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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
Subscribe to comments on this post
18 Comments
Hi, I enjoy your blog so I thought I would check out your first blog post ever. I hope this is it, if not please point me in the right direction.
Anyway–I have a collection of my Grandmother’s recipes and I have a recipe for Rare Roast Beef and this is exactly what you showed here. The process is different, but it uses a standing rib roast.
I thought that was neat. I hope you don’t mind if I link over to this recipe–it would really help anyone looking to make one of these (myself included!).
Thank-you for a great blog.
If your interested-here’s my Gram’s recipe–not handwritten, but typed on her recipe card:
Grammy’s Recipes: Rare Roast Beef
Wow, this is really reaching back there. It’s actually #6. My first one was last Thanksgiving. Oh my God I took bad pictures.
I’ll be heading over to check the rest of your blog in a sec, but thought i would comment that I found you through my blogging friend at Grammy’s Recipes
I’ve made standing rib roast several times and still have 3 of them left in the freezer (we buy a whole beef each year). Luckily for me, the price works out to about $8/roast instead of $60
Your comment about opening the door and adding 30 minutes really grabbed me. I followed a recipe the other night for a sirloin tip roast that said to roast at 200 and baste often. So I was opening the dang door every half hour! No wonder it was in the oven for 5 hours and still wasn’t done. UGH!
I’ve got to look into doing that. I’ve got the freezer space, and $8 for a standing rib is too good to ignore.
Drew I was just cleaning out my inbox and came across this comment. Do you have any farms with cows out grazing within a 30 minutes radius of your home? Just stop by and ask tell them you are interested in getting a quarter or half a beef and see what they say. If they don’t they may be able to tell you where you can get one. Also, look up packing houses in your area and ask them if their are any local farmers you can buy from. I pay the farmer for the beef, he takes it to the packing house (they have to make appointments, it’s not a big slaughterhouse, they do one at a time). Then I call the packing house and tell them how I want it packaged. then I pay them for the packaging.
For the beef the farmer usually just charges me market value, somewhere around 90 cents per pound. He usually rounds down if I pay in cash instead of a check. The last one came to $1,305.00, it was 1,450 pounds live weight. I paid $1,200 cash. Then I paid another $440 for the packaging. The hanging weight is usually about 60% of the live weight, so we got about 870 pounds of beef for $1,640 which is roughly $1.89/lb. Now this weight also included soup bones, but those are great for making broth as you know
So even at $2/lb that beats anything in the store. I split this beef with a neighbor of mine who has a family of 8 and we have a family of 6. We already have an appointment for April for the next one. Then six months after that he’ll have Black Angus! it’ll be a little bit more, but I can’t wait for that 
The ones we buy now are Holstein.
Anyway, it’s worth doing a little legwork if you can find it!
Amanda, I’m in an inner-ring suburb, which means there’s no green space between us and downtown except for parks. The only time we see livestock is when we’re leaving town, and we’re usually on a tight enough schedule that we can’t take detours to chat up the farmers.
The other problem is I don’t have any place to put 400 pounds of frozen beef. But I’ll start asking around, see if any neighbors want to get in on this. If I can get it down to about 100 pounds for me I can probably manage it.
I’m not sure about all farmers, but I know that the one I buy from basically keeps a list of his customers and what they want. Some only want a quarter beef, so he will note that and wait until he has another customer wanting the rest, or a combo of customers to make up the rest. So you may not have to ask any neighbors, they may already have people waiting.
Hiya! I followed your tracks from the comment on Darya’s blog Summer Tomato where you agreed with my comment (thanks!). I LOVE this post on a standing rib roast. I make one every Christmas day and find your method so interesting and your pictures mouth-watering that I’m going to try it this year. I did have one question, though. I used to buy a prime rib roast at a grocery store nearby but grocery stores no longer get any prime meats, the restaurants and butchers get it all. My prime rib roast was going to cost me $175 a few years ago from the butcher so I ended up buying a roast graded select from the grocery store for around $45 for the same size roast and I’ve been doing that ever since. I want a PRIME rib roast again! Do you buy prime? Where do you get it?
