inch of hot water. (Don't boil it, just hot tap water is fine.) Lower the tray into the water but don't let any water come over the top. Give it about 20-30 seconds then bang the tray upside-down onto a paper towel on the counter. Most of the cubes should pop right out. The ones that don't, stick a paring knife down the side and pop them out.

Let the cubes sit for a half minute for the edges to re-solidify, then put them in a zip-top freezer bag. Each cube will probably be about two to four tablespoons. If you want to follow a recipe closely you can measure your tray to see how much each cube holds.

I've stored pesto this way for up to a year and it still tastes fresh when you add it to a sauce. One cube added to a 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes makes an instant red sauce.

One cube plus one tablespoon each of butter and extra virgin olive oil makes a great pesto pasta. Add crushed, toasted pine nuts and grated Parmesan for this one.

Or my personal favorite: melt one stick (1/4 lb) of butter until it is just softened all the way through, then mix in one cube of pesto. Spread on crusty bread and toast for garlic-basil toast.

You, yes you, can make lasagna from scratch

I was never good at chemistry. I was fine at the book work but I was absolutely hopeless in the lab. That's why I leave the baking to my wife. She's great at fine-tuning a recipe and getting it just right time after time. I'm more of a seat-of-the-pants kind of cook. Taste it along the way, come out with something I like. But don't ask me when I'm done whether it was one teaspoon of oregano or one-and-a-half.

That's why this step-by-step lasagna recipe is going to have a couple of steps that say, "Don't do it like this." It still tastes great but it doesn't look the way I wanted, and the filling is a little too close to pizza toppings. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Ingredients

1 lb ground beef
1 lb bulk Italian sausage (mild, hot, or half-and-half)
1 lb sliced provolone
1/2 lb shredded whole milk mozzarella
1/2 lb ricotta
1 cup grated Parmesan
1 medium onion, diced
6 cloves garlic, minced
56 oz crushed tomatoes -- 2 large cans[1]
4 eggs
6 cups white flour
4 tbsp basil pesto
4 tbsp bacon fat or lard[2]

Directions

The sauce

In a large non-reactive pan (ie: stainless steel or porcelain-coated iron[3]) melt 2 tablespoons of bacon fat or lard over high heat. Add half the onion and two-thirds of the garlic. If you're bad at math, and you're prepping as you go, that's four cloves of garlic.



Sauté that until the onion goes a little past clear and starts to turn a little yellow. Stir it enough to keep the garlic from burning. If the garlic goes brown it gets bitter.



Add the tomatoes and bring to a simmer.



Add the pesto, reduce the heat, and cover.



If you're good with volumes you might think that doesn't look like 56 ounces of tomatoes in the pictures. It's not. I was halfway into the assembly when I realized I had accidentally cut my sauce recipe in half. Oops.

My next big step is going to be canning my own vegetables and sauces. When I do, I'm going to make this sauce by the gallon and have plenty in reserve for the next time I screw up.

The meat

In a second large pan, sauté the rest of the onion and garlic in bacon fat. You can use your aluminum pot for this round. This won't have any tomato. When the onion and garlic are ready, add the sausage.



Here's one of those "don't do what I did" moments. When the sausage is browned, drain some of the grease. The finished lasagna didn't taste greasy, but when I re-heated portions there was some grease on the plate.

Next, add the ground beef and cook until that is also browned. Check again if you need to drain it.

The noodles

You could use a box of pre-made lasagna noodles. If you do, I won't tell you all the tricks: how to cook them without sticking together, how not to break them, do you really need to cook them before assembling the lasagna? Instead, I'll tell you how to do it with fresh pasta.

Roll the noodles out to #5 on your pasta roller. (I'm assuming yours has 9 markings, like mine and the other three I've checked.) If you got really lucky your noodles came out exactly the same length as your lasagna pan. Since the standard roller is about four inches wide, and the standard lasagna pan is nine inches wide, you're going to need two-and-a-half noodles for each of three layers. That's eight noddles, with a little left over.

If you've got a lot of counter space you can roll out all the noodles at once. My kitchen is a little more limited so I roll them out as I assemble each layer.

The assembly

Set up a work area where you can have the tomato sauce, the meat and the lasagna pan all on the same surface.



Put just enough sauce in the pan to cover the bottom.



Arrange the first layer of noodles. You want the edges to overlap a little bit. This will keep everything together once it's baked.



Add a layer of of sauce then a layer of the sausage/ground beef mixture.



Next is a layer of cheese. This is the next "don't do this" moment. I couldn't find any shredded or sliced mozzarella that was made with whole milk. If I'm going to make my pasta from scratch I'm not going to use part-skim mozzarella. So I got a chunk and figured I could slice it thin enough.



I was wrong. I ended up with uneven chunks throughout each layer.



I also discovered that going with half mozzarella and half provolone, like I did, makes the filling gooey like pizza. It was still good, but wasn't the texture most people are familiar with. You'll get a better texture replacing half the mozzarella with ricotta.

Next on the cheese layer is the provolone.



Much easier when it's already sliced.

