Around Christmas we all need a couple of great dishes that we can rely on to tick away in the
oven just getting better and better. These easy beef short ribs let the oven do all of the work.
Slow-cooked in beer gravy to give you all of the festive flavour with none of the fuss. It
all happens in one pan and we are going to use a fantastic cut of beef, very very economical, it's
the short rib. Very tough, but we're going to turn that tough into absolutely melt-in-your-mouth.
So get this pan on on a medium-high heat and let's get some dark golden colour on this beef.
So as the fat renders out of the ribs of beef let's start thinking about some
flavour so I've got carrots and they're going to cook for the same amount of
time as these ribs. So I'll keep them whole and just give them a little peel like that.
So look - hello Conker! Oh he knows, he knows that there's bones in the house.
So don't be scared to give our ribs some hard heat look at that, we want to get colour on here
because that's going to give you extra flavour. Okay next vegetable, celery, and cut about 12
centimetres up from the root and that's the heart. So this for me is the prized bit. and
then the second most prized bit is the yellow leaves. Just get some cold water, in they go,
and they will be perfect at the very end. Let's just show you how to prep the heart. In half,
and then in quarters. With the stalks here just finely slice these,
they'll give you the most beautiful fragrant flavour.
I'm very happy with that colour. So, remove the rib now. Look at that. So before I put that back
in there we're going to go in with the carrots and the celery hearts. So we're going to get some
colour on these and treat them a little bit like the meat. You can see in the pan here we've got
nice colour on the carrots, look at that. Now we're going to go in with the chopped celery.
So as these celery chunks soften now we can add the onion marmalade, about half a jar goes in.
The next one is walnuts, about 50 grams. They seem to kind of rehydrate and take on those flavours
and they're like real treats later on when you're eating it. So we get our seasoning in there lots
of pepper, that marmalade has given this whole thing an outrageously sticky form. So get yourself
a nice bottle of beer, something you'd like to drink. All we do now is take our ribs, snuggle
it in, and then I'll top it up with about 600 mils of water. Oh, look at that, it's gonna be amazing.
I could put a lid on top but I'm going to use some greaseproof paper
and make what our French neighbours would call the cartouche. So you just
take a sheet of paper like this, fold it in half and then fold it in half again,
and we'll keep doing that. Kind of like a weird little paper airplane.
We go to the middle and that is our cartouche. Now the genius of this instead of a lid that's very
perfect is we can put little cuts in this and it's going to allow steam to escape so you'll get that
reduction in the sauce. So you get a lovely sticky gravy and it protects the ribs. So put your little
hat on. The oven is at 160 degrees Celsius which is 330 degrees Fahrenheit and I'm going to cook it
for four hours. And now the oven does all the hard work. And then you can go do what you need to do,
and at this time of year there's lots to do. Conker! Come on, can't sleep all day.
Conker? It's time my friend. Four hours have passed. Halfway through by the way I got it out
and I just turned over all the ribs, gave it a little base, and I put six jacket potatoes in
okay. So we got nice jacket potatoes ready and raring to go and let's just get these spuds,
absolutely gorgeous. Okay so in here is gonna be dark and mysterious. It's smelling amazing
we've got to be careful when we turn it now because [laughter] oh, look at the tenderness!
Look at it, if I just pull a bit...
so tender. Oh the deep flavours are phenomenal. So what I want to do is just sieve off any excess
fat. If you if you cook roast potatoes with this, or a stew or a bolognese it's going to be utterly
delicious, it's like supercharged flavour. What I love to do is put horseradish over this rib,
and that just kind of finally seasons the sauce in the most beautiful way. So let's plate some up,
we're gonna have a nice jacket potato then we're gonna go for a nice hunk of slow cooked meat.
Let's get some of those celery leaves and then the hot gravy on the top look.
Beautiful. Let's get in there I want to show you just how outrageously tender this meat is,
it just falls apart. Bit of horseradish
Mm.
It works so well, you got this beautiful gravy, that sweetness, the tang, and then the meat is
so tender. Mm! So little work for so much flavour and this is great party food you can do it earlier
in the day and reheat it, it's a brilliant dish to do for gatherings, but what a joy.