Barbecued Beef Short Ribs

[Project ‘Recreate New York Food’ to commence shortly. This is just shameless filler whilst body clocks return to normal and things like mountains of washing get done].

Forget everything you think you know about the rules of the kitchen. For just a few minutes.

This is just plain wrong. It shouldn’t work. Nearly every bodily fibre was screaming, shouting, balling at me to stop and obey the bloody rules. This method flies in the face of conventional cooking methods and tickles the scrotum of classical cuisine before running away and hanging out with the cool kids.



There are some cuts of meat that are user-friendly. They are fast, boneless and easy. The chicken breast. The fillet steak. The pork loin. A sprinkling of seasoning and a quick searing over a high heat and you have a tasty morsel ready for consumption.

Then there are those that need a little more care and attention. And time. Lots and lots of time. In general these are the cuts that I cherish (secretly I think most cooks do, at least those that really love their food).

They are the ones that are left on the bone, that need to be braised in liquid (wine is good. Always) until they are meltingly tender and rich, delicious and unctuous. Or roasted s.l.o.w.l.y.

But they are winter meats.

Now that the sun is here why would you want a hearty stew or daube Provençal?

As such, I thought the short ribs I have would have to remain in the freezer until the clouds roll in, the temperature drops and the desire for rich sauces and mashed potatoes returns once more.


Not so.

I picked up a copy of Gourmet magazine at JFK airport (‘The Grill Issue').

In it was a wonderful photo essay about a Mexican barbecue supper complete with recipes for a multitude of tasty treats. But one in particular stood out because it made me scratch my noggin and mutter: ‘There’s no way that could work. It goes against everything I know and cheekily tickles the scrotum of classical cuisine.’

Beef short ribs. Unmarinated. Unbraised. Unadorned. Just seasoned with salt and pepper then cooked over hot coals and torn apart by enthusiastic teeth. How could you not want to try that?



One of the best things about barbecue cookery is the purity of it. It’s as close most of us get to recreating the ancestral methods that live on in the collective memory. It’s just you and the fire, the ideal conditions for letting your inner Neanderthal out for an hour or two.

Which is great. And I’m all for delicately spiced fish wrapped in banana leaves or long marinated pork chops or skewers of vegetables drizzled in olive oil. But to really get to the heart of the purity of outdoor cooking all you need is a great hunk of meat.

If you’re going to do this, you might as well go all the way and release the caveman.

Enter the beef. Bones and all.

Seasoned in advance (ignore the hokum about only seasoning meat milliseconds before you are about to cook it), they were left at room temperature until the barbecue was seriously hot (hold your hand the coals about five inches up – if you have to move within 1-2 seconds, you’re at the right heat). Then it was time to cook them.



Where American short ribs tend to be cut across the rib, the English butcher them differently, giving single bones rather than a series of them dotted through the meat, much like the equivalent cut on a pig. It matters not. They need about three or four minutes on each side to really get that tasty browning before they can be moved to a cooler part of the barbecue to cook through.

Leave them for about fifteen minutes, turning occasionally. You have a lot of leeway with these bad boys. A steak can overcook in just a couple of minutes. These butch fellas can take it, begging for more. It’s like watching the cast of High School Musical take on a team of Jack Bauers (oh, I would give a minor appendage to witness that).



Once cooked leave them to rest for 10-15 minutes (absolutely freaking essential) – just the right time to dish up whatever it is you would like to accompany your feast. Salad? Perhaps not the best option. I’d go for beer. And maybe a mound of potatoes. Concessionary veg optional.



Season the meat again – just a little turn of black pepper and some sea salt and dig in. This isn’t dainty food. Use of hands is not just recommended, it is mandatory. The taste is incredible. I’ve never had a steak that tasted as good as these. Honestly. Not a single steak has ever come close. The flavour is intensely meaty, packed full of umami and downright deliciousness.

If you’re used to meat that is so tender it may as well have been pre-chewed then these will come as a shock. They offer up some resistance (hardly surprising considering they are the Jack Bauer of the food world) but in a really satisfying way.

I don’t want my food to fall apart in my mouth. My incisors and molars evolved for a purpose. Precisely this purpose: for tearing off mouthfuls of completely delicious beef, still on the bone and tasting exactly like beef should.

Naturally, I cooked too much. The rest were left over night then sliced thinly, still pink, to go into wraps the following day with some spicy beans, spinach, guacamole and chillis.

Anthony Bourdain has a term for food like this: It’s the sort of food that you would only serve to friends, and people you already know you are going to like. Put your inner sceptic to sleep for just one night, invite over some people you know will appreciate this (vegetarians need not apply) and make a long, long evening of it.

