So... anyone got a recipe they love and I would be proud to adapt for a Christmas party?

I just made these on Saturday and they were very good. The porcini mushrooms added a wonderful earthy flavor.

Josh Besh-Esquire Magazine

Al Dente shared this recipe with me when I first discovered short ribs. I now use it as a start and play with it from there.

Do you have either of these Tom Valenti cookbooks? They are both excellent and have a couple of good base recipes. I don't think it is good form to post recipes here, but the info could be helpful.

Welcome to My Kitchen

Soups, Stews, and One-Pot Meals

If you have (and you should) the French Laundry cookbook, Keller's recipe is stupendouse.

If you don't, the basic recipe is this:

Boil a bottle of red wine together with leeks, carrots, onion, garlic and the usual herbs.

Marinate the ribs in the wine for a day or two.

Dredge ribs in flour and brown.

Tie the meat to the rib with twine or caul fat.

Put ribs in a pot with marinade and enojugh veal and/or chicken stock to cover, braise in the oven for many hours.

Let pot sit in the fridge or back porch (depending on the weather ) overnight. Skim the congealed fat.

Warm liquid until it's liquid again, remove meat, strain the liquid.

Cook the liquid down to whatever consistency you want, add the ribs and rebraise until warm.

(Being that it's a Keller recipe there are also 26 other painful and time consuming steps, but you can skip them if you're not feeling OCD that week.)

I like to serve it on creamy garlic polenta or mashed potatoes.

There is a similar recipe in Bouchon that is slightly less OCD, but it still has five separately cooked garnishes. It's the best Boeuf Bourguignon I have ever made.

Paula Wolfert's recipe for short ribs in the style of the Camargue, flavored with fennel, pastis, olives, and orange zest, is a great all-around beef braise. The book in which it appears, Slow Mediterranean Cooking, is overall rather spotty, but this recipe is great, and some of the more fussy steps can easily be left out.

This is great. I just bought beef short ribs for pretty cheap at Bestway (Mercado Latino).

That's basically how I make beef or lamb braises EXCEPT:
I saute a second group of aromatics for the braising pot, along with bay leaf, celery leaves, parsley, thyme and orange peel.

To the cooked wine marinade and stock that comprise the braising liquid, I add a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, some red wine or sherry vinegar or balsamic vinegar, and a slug of brandy. And another "secret ingredient" that I learned from Michel Richard--some soy sauce.

Also, I was under the impression that to braise meant that the meat wasn't submerged in the liquid. The liquid comes up to about 2/3 of the side of the meat, and then you turn the meat over halfway through the cooking time.

When I made brisket last night, I added some porcini powder to the braising liquid, which is something I haven't always done. Ooo-mommy, that sauce had amazing depth of flavor.

Zora - my eyes lit up when I saw you'd responded to my mashed potato and short rib posts. I had hoped to hear from you on these. Thank you.

The only braised short ribs I've made so far are these by Mario B. http://www.mariobatali.com/recipes_shortribs.cfm . Real simple and really good, I think I'm ready to step to the next level as described by you folks.

Mario's recipe has you cooking the short ribs at 375 degrees for two hours. Too hot! Sorry Mario, but I think you are wrong on this one. I say 225 for between three and four hours. Maybe even a little lower than that. For the best texture, you want it to lightly simmer, not boil hard.

What I did was knock it down to 325 for 3 hours. The meat was fall apart tender but I lost a lot of my precous braising liquid. I'm definitely going low and slow next time.

This week I made the Short Ribs using Michel Richard's recipe from Happy in the Kitchen as a guide. This is an excellent recipe, although it is a 2-day project from start to finish.

Most recipes I see call for a "full-bodied" red wine.

What are some examples of good short rib braising wines?

Syrah or Shiraz

Batali's Babbo recipe calls for Barolo (but, Buford, in his book says that the restaurant really used a cheaper Merlot). When I made that recipe, I used a nebbiolo.

To change the immediate subject, I cooked short ribs last night...for my mother's beef vegetable barley soup. We'll have it for dinner tonight. I don't imagine you're looking for this for your Christmas party, but since I just made it, I'll write it out.

She (and her mother) always used short ribs for the beef. I don't have amounts anymore and just wing it, but, you put enough water to cover the short ribs by a couple of inches in a pot and bring to a boil with a couple of bay leaves and salt and pepper. Then add a big (28 oz.?) can of whole tomatoes and a 14-15 oz. can of beef of beef broth. Simmer, uncovered, for a couple of hours until the meat is tender and the liquid has reduced. Smash up the tomatoes along the way. Pull the ribs out, cut the meat into pieces and return to the pot. Add some barley and cook another 45 minutes. Add a couple of peeled, chopped potatoes and cook another half hour. Adjust seasoning and add frozen mixed vegetables and cook until everything is done. This is best made a day ahead and refrigerated, so it's easier to pull out the fat. It also freezes well.

(Given that most recipes I see for making short ribs call for red wine, I've considered adding that to the soup, but my mother never cooked with wine, so I'd rather leave as is. YMMV. Ditto on the frozen vegetables )

I usually use inexpensive but drinkable full-bodied reds from Spain and South America like malbec, grenache, tempranillo, carmenere.

Or try a petit verdot from Australia. Drinkable to some (not to me), there is one retailing around $6.99 at Schneider's that a friend used to make some short ribs last weekend. I believe the label on the bottle was cockatoo ridge?

I've made the shortribs out of Daniel Boulud's "Cafe Boulud" cookbook, and they were excellent: http://www.danielnyc.com/recipes/shortribsbraised.html

High praise from my taste testers .

