Medium Rare 48-Hour Short Ribs, Sous-Vide Style

 Okay, y'all, Uncle Nate's been giving sous-vide lessons, and I've been taking them.  I mean, yeah, in our years together, we did a lot with it, but in the years since our first breakup (Jesse goes at takes over Social, 2010 maybe?), he's really stayed with it, whereas I went in a more old-school, wood-fire direction.

But now that he and I are back together on this project, I've been playing catch-up.  During our recent episode on sous-vide, we discussed the 48-hour short rib.  The technique is highly vaunted in progressive circles for it's ability to achieve braised-ish texture and rosy pink flesh (something I achieved partial success with in my recent experiment with the Slow Cooked Short Ribs in Fermented Harissa, a dish I recently chronicled on this very blog).  However, it's not a technique that DHEC takes too kindly too, since it requires holding a perishable product (meat, in this case), below the threshold of the time-temperature danger zone for many times longer than is legal, so it's not something professionals get to mess with much.

Partial Success, You Say?

Yeah, I was able to get somewhat satisfactory results from the method I read about in Saveur.  You can read about it over on that post (and you should, if you're interested in the technical aspects of this process), but here's the gist.  Short ribs, cross-cut, were given a marinade overnight in fermented harissa, before being slow-baked for 5 hours at 170F.  The article actually called for them to have 5 hours at 125F, but I didn't have a dehydrator, and 170 is as low as my oven will go.

The results were okay.  The meat actually did get tender-ish, but the process didn't do much to break up the connective tissue.  It's okay, they were great gnawing, with an incredible, meaty flavor, but they were next to impossible to eat with a fork, and working around gristle was a constant issue.

Okay, So Why Sous-Vide?

Well, the partial success was actually pretty cool.  It proved that short rib meat was more versatile than I was giving it credit for, a process that has been continuing since cooking school.

Wait, That Bears an Explanation:

In cooking school, we were taught that the short rib was a braising cut, full-stop.  It needed a long, slow, moist cooking to yield its collagen and become palatable.  That's just the way it was.  I first learned that this was wrong when I learned about kalbi, aka Korean barbecue.  Shortribs can be sliced across the grain (traditionally with a bandsaw, since the bones run parallel to the grain), and griddled quickly.  The thin slicing across the grain mitigates the toughness, and you can have three-minute short ribs!  (Also, if you don't have access to a Korean butcher or a bandsaw, the trick works with boneless chuck flap shorties, as long as you painstakingly slice them thin across the grain.)  Okay, myth busted.  But it wasn't over yet.  Working in the BBQ game, you could cook shortribs under dry heat (just like a brisket), as long as it was slow enough, and they would tenderize.  However, they were still cooking over 200F, so they wouldn't be pink, but now we know that the moist heat requirement is cultural, not scientific.  Another myth busted.

So anyway, back to the partial success:

But then came the Saveur article.  So now we know we can give shorties a slow cook at low, LOW dry heat, and maintain an internal temperature sufficient to tenderize the meat to a degree, although it doesn't help much with the connective tissue.

Enter the Sous-Vide Dragon:

This was my thought process:  The technique of sous-viding for 48 hours at 131F (which is a normal-to-high ending temperature for medium rare-to-medium meat, don't pull your steaks at 131F, they will carry up to medium well!!) should yield meat of a perfect rosiness, whereas the longer cook should break down the connective tissue more.  Also, the bag plays a role.  A 48-hour dry-heat cook at a low temperature would result in jerky.  The bag keeps the moisture in the meat.  

Note, I am in no way trying to take credit for this process.  I wasn't inventing it, I was working through my skepticism at whether I thought it would work.  I'm a skeptical guy.  But I worked through it, and it seemed like I had a good chance of achieving that medium-rare-but-tender holy grail that I had been taught since I was 21 that shorties simply couldn't achieve.

Okay, Speaking of Skepticism, Why Doesn't This All Cause Food Poisoning?

