Roasted and Reverse Seared Prime Rib Recipe (2024)

This is a four-pound joint of well-marbled prime beef rib—it is not cheap. And, while my friends provide me with as many mental and philosophical riches as a man could ask for, and my wife supplies an adequate amount of emotional wealth, as a humble food writer, I do not part with dollars and cents lightly.

Thus, when I buy a quality piece of beef—and, honestly, does beef get any better than prime rib?—I have a great impetus not to mess it up, as do, I imagine, most of you.

So atThe Food Lab, I've decided to get through a lifetime's worth of messings-up so that in the future, I (and hopefully you, too!) will never again serve anything but a perfectly cooked roast.

So what exactly is a perfect prime rib, anyway?

Prime Rib: The Basics

If you want to dive further into the ins and outs of prime rib, there are some crisp, succulent morsels of well-browned information to gnaw off the bones of the knowledge beast in The Food Lab's guide to buying and cooking prime rib.

Important Details About Dry-Aged Beef

For the ultimate experience in prime rib, you'll want to use dry-aged beef. There are no two ways about it: Whether you buy it from a good butcher or supermarket or age it yourself at home, it's an expensive endeavor that's gonna add to the cost of your meat. Commercially dry-aged beef will fetch upwards of $25 to $30 a pound. At home, you'll need some dedicated equipment, while also running the risk (albeit a small one, if you follow my directions) that you'll cut into your beef a few weeks down the line only to find that the controlled rot of dry-aging has turned into full-on, zombie-apocalypse-style decomposition.

But if you have the patience and the funds, nothing beats the flavor and tenderness of a perfectly dry-aged prime rib. The aging process not only improves tenderness through the action of enzymes within the meat, it also adds flavor through controlled bacterial action and the oxidation of fat. Well-aged prime rib will have a dense and meaty texture that's still incredibly tender, with a nutty, sweet aroma. Let it go long enough (28+ days), and you'll start to develop hints of Parmesan or blue cheese.

I've written an extensive guide to aging your own beef at home (all it really requires is a mini fridge, a computer CPU fan, and some patience), but since I wrote that piece, I've also tested a number of products on the market intended to help improve the odds of successful aging. Of those, two have stood out.

The Prime Rib Commandments

Whether you buy prime or select, fresh or dry-aged, corn-stuffed or grass-fed, if you don't cook it right, prime rib ain't going to be good. Here is my definition of perfection, in three commandments:

Sub-Commandment i:The Perfect Prime Rib must be cookable without the use of heavy or specialized equipment, including propane or oxy-acetylene torches, sous-vide machines, or C-vap ovens.

Highs and Lows: Temperatures for Medium-Rare Prime Rib

Before I tried to start figuring out how to achieve all these goals simultaneously, it was helpful to note thatwhen cooking beef to medium-rare, there are really only two temperatures that matter.

• 125°F (or 51.7°C)is the temperature at which beef is medium rare—that is, hot but still pink, cooked but still moist and able to retain its juices. Any higher than that and muscle fibers start to rapidly shrink, forcing flavorful juices out of the meat, and into the bottom of the roasting pan.
• 310°F (or 154.4°C)is the temperature at which the Maillard reaction—that wonderfully complicated process by which amino acids and reducing sugars recombine to form enticing roasty aromas—really begins to take off. At this range, meat will quickly brown and crisp.

Ah—a dilemma revealed itself: In order to maximize browning I had to cook the meat in a sufficiently hot oven—I tried 400°F. At the same time, I didn't want the interior to come up above 125°F.

Sincea big beef roast cooks from the outside in,by the time the center had reached 125°F (that is, 120°F in the oven, followed by a 5°F rise in temperature afterresting), sure there was a perfectly browned exterior, but the outermost layers had risen closer to around 165°F or 180°F, rendering them overcooked, gray, and dry, their juices having been squeezed out.

I was left with something that looked like this:

I know, I know—not pretty.

Score:

Okay, so what if I went to the opposite extreme,cooking the steak at a much lower temperature?

I cooked another roast in a 200°F oven until the center reached 125°F. Well, just like withboiled eggs, the temperature at which you cook is directly related to the difference in temperatures between the center, and the exterior layers.

