My World of Travel and Food: December 2023

We'd been meaning to buy oysters for ages but always got a bit scared because we hadn't shucked them before. There are stacks and stacks of boxes of oysters here at this time of year. They set up a whole separate area in the supermarket for them.

Anyway this year we bought a box and a shucker. Andy shucked them (it's pretty easy) and we had them with champagne on Christmas eve. It was fun and they were delicious. We'll get more for New Years.

For Christmas dinner we bought a prime rib or côte de boeuf. I did what I always do with cuts of meat. I salted it for a few days to season it and dry it out so that the moisture content reduces and the crust is delicious when cooked.

I found a blog: https://www.seriouseats.com/perfect-prime-rib-beef-recipe which made a lot of sense. Most people really make no sense whatsoever when they have their own techniques with cooking, including most chefs in my opinion.

This blog was really along the same thinking as mine including the salting technique beforehand. Something I've been doing for years whether it's sea bream, salmon, chicken, pork or beef. I don't do it with duck as duck fat needs to be nicely rendered and it's easier if it's not too dry.

Anyway the theory behind this was to cook the côte de boeuf to a perfect medium so that the fat is nicely melted but the meat still very tender. Not too rare where the fat can be still quite uncooked and unpleasant to eat in my opinion and the meat can be quite chewy. Not too overcooked where it starts to dry out. Just medium. So this means cooking it to an internal temperature of 55deg before resting and giving it a final blast to crisp before serving.

The way this is done is to cook it long and slow in the oven at 65 degrees C for about 5 hours on a rack over a deep baking tray. Letting it rest for 30 mins then turning up the oven to 250 degrees C and giving it a final 10 minute blast. It was an amazing way of cooking for a couple of reasons. 1. The result was absolutely incredible. The beef was so tender, the fat beautifully melted and it really was the best cote de boeuf we've ever had. 2. It meant there were no spatters all over the kitchen which suits me.

We served it with roasted Jerusalem artichokes from the garden, celeriac dauphinois (from the garden), roasted potatoes and onions, caramelised onion puree and a foie gras green peppercorn sauce.

Delicious. This is definitely a technique worth doing again and again for a cut of beef like this. It would not work on a tenderloin or similar. Anyway we had a fab 2023 Christmas. Excuse the rather crap photos!