Braised Short Ribs & Sauce
Serves 4-5
Ingredients:
Champs Beef Short Rib Rack
1 cup chopped onions
½ cup crushed garlic cloves (2 cloves)
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped carrots
Bunch of fresh herb sprigs such as Rosemary & Thyme
2-3 Tbsp. Tomato paste
1-2 cups red wine such as Merlot, Malbec or Cabernet Sauvignon
2-3 cups beef stock
Olive oil
Cook in a crockpot, covered baking dish, Dutch oven, or a covered roasting pan. We don’t recommend cast iron for the cooking, but ok for the searing. Tongs will be helpful when transferring the ribs.
Chef’s Note:
This is a simple recipe you can prepare and leave until time to finish the sauce. Serve over mashed potatoes or Champs potatoes au gratin. You can thicken the sauce with a roux or leave it as an au jus per this recipe. Let the ribs rest for 5-10 minutes before slicing, unless they are falling off the bone. Enjoy.
Step 1
Preheat oven to 350°. Season short ribs with salt and pepper or Champs KISS. Heat olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high. Brown short ribs fat side down – pressing firmly with a heavy hand, spatula, or even a brick wrapped in foil. The weight or pressure helps to get an even sear. Once you reach the sear color you like, transfer the short ribs to a plate. Pour off all but 3 Tbsp. of the fond or drippings from the pot.
Step 2
Add onions, garlic, carrots, and celery to pot and cook over medium-high heat, stirring often, until onions are browned, about 5 minutes. You can also add chopped jalapenos or serranos if you like a little spice or heat.
Add tomato paste; cook with the vegetables, stirring constantly, until well combined and deep red, 2–3 minutes. It is important to cook the tomato paste before adding liquids. Next, stir in the wine. Pool together the veg in the middle of the pan and then add the short ribs back. Add the herbs to the pot along with the stock. Bring to a boil, cover, and transfer to oven.
Step 3
Cook until short ribs are tender, 3-4 hours or max 6 if you like your meat falling apart and off the bone. For beautifully tender and sliceable, 4 hours is a great cooking length. Transfer short ribs to a platter. Double-strain sauce from the pot into a measuring cup. Spoon fat from the surface of the sauce and discard; season sauce to taste with salt and pepper. Serve in shallow bowls over mashed potatoes with sauce spooned over.
View Full Video Transcript
Special Guest, Chef Matt (00:01):
Welcome to the Monthly Chef’ demo here at Champs. This month we’re going to do braised short ribs. Beautiful, beautiful short ribs here. This one here, it’s $16. That’s good for a family of four or five, right? We’re going to braise up, cook up nice. Lots of different ways to do short ribs. You can grill ’em, you can smoke ’em. But today we’re going to show you how to braise ’em. Great cold weather. Well, not that it ever gets cold down here, but cooler weather than summer dish for us. We’ve also got some twice-baked potato casserole going and some green beans as well in the oven right now. To finish the meal off for us this Friday, four:30 to six:30, come down, taste the short ribs, and drink some wine with Corey. He picked a nice malbec with us. That’s what we’re going to use to cook here in just a second. So you want to come over here? We’re getting it going here. I got my short rib, I’ve already seasoned it up.
(01:08):
You can do that as early as you want. I’ve had this sitting out for an hour and a half to come up to room temperature. I went ahead and hit it with some salt and pepper, a little bit of garlic, some cayenne in there. For a little touch of spice. We’re going to use a little thyme and fresh rosemary. And then I got what I call the South Texas mirepoix. We got the onions, celery and carrots, which is your French mirepoix. Got a little garlic in there and you got to have the jalapenos for some heat to make it a South Texas mirepoix. This is the wine that we’re going to be tasting on Friday and that’s what we’re going to cook with. Really nice full flavor wine there. I really did enjoy that. So let’s see, good here. Now if you want to come over here, we’ve got, it’s almost hot. What I’m looking for is the little oil legs on there. I want it kind of shimmer when it separates. Kind of like that there.