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Braised Beef Short Ribs

Here’s a question for you: what do Geert Wilders, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Straw Dogs and beef short ribs all have in common?

Any ideas? Yes, you at the back? Correct answer! They have all, at some point, been banned from Britain by the government.

Thanks to the BSE crisis – a result of abhorrent farming practices – for two years between 1997 and 1999, it was illegal to buy or sell beef on the bone.



Steaks were fine, burgers likewise, topside and rump all legal but a request for forerib or shin of beef would be met with sirens, a lock down and a near instantaneous crack SWAT team swooping in to make arrests.

Even after the ban was lifted, getting hold of beef short ribs was harder than quoting Darwin to a Jehovah’s Witness without being interrupted. As a result this dish has probably been on my ‘Must Cook’ list for longer than any other.

Short ribs have never managed to segue their way into the British collective culinary consciousness in the same way they have in France or the States. Ask for short ribs here and you are likely to walk away with pork rather than beef.

But that seems to be changing. Finally. Whilst it might still necessitate a special request to the butcher, you will likely to be able to source them rather leave empty handed. And this, I can now affirm, is a good thing. A great and wonderful thing.



Why? Because this is quite possibly the tastiest cut of beef imaginable, not to mention being one of the cheapest. For the price of a small piece of fillet, you could buy enough beef to feed at least eight. An entire slab of short ribs will set you back about 15 quid and that will feed a small platoon.

After some lengthy discussion (‘no, not rib of beef. No, not pork spare ribs.’ Et cetera et cetera) I finally managed to secure a good sized chunk with no clue as to what to do with it.

It was one of those trips to the butcher when I just went a little crazy and named all the pieces of meat I could think of that I’d never tried but always wanted to: Marrow bone, pork hand, lamb breast. They just kept coming. I’d only gone in for half a pound of mince.

But there it was. The biggest piece of beef I’d ever seen and no idea how to cook it. who to turn to in moments like this? Hugh? Gordon? Nigel? No. This was clearly a Keller moment.

For a cookbook that is notoriously complicated, there are moments of sublime simplicity in Keller’s The French Laundry book. His Parmesan Baskets with Goats’ Cheese Mousse is an exercise in near effortless minimalism. And a tasty one at that.

And so it is with his braised beef short ribs. The beauty of slow cooking is that you can let the ingredients – and the oven – work for you. People tend to avoid slow cooking because they see numbers like ‘4’ and ‘5’ followed by the word ‘hours’. In an era where we are time short, this seems like an extravagance.

But with slow-cooking the actual hands on time is close to zero. Some peeling, some chopping, some browning and then that’s it. You’re free to go.

And when the final result is so extraordinarily tasty it almost feels like cheating.



After separating the ribs along the natural lines they were seasoned liberally with salt and pepper, lightly dusted with flour and browned in a little vegetable oil closely followed by a crude mirepoix of leeks, carrots and red onion.



The whole lot went into the biggest pot I could find and was covered with red wine (choose a butch one, something with balls like a new world Shiraz or Cab Sauv), and half chicken and half beef stock (homemade beef, chicken from a cube).

Instead of a lid, Keller recommends a cartouche with a whole cut into the middle so that’s exactly what I did - a circle of greaseproof paper placed over the top of the bubbling mass which then went into a cool oven (125 degrees C) for four hours.

After twiddling my thumbs, doing a crossword, getting impatient and finally falling asleep, it was ready. Sort of. This being Keller there was still a fair amount to do. I’ll admit now I didn’t follow him to the letter. I went a little off road from here on in but it was getting late and I wasn’t trying to retain my Michelin Stars.

The meat was removed from it’s tasty bath and left to cool while the cooking liquid was drained and reduced by about three-quarters. While this was all going on I diced up some carrot, parsnip and swede and cooked them off in salted water.

‘Looks like school dinner vegetables,’ said the Girlfriend. I bet Thomas Keller doesn’t have to put up with those sort of comments. But she was sort of right.

The meat was cut into cubes fried off in a smidgen of butter and then added to the reduced sauce along with the veggies.

Anything rich, saucy and meaty, for me, shouts out for mashed potatoes (or pommes puree seen as we are going all haute cuisine) so we knocked up a swift batch of lazy-mash (put potato in microwave. Cook. Mash with butter, milk and seasoning) and then sautéed some spring greens.



The dish was topped off with a small disc of bone marrow, fried after being rolled in seasoned flour and then, finally, it was time to eat. And it was well worth the wait.

This is food so tasty that it makes you want to sing from high on the rooftops. It was revelationary in the finest and truest sense and all I can now do is urge, plead and beg you to go out immediately, find and cook some beef short ribs and then go forth and spread the word.

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