Karen,
I order it from the local butcher. (Unless you’re up late, by the time you see this you’ll see that we just got a new butcher. Larry retired.)
Anyway, they always get several in, anticipating the holiday feasts. But I always order one a week in advance, so he gets exactly what I want, and it’s got my name on it. Can you imagine showing up and they don’t have any?
It’s always pretty expensive … not $175, though. And for a once-a-year treat, totally worth it. If we can feed 8-10 people for under $100, that’s better than any restaurant we’d go to.
Hi there,
Directions, reminiscent of how Alton Brown does it. I noticed you don’t have cooking time on there. Is there a ball park? For instance, If I want to be serving at 6pm. Should I have a 3 bone roast in at noon or even earlier.
Thanks, and nicely done
Costa,
I actually just did another one of these on Christmas, this time a five-bone. Because of the shape, though — rib roasts get longer, not bigger around — the cooking time is roughly the same no matter how long it is.
One thing I do differently now is that I start at 500° until there’s a good crust, then turn down to 200°. I find that it produces a better crust that way.
I picked it up about 2:00 on Christmas Eve, and put it in the oven instead of the fridge. I wanted it to come up to room temperature before cooking, and experience told me that taking it out in the morning doesn’t give it enough time. By 3:00 on Christmas — so 24 hours sitting in a cold oven — it had come up to 62°. Not quite room temperature, but it goes to show just how much inertia there is when changing the temperature of a big hunk of meat.
So to answer your question (finally), with a five bone roast, starting at 62°, it was one half-hour at 500°, and another two-and-a-half hours at 200°. Then 20 minutes to rest and it was on the table three-and-a-half hours after going in the oven.
Drew,
Thank you so much! Having a this really helps me with my time table and how to work the rest of my preparations of the day around the main course. Also thank you for the quick response.
I have a few more quick questions, and I apologize for not including them with my last one.
I was able to get a whole rib (7 bones) which the butcher broke down for me to a 3 bone roast and 4 HUGE steaks (2 1/2″ thick). I also had him include the trimmings. I was wondering:
1-any recommendations for cooking the steaks, I have not tackled any with such girth before.
2-What can I do with the trimmings? I haven’t even opened the vac bag to see exactly what is in there but it looks like a bunch of chunks of meat and fat. I was thinking maybe something in the dutch oven or somehow using them to make a gravy
3-what is your opinion of using aromatics in the roasting pan with the Rib Roast? (i.e. onion, garlic, celery etc…)
Thank you again for sharing your time and your knowledge, and I hope you have a fantastic holiday!!
Costa
1 – If possible I’d cut those steaks in half. We have this image in the U.S. of the big, thick steak, but a thinner one is actually easier to cook. I usually ask my butcher to cut me half-inch thick ribeyes.
Thick or thin, start by letting them come up to room temperature, then use a little salt and pepper, and put them in a very hot pan. If you use non-stick or cast iron you shouldn’t even need any fat in the pan. Prime Rib usually has enough fat through it to lube the pan while it cooks. If you’re using stainless steel, either put a tiny bit of fat in the pan (bacon fat is my favorite) or spray the steak with a little olive oil just before it hits the pan.
Go for just a minute or so on each side, just enough to brown it.
If you cut them thin, you’re done. If you left them thick, take the pan and put it in a 350° oven until an instant-read thermometer shows 130° in the center of the steak. Depending on your starting temperature it could take as little as 5 or 10 minutes.
2 – If I had it, I’d get some London Broil or rump roast — something very lean and very inexpensive — and run that and the trimmings through the meat grinder and make awesome ground beef. Without a grinder, I’d slice the fat into thin strips which I’d drape over roasts before cooking.
3 – You can see in the pictures above that I use a flat baking sheet, not a roasting pan. I’ve never gotten enough drippings to make gravy, and can’t imagine getting enough flavor into the roast to make it worthwhile.