(02:12):
Don’t want it to smoke, but just do want it to sear and go. Good. Did you use olive oil? So this is a 80-20 blend of olive oil and vegetable oil. Now I’m going to push it down to keep it in contact with the pan the whole time. Some people wrap a brick with foil and that’s what they’re used. Some people you have a real heavy hamburger press. People can use that too. I just like to sit there and hold it and I’ll take it up and then I’ll go the other way too. Now this is also going to create a bunch of fond that y’all know I’m fond of in the bottom of the pan. That’s just all good flavor and we’ll get that going.
(03:07):
I’m pushing fairly hard. It’s going to want to, when that heat hits it, it naturally wants to squeeze in like that and the ends kind of curl up. So I am trying to keep it from doing that. It wants to stay away from the heat of the cans. Alright, now I’m going to grab some carrots. I’m going to put the carrots in first while the meat’s still in there because I need to get a little more color on the carrots before I put everything else. Then yeah, it’s pretty good. We can go a little bit more. You see now that I don’t want to see her anymore, but I do want to hear over here. So what I’ll do is I’ll put that in there and I’ll just push right where I want it to see her.
(04:02):
All right, see, and I got a little more color there, so that’s about as good as I’m going here. Now I’m going to grab everything else and we’ll throw it in the pan. Now the garlic, what I like to do here, the garlic is just smash it. If you can come and look at there, I don’t chop it and I don’t like to leave it whole. Some people leave it whole in the brazen, but I think smashing it, you get a little bit of both worlds, the chopped and the whole. So there’ll be pieces in there that’ll kind of roast up nice and gets you deeper flavor. And then the small pieces will get you the high flavor of garlic. So I’m just sauteing this just a little bit just until they’re kind of started in translucent. Then I’m going to deglaze with our wine, not too much. I want to have a little bit more to drink
(05:05):
And I’m going to let that reduce at least by half. And then we’re hit it with some beef broth or beef stock if you have it. I just get, dunno, just get the Swanson stuff from HUBI and then, so what I’m going to do is I want the short rib to sit up on top of the vegetables. I’m kind of using the vegetables to keep the short rib off the bottom of the pan. So I’ll build a little bed in the middle here and help keep the short rib up higher. And then what we’re going to do, so with brazing, you want to cover half or two-thirds of the meat. That’s what you want to cover. You don’t want to completely submerge it, but you also don’t want it to go below half. That allows that moisture just to work into the meat. You’re kind of, I don’t know, oven and poaching kind of a way to think of it.
(06:28):
You’re just real soft, real slow, be really nice and tender. But anyways, I have that bed of vegetables and that’ll allow me to put more broth in there. But you also have to think about those vegetables are going to cook down while it’s in the oven. So if I were to go two-thirds of the way up on the short rib, now by the time I’m done, it’s going to be all the way underneath it. So you just kind of got to eyeball it. But right now I’m going to go about half because I know those carrots and those jalapenos that it’s sitting on, once they cook down, they’re going to cook down to nothing.
(07:18):
So all right, so I’ve got that now through the magic of a tv. I’ve got one here and we’re going to cover this up here. Then. So I’ve got rosemary and thyme. I’m just going to put that on there, the rosemary. Then I’m going to put the thy in the liquid, cover it up, put it in the oven here. I’ve got the oven on three 50 now and then I’m going to turn it down to about 2 75, 2 50, kind of depending on where your oven is. That way that allows us to, when I open that door, if it’s on two 50, it’s going to go down to 200. Then it’s got to take a lot of time to get back up to two 50. So I start the oven off hot knowing that when I open it, it’s going to lose a bunch of temperature and then it’ll be kind of right there.
