Holiday dinners are a family affair.  That seems to be a universal truth.  There’s nothing more natural than gathering together to make delicious foods and share them with the people you consider to be the most important part of your life.  For years, my family has always gathered at my aunt and uncle’s for Thanksgiving, and at my mom and dad’s place for Christmas.  I don’t recall exactly when I started helping my mom make Christmas dinner, but I do remember making a pork tenderloin with a tart cherry sauce to go with it.  Over the years, I’d make several more dishes, as time went on, life would make holiday dinners smaller and smaller.

This year, however, would be the first time that I’d make most of the dinner.   My mom is in her 70s now, and she can’t do nearly the amount of stuff she used to do.  As a result, I had to make most of the dinner this year, though we planned it together.  And what was the line up?

Main Course: Standing Rib Roast with Sage Au Jus

Sides: Braised Red Potatoes, Grilled Radicchio with Bacon Vinaigrette

Dessert: Cheesecake with Cherry Sauce

Of this, I ended up making everything but the cheesecake, which was storebought (and that’s only because I wasn’t quite ready to do the cheesecake episode).  Since I was working on the menu, I got to seed the menu with several recipes I would be working on, particularly the standing rib roast recipe.  This one I was quite excited about, because a standing rib roast is a serious affair.  Anyone who knows me knows my favorite cut of beef is the ribeye steak, and a standing rib roast is basically the same cut – just bone in and uncut.  As with many things in cooking, 90% of making a good standing rib roast is to find a good specimen.  As I’ve said before, there are some significant advantages to living in Kansas City, not the least of which is that it’s remarkably easy to find a number of good butchers that offer up great cuts of beef.  We ended up getting it through Dean & Deluca, though I can think of three other places off the top of my head we could have easily found it from instead.

The recipe is a bit unusual, mostly because Alton suggests the use of a flowerpot.  It sounds insane, but makes sense when you think about it.  An earthenware pot is a bit like cast iron – it heats slowly and gives up its heat slowly, so it cooks more evenly.  First of all, though, the roast needs to spend some time dry aging in the fridge.  I picked up a plastic tub that I drilled some holes into in order to promote air flow.  The roast aged in that for three days.  Why is this necessary?  Well, the beef has a lot of water in it, so removing the water will make the beef that much more beefier.  The day of the roast, I removed the roast and let it come to room temperature – the shorter the thermal trip, the less damage the trip would cause to the beef.  The 16″ azalea planter was put in a cold oven, which was then heated to 200 degrees.  The roast is oiled with canola oil to promote browning, and the roast is to be placed in a glass bake-ware dish, and that dish is to be placed in the planter.  It cooks for several hours, until it reaches an internal temperature of 118 degrees.  It’s then removed from the oven, and it should reach an internal temp of 120.  While it’s out, the oven temperature is raised to 500, and the roast goes back in once it’s there, and roasts for 10-15 minutes, just to get a good crust on the outside.  It’s then removed from the oven and allowed to cool, while the au jus is made.  Like most pan gravies, water and wine is added to the roasting pan, and brought to boil over low heat, scraping up the fond from the bottom.  Several sage leaves are bruised and thrown into the pan, and a few ounces of butter is added to finish the sauce.  The jus is then strained.

While that was all going, I made up the warm salad.  The first step was to roast some thick-cut bacon, and reserve some of the bacon grease.  Some of that grease is added to a bowl along with some olive oil, cider vinegar, dark brown sugar, coarse-grain mustard, salt, and pepper.  This is all whisked together until you have a vinaigrette.  Once that was done, I went to work on the radicchio, quartering them and brushing them with some of the bacon grease, grilling them in a hot grill-pan.  The radicchio quarters get dressed with the bacon vinaigrette and some crumbled bacon, and served together.

(I could give the potato recipe here, but it’s not an AB recipe.  Go search for the America’s Test Kitchen braised red potatoes recipe.  It’s easy and delicious.)

So, that’s how things should have gone.  In practice, things weren’t quite that simple.  First off, my mom’s oven wasn’t tall enough to allow the pot in the oven, so that had to be jettisoned.  Also, the rib roast was supposed to be bone-in, but we ended up getting a boned roast.  Neither of these things really caused too much problem, though, in the final product.  Also, the high heat at the end might have caused a bunch of smoke from the fat already in the pan, and we might have tried to prevent the smoke alarm from going off in the house by opening all the windows and using a fan to blow the smoke out.  (It didn’t work.)  Regardless of these minor setbacks, the roast came out beautifully, and was amazingly delicious.  The radicchio…well, radicchio is very bitter, and the grilling didn’t do much to fix that.  The dressing helped mask the bitterness, but I don’t see making that one again.

The main course, as I mentioned was an unmitigated success.  I hope to make this again in the future, this time with the planter, so I can accurately determine how important it is to the recipe.  The radicchio, however, probably won’t be made again.  I can think of better things to do with bacon.  And that will be evident in the next blog post.

Next Time: We marry savory and sweet.

Recipes:

Dry Aged Standing Rib Roast with Sage Au Jus

Bacon Vinaigrette with Grilled Radicchio