Okay, that's a great question, imaginary person that I made up who is also me.  See, DHEC laws are a lot of things, but one they aren't usually is entirely scientifically accurate.  It's not their fault.  They have to be alarmist.  They also have to set benchmarks in a way that can be easily checked during a 30-minute inspection.  They have no way to know whether a piece of meat has been at 131F for five minutes (no problem, bacteria hasn't had time to grow), 131F for six hours (problematic, bacteria has had ample time to propogate), or 131F for 24-48 hours (no problem, long slow heat kills bacteria).  They have no choice but to make 131F illegal, and move on.  This is why restaurants really can't mess with this unless they manage to get a variance from DHEC (which is kinda like getting a date with Scarlett Johansson... you can ask, but you probably won't get it).

See, the way all this works is something called Thermal Death Curves, which is also the name of Nate and I's upcoming heavy metal side project (just as soon as Nate learns some instruments).  A thermal death curve is a graph of how bacteria decays as a function of temperature and time.  The conventional wisdom that, for instance, chicken, needs to be cooked to 165F is bupkus, but it is educated bupkus.  A chicken needs to hit 165F for a minute or so to kill the same amount of bacteria that would be killed by holding it for just under an hour at, for instance, 140F.  But like I said, DHEC doesn't have an easy mechanism to monitor this, so their rules err on the side of caution, and I can't blame them.

But anyway, out of paranoia and curiosity, I checked the thermal death curve chart in Volume 1 of Nathan Myhrvold's  brilliant (and insanely expensive) Modernist Cuisine, and 48 hours at 131F is plenty to render the meat safe to eat.

So how did it come out?

See for yourself:

I seasoned the meat with salt and pepper the night before beginning the cook.  I cooked them for the required 48 hours, before icing them in their bags to get to service.  At service, I gave them another hour at 131F to knock the chill off.  After the meat came out of the bags, I towelled them off and gave them a quick sear in a hot pan, to develop that steaky crust.  

{Note to spellchecker: 'steaky' is a perfectly cromulent word!  Wait, my spellcheck is ok with 'cromulent,' but not 'steaky?'  Geez....  -mgmt}

The Results- The Good:

Well, take a look!  Dark, savory, dare-I-say 'steaky' crust?  Nice, rosy, medium-to-medium rare interior?  Yes and yes!  The sous-vide trick officially works, and yielded some of the better short ribs I've tried.  And yes, the connective tissue did break down a lot more than with the slow-roast method, although it still didn't achieve that ultimate silky softness.  I guess there's still room for the braise.

The Results- The Issues:

I say 'issues' rather than 'the bad,' because there were only two little issues, and they weren't actually problems.  First, if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't pre-season the meat.  I've salted barbecue the night before a thousand times, but it was always cooked by the following afternoon.  This was a lot of time under salt. The meat was seasoned nicely, but was kind of cured-tasting, and the pepper really penetrated, and kinda took over.  If I had to do it again, I'd season the meat after towelling it off, and before the final sear.  Or maybe even not at all, and serve it with a little salt-cellar of fleur de sel for each diner to salt as they eat.  Either of these would have been cooler than what I did this time.

The other issue is that I tried to make a sauce with the few ounces of juice that accumulated in each bag., reasoning that it would be like the jus from a braise.  I heated it up, thickened it with some Wondra, mounted in some butter, darkened it with a little Kitchen Bouquet, and adjusted the seasoning. The thing is, there wasn't enough flavor to salt ratio in said juice.  It's flavor was too mild to really have any impact, but if I'd cooked it down, it would have just tasted like salt.  So the sauce wasn't terrible, just really mediocre, and a waste of five minutes.  Worst gravy ever.  I guess the good news is that all the flavor that leeches out into a braising jus stayed put in the meat, and that's why I say it wasn't a problem, just a learning experience.

But know that the sous-vide method doesn't really yield a sauce for free the way a braise does.  Ah well, win a few, lose a few.

-JS