(08:33):
So I’ve had this one going for about three hours now You can braise the time. You can braise it just depends on how tender you want it. I wouldn’t go any less than two hours and I really wouldn’t go. I mean if go six, eight hours, then it’s going to shred like a Barco or shred. It’s going to completely shred apart. So just kind of depending on where you want to be, how firm you want it is where you want to stop it. This one went for about three hours. So I’m going to pull this out of the pan, let it sit here and then you can see how tender this is going to be.
(09:33):
Just pull the bones right out there. But I am going to be able to slice this with a knife, right? It’s going to hold together and actually be like a slice on the plate. So go any further than that and it’s just going to get more tender, more tender, more tender. If you went six hours on this, you’re going to have trouble pulling out of the pan, which is nothing wrong with that. It’s just it’s going to fall apart as soon as you touch it. So now lots of different ways to finish the sauce. I sit pour it through a strainer or double strainer.
(10:16):
If you have two strainers, that works well too. That way you can kind of get it double. And then now I’m going to turn a little bit off there. Now there’s going to be a fair amount of fat in this sauce. It’s a short rib, it’s a rib, it’s fatty. So what you can do is get a spoon or a ladle and just go right along the top and you can skim that fat off. Now if you did this the day ahead of time, what you can do is put it in the oven and put it in the fridge. It’ll solidify. The fat will go to the top and be solid and then you can just pull it off. But you just kind of keep skimming. And then once you get most of that done to get the last little bit, I just get some paper towels and you can just drag some paper towels across the top of it and it’ll soak up a lot of that fat as well.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Chef Matt, we have a question.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
If someone didn’t have a beautiful steel pan, what other sort of cooking pans would you recommend?
Chef Matt (11:44):
Pans? I do mine in your Le Creuset casserole pan that works really well.
Chef Matt (11:54):
Cast iron dutch oven.
Chef Matt (11:57):
Yeah, well a Dutch oven, yes. Cast iron. No, because cast iron doesn’t like the liquid or I don’t like the liquid in the cast iron. I know some people do.
Chef Matt (12:06):
Different flavor but it’s it’s not really meant for wet cooking. Any oven-safe pan that you can put tinfoil, put a lid on if you don’t have an oven or if you don’t have a pan that can go from the stove to the oven. You can also just sear s seared in a pan, and transfer it to a Pyrex casserole dish. After you deglaze it, just pour it all in there. You just want to get as much of the flavor out of that pan into the dish that’s going in the oven so you can work with what you you got. So after I kind of skimmed it all, there’s still a little bit on there. You can see some droplets, but I got most of it.
(13:06):
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to let this go nice and slow and just reduce down a little bit and that’s how I’m not going to thicken it, but that’s personal prence. I mean right now it smells beautiful. It’s got lots and lots of flavor, lots of herbs in there. I make mine a little spicy, so it’s going to have a little bit of howick pan your kick. You don’t like it that spicy, don’t you want it spicier? Throw some more in there. But if you want to make a gravy, however you make your gravy, you can do it with this here too, whether you do a corn starch, slurry, whether you make a ru thicken your gravy at the house, you can do the exact same thing with this liquid here. If you want it thick, this is going to be more kind of your au jus kind of sauce there.
(13:58):
So to complete the meal here, I’m going to get this out of our way now. We did some of the champs twice, baked twice baked potato casserole here and the green bean casserole. So kind of complete the meal. All one stop, the meat slam that the meat and sauce will go great with those potatoes. And we’ll keep a little bit of green with us. Have some green beans, but there you go. That’s the Champs short ribs braised style, I got it. And then what we got Friday from four 30 to six 30. We’ll be sampling these and pouring some great wine. Now here we’re going to just slice up, look at that. Just nice and tender, nice and juicy. But now this is still firm so it’s not quite pulling apart. That’s how I like it. But now if you want it, you want it more tender. You got to think how you eat your brisket. Do you like your brisket sliced Like it chopped it pulled? That’s the same thing you’re going to do here and you’re probably going to like it about the same kind of texture as you would your brisket. So come and see us Friday at Champs, SPID, and Everhart four 30 to six 30. Thank you very much. Thank you.