Now do another layer just like the first: noodles, sauce, meat, cheese. Then add the top layer of noodles.



I didn't go sideways on purpose. That's just what length my noodles came out. As long as you have good coverage with a little overlap, it doesn't matter.

Last step in the assembly is another layer of sauce, and the Parmesan. Make sure the top layer of noodles is covered really well with sauce.



Now for the last "what not to do" tip. Cover the pan with a lid or aluminum foil, just like I didn't. Bake it at 350 degrees for a half-hour. Uncover and bake for another five to ten minutes, until the cheese on top starts to bubble.



Since I didn't cover this one, the tomato sauce completely baked into the top layer of noodles. Once again, the taste was just fine, but the top layer wasn't as tender as the other two. Next time I make lasagna, I'll come back and post the photos showing the difference.

PS: I lied. There's one more "don't do this" tip. In the second-from-last photo you can see that there's some sauce on the side of the pan. You can see this burned on in the last photo. It's not that hard to clean, but it doesn't look as nice. If you're going to bring the pan to the table and serve it there, you'll want to wipe the sides before baking.

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1. Generally I don't recommend canned food. Most of it has so many ingredients besides what you're looking for that you can't control what you're actually cooking with. Fortunately tomatoes are such a staple item that there are plenty of options without going to a specialty store. Just check the ingredients before you buy. If it has anything other than tomatoes, tomato paste and water, keep looking.

2. You do filter and keep the fat after cooking bacon, don't you? It's much better for pan-frying food than either butter or vegetable oils. If you don't have any (yet) lard is a good second choice. It's just as good for frying, but I don't like spending money on lard when I get the bacon fat for free.

3. You don't want to cook something as acidic as tomatoes in a pan that will react with the acid. Even though the science is pretty clear that you won't get Alzheimer's disease from cooking in aluminum pots, why would you want aluminum-flavored sauce? Eww.

I've ruined my kids (plus turkey soup recipe)

The day after Thanksgiving my father-in-law and I took the carcass and turned it into turkey stock. I ended up with about eight cups of awesome light-brown gelatin, which I froze in one-cup batches in zip-top sandwich bags.

Two days later I made soup with the turkey that was left, a mirepoix with garlic, some of the stock, and home-made pasta. The girls said it was the best soup they ever had. Cool.

Then today I came home and my wife said, "Thanks a lot, you've spoiled the kids." Ummm ... huh?

Apparently she was in a hurry and had offered them canned soup for dinner. They turned it down flat. The four-year-old said, "You can get the machine out and make the noodles."

Oops. Sorry honey. I've taught them to like real food.

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Ingredients

4 cups pre-cooked turkey[1]
1 cup turkey stock
2 cups carrot, sliced 1/8-inch thick
1/2 medium onion, diced (~1cup)
1 cup celery, chopped
2 large eggs
1 cup white flour
2 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 tbsp fat (rendered bacon fat or lard)
salt and pepper

Directions

In a heavy bottomed 4qt (or larger) pot or dutch oven over medium-high heat, melt enough fat to coat the bottom. Add the onion and garlic and sauté until the onion is a little past clear and starts to pick up some color. Stir it frequently so the garlic doesn’t burn.

Reduce the heat to medium and add the carrot. Turn everything over so the carrot is mostly on the bottom and the onion/garlic mix is mostly on the top, and add one tsp each salt and pepper. Let the carrots cook for five minutes or so, until the center of the top side just starts to get a little soft.

Add the celery and the turkey, in bite-size chunks, and turn the heat up high. Stir frequently, but gently -- you don’t want the turkey to crumble -- until the turkey is lightly browned.

Add enough water to barely cover everything, then add the stock. Allow the water to come to a boil and reduce heat to low. While it simmers for 20 minutes, make a thick pasta with the egg, flour and 2 tsp salt. Cut into noodles 2 inches long and 1/4-inch wide. Add the noodles to the soup and simmer another 10 minutes, stirring once or twice. Check the salt and pepper.

Serve with fresh-baked crusty bread and home-made butter.

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1. Dark meat is more flavorful. I go all dark when I’m making it for myself, but I’ll go as high as half white meat if I’m going to share.

One Simple Rule to Improve Everything You Cook

It's easy to get discouraged when you first start learning to cook for yourself. Nothing tastes as good as what Mom used to make. Heck, you can't even top the stuff that comes out of a box or a can or the frozen-food aisle.

If this describes you, there's one thing I'll bet no one has ever told you that will get you through this roadblock: use salt.

When I started cooking I looked at the ingredients on prepared foods. The sodium content on everything was sky-high. I "knew" that salt was bad for you, so I didn’t use any. (Whoops, should have done some research first.) I figured you can always add some once it's on the plate. What I didn't know was that adding the salt earlier in the cooking process makes a huge difference in the final flavor.

I could go into some pretty extensive details on the chemistry behind this. It would be all about brining and the Maillard reaction. I'd have to talk about semi-permiable membranes and coagulation of denatured proteins.

But the bottom line is that any salt added at the beginning of cooking will bring out all kinds of flavor from whatever you're cooking. Salt added at the end of cooking will just make it taste salty.