Try standing rib roast for holiday dining

Roasting the prime rib at a low temperature for several hours followed by a brief time at 550 degrees results in a roast that’s medium rare to its edges.
Sascha Nelson

My daughter has always been a great cook, something I hope comes from her girlhood days helping me in the kitchen. But she gives a lot of credit to the website SeriousEats.com which provides reasons and background with its recipes.

She’s Sascha Nelson and today she shares her recipe for a perfect standing rib roast — something readers can try for the New Year.

She lives in the Washington, D.C., area and loves to cook for friends. A Christmas Eve roast prime rib dinner, a longtime holiday tradition, had to be downsized this year due to the coronavirus. Like many of their friends, her husband works for the government with a summer job serving as King Henry VIII with the hugely popular Maryland Renaissance Festival. Like many events that attract crowds, the festival was cancelled this past summer resulting in a sizable reduction of income for her family this year.

She considered canceling this year’s Christmas Eve dinner, but instead asked her guests to bring side dishes, appetizers and desserts to better keep expenses in check. Only the three couples in her COVID “pod” were in attendance along with my grandson and the son of another couple. All are folks who work at home and have little contact with others. The dinner was their Christmas gift to each other.

She shopped around for a well-marbled, dry aged roast and found a good price for an 11-pound, five-rib standing rib roast, figuring there would be leftovers for everyone to take home.

I’d shared with her the disaster I’d had with the roast I purchased for our November anniversary dinner, and we determined that my roast was just too small to cook properly. Intended for just the two of us, mine was one rib and weighed a little more than two pounds.

Searing the roast at a high temperature at the end of the cooking process results in a dark, crusty surface.
Sascha Nelson

“A bigger roast works much better,” she told me. “And with a coupon I had, this one was bigger than I had wanted but was a good price.”

“I salted it the night before and started cooking it at noon at 200 degrees,” she said. “And by 4 when my guests arrived, I took it out of the oven and tented it with foil. It filled the house with its wonderful scent as we ate the appetizers my friends had brought.”

Dinner was scheduled for 5:30 so she began heating her oven to 550 degrees after a few minutes. “Be sure to put your fan on and open a window because the fat on the roast will smoke at that temperature. Some ovens only go to 500 degrees, so that’s OK, too. But it will need about 10 or 12 minutes at the higher temperature. Mine was ready after eight minutes. ”

A second check with the instant read thermometer revealed the temperature inside the roast had risen to 140 by then.

The roast is salted and peppered the night before cooking.
Sascha Nelson

After pulling it from the oven the second time, she let it rest again while side dishes were assembled. They included mashed potatoes made with butter, cream and boursin cheese and a mashed potato bar where guests could add chives, chopped bacon and other ingredients.

“I expected leftovers but there were only two slices left,” she said. “They devoured it. Everyone told me it was the best prime rib they’d ever eaten.”