Let's take a poll...

Michel Richard's "Silky Syrah Short Ribs"

or

Thomas Keller's "Braised Short Ribs with Whole Grain Mustard"

???

The Keller recipe seems more original in its execution, but the Richard recipe seems like it has more going on.

Thoughts?

i'm very partial to the rock candy ginger short ribs recipe i posted on here when i first joined. they are a little on the sweet side, but you can always adjust the amount of sugar you put in the dish. i've only received outstanding compliments everytime i make it.

I'm making both Thomas Keller's AND Michel Richard's braised short rib recipes for dinner tomorrow.

Iron Chef: Dan's Kitchen

Keller vs. Richard

Whose cuisine will reign supreme?

Together or separately?

Huh?

I'm making them at the same time in separate cooking implements... each diner will get one of each.

Okay.

Here's the scoop.

Both Keller's and Richard's recipes (available in their respective cookbooks) took about the same amount of work, although Keller's took an extra day (to prepare the marinade) and Richard's took longer overall (simply because there was more liquid to reduce).

Here they are side-by-side in the oven to be warmed up after removal from the fridge on Sunday, Richard on the left and Keller on the right:



Here they are side-by-side on a plate with some plus de beurre mashed potatoes:



And this is the fat that I skimmed off and am saving for later for god-knows-what:



I think for my Christmas party dinner I might combine recipes somewhat. I feel like the marinating that Keller's underwent created a "creamier" texture.

But who's cuisine really reigned supreme?

It was a tie. I strongly preferred Richard's ribs, but I usually prefer heavy red sauces. My wife felt that Keller's, which were lighter, would go over better with a crowd.

So... inconclusive!

For those of you on the 2941 mailing list, you'll see that this month features Chef Bryan's take on the braised short rib. My wife had it when we were there two months ago. I wonder if the home version is as good...?

Uhm... is there a difference between beef "short ribs" and regular ol' beef ribs? Any suggestions on how to cook them, other than braising?

I'm not sure what you mean by regular beef ribs. Short ribs are a particular cut--and they can be cut a couple of different ways. I think they're usually chuck, but I'm not too expert on meat cuts. Braising is generally the most popular way of cooking them, but I've seen recipes for marinating and grilling them.

With any kind of rib just remember low and slow. You do not need to braise them, but they need to be cooked for a while and at a low temperature. One idea is to smoke them.

I made short ribs using this recipe Sunday. I didn't trim the ribs as much as I needed to, so the glaze needed to be skimmed a few times, but the flavor was good.

This doesn't explain the difference, but at The County Line in Austin, I've seen 'regular' (or back) beef ribs called Dinosaur ribs and they are HUGE. Looks like the short ribs come from the rib roast cut, which becomes a half standing rib roast when the ribs are removed. This link provides a little more detail.

How do I describe this? When I think of ribs, I think of pork ribs. With either a dry rub or tomato/vinegar based BBQ sauce. So far, I've seen recipes for "braised" beef ribs. And, they are inevitably described as "short" ribs.

I guess the real question is: what, if anything, should I be aware of when I attempt to "dry" cook beef -- not labeled as "short" -- ribs?

ETA: I like the idea of smoking the ribs. Is it safe to do this inside? I know Ferment Everything has this set-up going on, but he also leaves pots of simmering liquids, unattended!, on the stove when he goes to work out at the gym; he probably has better a homeowner's insurance policy!

Image from Alton Brown Good Eats. Now you can see all the different kinds of ribs. I was surprised to see that cows have both short ribs and spare ribs, which confuses me, or at least tells me that I have been confusing them for years. Not that I cook ribs much, nobody else in the family loves connective tissue as I do.

If the image won't load, here's the link.

Edit: removed the image, for some reason it makes Firefox (but not IE) hang.

There are stovetop smokers. I think Zora has mentioned having one (?). There is a thread or portion thereof somewhere dealing with stovetop smokers.

I don't make any kind of ribs that often, but I have made beef ribs basically the way I make baby back pork or spareribs. I use a dry rub and long low heat in the oven, and then add a sauce of some kind near the end.

Short ribs are kind of squared off. The ones I use most often are the English style. Sometimes they're cut into smaller pieces for sale rather than left whole. There's also a kind cut lengthwise, but you can see where each square is on the slab. These are what I think of as short ribs for braising or these. These are the ones cut the other way.

ETA: That last url has links for photos of short ribs from the chuck and plate portions of the anatomy.

It appears to me that the cut you are calling short ribs from the plate is also what is called beef spareribs. Link.

Now you've really got me wondering about the difference between these two cuts.

Actually after surfing the site linked above, I realize that I am woefully ignorant about meat, in general. I had no idea how many cuts of beef there are, nor so I have more than a superficial understanding of the cuts I thought I knew. Need a good book.

Those do look like the same thing.

Different sources have somewhat different information. I have The Complete Meat Cookbook (Aidells and Kelly), which is pretty useful, but I still feel like there's a lot I don't understand.

I vote for David Burke's Handmade Cavatelli and Braised Short Ribs with wild mushrooms, mushroom chips, and truffle mousse. I don't know if the recipe is online anywhere, but that dish is light years better than the Richard version I had.

According to the link, there are two different types of ribs and the "short" ribs can be found in two different locations. Which, again, begs the question: how do you cook beef "spare ribs" without braising.

So far, I've marinated (wine, oil, Sirarchi, garlic, S&P) the "spare" ribs and have them roasting, covered, in the marinde, at 350 going on 1.5 hours. I'm going to remove the foil the last 20 minutes of cooking. Check for an update in the "Dinner" thread.