In other words, by cooking it at a lower temperature, you make sure to minimize the volume of beef that comes above the ideal final temperature. I was able to almost completely eliminate the gray band of overcooked meat.

Of course, any browning that Iwas getting was also right out the window, leaving me with a roast with pale, flaccid exterior that looked like this:

I know, I know —again, not very pretty.

Score:

The Myth of the Sear

Jump back a couple of decades and the solution to my dilemma would have been obvious. It was a commonly held belief (and still is, by many home cooks and professional chefs alike), that in order to help a roast, steak, or chop retain moisture, your goal should be tofirst sear it, creating a crust that will "lock in the juices."Now anyone who reads theirHarold McGeeor has ever seen juices squeeze up through the seared side of a steak after you flip it over on the grill know that this can't possibly be completely true. But what about partially true?

Could a sear actually help retain at leastsomeof the juices?

To test this, I cooked two roasts cut from the same rib sections, with comparable surface areas, weights, and fat contents according to the following processes:

• Roast 1: Seared in a pan with three tablespoons of canola over high heat on the stovetop until a well-browned crust formed (about 15 minutes total). Transferred to a 300°F oven and roasted to an internal temperature of 120°F, removed and rested for 20 minutes (during which time the center rose to 125°F then dropped back down to 120°F).
• Roast 2: Roasted in a 300°F oven to an internal temperature of 120°F, removed and seared in a pan with three tablespoons of canola oil over high heat on the stovetop until a well-browned crust formed (about eight minutes total) and rested for 20 minutes (during which time the center rose to 125°F then dropped back down to 120°F).

If searing does in fact "lock in juices," then we would expect that the steak which was first seared then roasted should retain more juices than the steak that was first roasted then seared. Unfortunately for old wives' tales, the exact opposite is the case. I carefully weighed each roast at each step of the process to gauge the amount of moisture and fat lost during cooking. These are the results:

The meat that was seared first and then roasted lost 1.68% more juices than the one that was roasted first then seared. It's not a particularly huge difference, but the knowledge that searing conclusively doesnotlock in juices was certainly liberating in the ways that it allowed me to think about the recipe.

Score:

Inside and Out

So great, you may be thinking—you can sear first or you can sear after, and it makes no difference. What's the big deal?

Well the big deal, as some of the more astute readers may have noticed in the timing above, is that if you are starting with a completely raw roast, in order to get a well-browned crust, it takes around 15 minutes in the hot pan, during which time, the meat under the surface on the outer layers of the roast is busy heating up and overcooking, just like they did when roasted in a 400°F oven.

On the other hand, in order to get a well-browned crustafterthe prime rib has roasted, you need only around eight minutes in the pan.Why is this?

It all has to do with water.

In order for the surface of a roast to reach temperatures above the boiling point of water (212°F), it must first become completely desiccated. When searing raw meat, about half the time it spends in the skillet is spent just getting rid of excess moisture before browning can even begin to occur. You know that vigorous sizzling sound when a steak hits a pan? That's the sound of moisture evaporating and bubbling out from underneath the meat.

On the other hand, a prime rib that has first been roasted has had several hours in a hot oven, during which time the exterior has completely dried out, making searing much more efficient, and thus giving all but the very exterior of the meat less of a chance of overcooking.

But then, I thought, 20 to 30 minutes is exactly how long a rib roast needs to rest anyhow. What if I were to first cook it at a low temperature (200°F or lower), take it out of the oven, allow it to rest while I heated the oven to its highest temperature (500 to 550°F), then pop it back in just long enough to achieve a crust?

What I achieved was nothing less than Prime Rib Perfection:

Score:

As you can see, no gray overcooked meat, a crisp brown crust, and a rosy pink from center to edge.

But wait—there's more!

The best part? I found that by cooking with this two stage method, I had a much larger window of time to serve the beef. Once I got past the initial low-temperature phase of cooking, so long as I kept the roast covered in foil, it would stay warm for over an hour. All I had to do was pop it back into its 550°F oven 8 minutes before my guests were ready to eat, and the roast would emerge hot, sizzling, and ready to carve, no need torest itafter the 500, since the only part that is being affected is the very exterior.

Family gatherings will never be the same. Now if only I could find a way to expose the rosy center under my sister's crusty exterior, we'd really have something to celebrate at the holidays!

December 2009