- We all know that prime rib is the ideal cut for special
occasions, but there's a lot of pressure on us to get
the ideal doneness. Here's the technique for you.
(cheerful music)
- The sous vide technique allows you to get precision
doneness on anything you put in a vacuum seal.
What I'm going to put in is a prime rib.
The benefit of cooking this prime rib in a
sous vide technique rather than
in a traditional oven technique,
is that I can have accuracy of doneness,
you also get better yield, less dry heat means that
I'm going to have less water loss.
Also, it's a clean technique,
I'm able to not dirty up a bunch of pans
and also it saves on energy,
I don't have to have the oven going for a large
amount of time.
So lets get started with the kind of equipment
you will need for this kind of technique,
an emersion circulator,
pretty cheap, this one now they're getting
cheaper and cheaper, probably under 200 bucks
and you can get one of these circulators.
A container that you can put large amount of water into
I'm using the clear ones so you can see what happens here,
this is a Lexan container,
but you can use a stock pot,
as long as the clip by the manufacturer makes sense
for the edge of what you're using.
Also need a FoodSaver, vacuum sealer,
this is FoodSaver brand vacuum sealer with a large
vacuum seal bag.
Later I'm going to use the roasting pan to put
a sear on it for afterwords
and then we need a quality roast
and that's where Certified Angus beef comes in.
Take a look at the marbling in this roast,
that's what you look for, the abundance of marbling within
the lean and that is a quality prime rib.
Okay, let's get this prime rib ready for the circulator,
meaning we're going to get ready for it to cook.
First I wanna trim off the excessive tail on here, during
a traditional cook I might leave some of that
on there but in the sous vide technique,
I want this tail to be trimmed nicely.
Just a small fat cap on the exterior is all we want.
Get rid of that tail, and if there's an excessive amount
of fat on the outside you can trim that off,
but as you can see that's not very large on this one so
it's kind of perfect, and then we season this up and
put it in a vacuum bag.
Salt and pepper is all I use, course kosher salt,
fresh cracked pepper, very generous on this roast
and all the way around.
This is going to spend a good amount of time in
a vacuum sealed bag, circulating in a hot water bath,
wow it's got good marbling,
oh look at that too, the chuck end looks fantastic.
That may seem like a lot of salt on there
but it's really not considering
that this is a 4 and a half to 5 pound roast
so we're trying to get it seasoned throughout
the whole thing.
I've got a large vacuum seal bag to slide this into,
and then we're gonna look for a flat part about
right here to vacuum seal it so,
I'm gonna cut this just a little bit.
Nice clean edge.
All right, we'll get this in for the vac seal.
Put it to operate, press vac seal.
(machine humming)
Once that light goes off it's ready to go.
And let's check the vac seal, make sure it's
where we want it, good it's all sealed
and then it's ready to put into this water bath.
So I've set the circulator to 131 degrees.
What the circulator does, is maintains the temperature
that you indicate and so we're going for 131 degrees
for a long amount of time, meaning this is going to go
6 hours for a roast that's about 5 pounds,
but after 14 hours it can kinda get mushy
so we don't wanna go past that,
so you can get the same results in that window
of 6-14 hours.
It takes the temperature of the water,
it maintains the water and it also circulates the water,
so this water bath is circulating so that
all areas of this water is ideally the same temperature.
The roast we know is cold, right?
When we put it in, it's just that amount of time
that we need for the roast to come up to 131 degrees,
131 degrees being a safe temperature to ride at
for that amount of time so that we don't have any
potential bacteria problems.
If you prefer it more done than medium rare,
put the circulator targeted at 5 degrees below your
target doneness.
So, we're gonna let this ride for 6 hours,
and be back in a bit.
So at this point,
our roast is fully cooked all the way through
so it's 131 degrees all the way through
this prime rib.
We're gonna take it out of this bag,
and apply a char on the outside,
because I gotta tell you, it does not look that
pretty right now,
but we're gonna make it pretty by getting a good crust
on the outside.
So let's pull it out of here and put it
on these paper towels just to blot it dry,
just to get the excess moisture off of it
so we can apply a good sear on the outside.
So let's pat it dry, but make sure we're not getting
rid of all of our nice seasoning on there.
If you want, here's a good chance to actually
add additional seasoning if you'd like,
like herbs and things like that, but I will try
to accelerate the sear by adding a little oil
to the surface, meaning it's moist all the way through,
and we're gonna introduce it to a really high heat,
a hot oven at 500 degrees and I wanna make sure we
accelerate that to get a good crispiness,
like we know prime rib to be, good crispy outside,
and perfect doneness inside.
From there, we can just set this into our roasting pan.
And go into a 500 degree oven.
Let's pull this beautiful roast out,
oh look at that.
We got an allover sear, let me set that here,
another way you can get a sear, and a lot of people do this,
is by using a torch.
I like the natural flavor that the oven gives me
for that technique, also the rib has this cap muscle on it
so it can handle that high heat at 500 degrees
and actually, it's better more than medium rare
on that cap, so a medium doneness is ideal
and medium rare doneness all throughout.
I do wanna still let that rest for about 5-10 minutes
before I go ahead and slice into it.
I don't have to wait as long as a traditional
technique on a roast, meaning I don't have to do
15 or 20 minutes, but since we introduced that high heat
of 500 degrees, we still want to give it time for
those juices to redistribute.
Let's get some tongs and we'll lift this guy,
onto the cutting board to let it rest
for just 5 or 10 minutes.
Good heavens that's heavy.
Great, I'm glad we did the foil, cause now cleanup
is gonna be super easy.
Let it rest a bit and then we'll slice.
So before we slice into it, I'm curious
I wanna take an additional temperature of this,
knowing we are at 131 when we started,
oh, 131, 132, so we only climbed just a little bit
on the internal temperature if at all,
but the exterior's got that nice crust on the outside,
let's go ahead and slice into this beauty.
About half inch slices, is what I'll go for.
Oh, you can see perimeter to perimeter doneness.
That's the advantage of sous vide cooking.
So to review, we put a prime rib in a vacuum seal bag
in an immersion circulator for at least 6 hours,
and then we put it in the oven at 500 degrees
for only 15 minutes to get an exterior crust on it,
boom, prime rib at its best.
For additional cooking videos,
check out CertifiedAngusBeef.com
(cheerful music)