If I wanted to add the flavor, I’d pierce the roast and insert the aromatics as deeply as I could. Something like sage, rosemary and garlic would be good.
Can you please advise, for scheduling purposes, about how long it will take to cook this guy? lbs/hr please.
If you let it come to room temperature first, it should take about three hours. No, it doesn’t really matter how many pounds it is. Here’s why: When you do a turkey, the heavier it is the bigger it is all around. With a rib roast, they’re all basically the same size. The difference between a 15-pounder and a 25-pounder is how long it is. (Three bones vs. five bones, for instance.)
Cooking time is about getting the center up to temperature, which is mostly about how far it is from the outside to the center.
You may wish to note that a “Prime Rib” is only IF the meat is actually graded USDA Prime. The same cut graded USDA Choice is simply a standing rib roast. Fortunately, I am able to get mine at Bichelmeyer Butcher Shop. It went into biz in 1923 and is still in the family. My dad started doing biz there in 1946, and I grew up with the current owner, so I get mine at a really good price.
Here’s the deal: I’m in my mid-50′s and not a good cook – at all. I was never taught when I was growing up, just shooed out of the kitchen. I raised four kids and cooking for a family of six never really produced a lot of good food memories for anyone. Cooking became such a grind and a chore and I grew to hate cooking; I think it’s primarily because of the stress and pressure of having to produce something when you don’t know what you’re doing. I could follow recipes, but I didn’t know about techniques, ‘Unspoken Rules’ or how to best use the tools I had to work with, so they didn’t come out so wonderful. No family around to help teach me. I felt like a loser and a failure. Now that everyone is gone and I’m on my own, I don’t want to cook anything unless it is absolutely superb and worth all that effort. Which means there has to be left overs involved.
Your website & blog have given me such hope. I got a french oven from Costco for Christmas and I faced it down like it was high noon. It sat there for a few weeks scaring me, but then I saw your Pot Roast recipe. You teach like you’re teaching third grade; giving step-by-step directions, then you explain the directions and the terminologies and then you take step-by-step pictures of what it SHOULD look like by now. I have purchased your cookbook and am waiting for it to show up during this great Seattle snowstorm. I’ve printed out your Potted Chicken recipe that’s going to be cooked this week. I found your Christmas Eve Standing Rib Roast recipe. I also found a $60.00 prime rib roast in the reduced meat section of Fred Meyer (grocery store) and got it for $20.00! I now have the courage to follow your entire prime rib recipe and see how it turns out.
I have prayed to God to give to me the joy of cooking (no pun intended) and glory be, I just may have found it through your website. I know this is a really long post, but you just don’t know the feeling of hope restored after so many years of never ‘measuring up’! Thanks again for all your efforts; it really does make a difference. ~ Laura
Wow, I know it’s early to be saying this but that’s the comment of the year right there.
Laura, if I have one piece of advice it’s not to approach any single dish with the thought that this time it’s going to be right. The whole point is to just try it and pay attention to what happens, then each time you get a little better at it.
Believe me, I didn’t figure all this out on the first try. People who write food blogs — and cookbooks, and do cooking shows — have the advantage that we get to edit, and only show the versions that came out right. (Which doesn’t explain Sandra Lee, who routinely shows stuff I’d be embarrassed to offer to my kids.)
Come back and let me know how it comes out. I can’t wait to hear the results.
3 Trackbacks
[...] might think after three days of eating prime rib I’d be a little tired of it for a while. If so, you’d be wrong. Maybe if I had gone [...]
[...] Next, insert the probe from your electronic thermometer. Measure the distance to the center of the roast the same way you would with a standing rib roast. [...]
[...] it is an Italian one. Photo by Mike and Sherry at Menu in ProgressI’ve mentioned before that I like to do a standing rib roast. Big ‘ol hunks of beef are welcome at most any gathering. Photo by ManicosityYou can go with [...]