Modernist Cuisine 72 Hour Sous Vide Beef Short Ribs with Red Wine Sauce

Modernist Cuisine 72 Hour Sous Vide Beef Short Ribs with Red Wine Sauce

Another holiday, another ridiculously beefy dinner. For Christmas, I made a Beef Wellington for my family and Trevin’s to (deliciously) celebrate with. And the next week, I was headed to the Cascade Mountains to celebrate New Years with a close group of friends and their children. After about four seconds of deliberation via email, we settled on beef short ribs for New Year’s Eve… and I volunteered (as tribute) to be the chef that night.

If you’ve read anything on this blog yet, you’ll have noticed that I’m a bit of a fan of Modernist Cuisine at Home. So, I decided to do their sous vide beef short rib recipe along with their pressure-cooker red wine sauce.

I followed their recipes (linked above, so I won’t reproduce them here) with the following exceptions:

  • Lightly salt + pepper the ribs before packaging for cooking.
  • I used beef marrow bones instead of beef knucklebones for cooking. They worked fine.
  • When the sauce comes out of the pressure cooker, I used a fat separator. It’s way easier than spooning it off.
  • After cooking, I seared the ribs in a very hot cast iron skillet and then torched them. Be very careful, because it’s really easy to light things on fire.

They turned out great, and everyone loved them. For the expense and time it took to prepare the red wine sauce/glaze, I was a little disappointed. I would have expected it to be “over the moon” flavorful, but found that it left me wanting more. The ribs themselves were drop-dead simple, and I definitely see myself making more of those since the texture was incredible.

Because, I am who I am, I also made a timelapse video of the preparation.

Parting Thoughts on Fancy Dinners

Check out this grocery bill:

  • $90+ for 15 short ribs
  • $55 for sauce ingredients
  • 3 pounds of ground beef
  • 3 pounds marrow bones
  • A bottle of wine
  • 4.5 pounds of veggies (carrots, leaks, garlic and onion)

My wife brought this up, and I’ve been thinking about it for several days now: we spent enough money to feed a family of 4 for more than a week. The (organic) ingredients for the sauce alone, could feed a family for several days.

How can I justify a meal like this when there are people in my town (and the world) starving and freezing in the cold? The answer is, I can’t. But I’m not perfect, so I do it anyways… and try to make up for it other ways.

What are your thoughts?

4 thoughts on “Modernist Cuisine 72 Hour Sous Vide Beef Short Ribs with Red Wine Sauce

  1. Ok, I like how not everything ends in complete happiness. I can relate to your writing. Do not be too hard on yourself here. The sauce does seem a bit extreme but I would happily once in a while go the rib route. Any thoughts on a more economical sauce for the ribs? Perhaps some Asian-inspired flavor?

  2. I’ve done an “Asian” version of sous vide short ribs less insane than Adam’s version in this post (in both preparation and cost). It uses ) light soy sauce, apple juice, mirin and sesame oil for the cooking liquid (which you reduce afterwards). I’ll try to post it up within the next few weeks.

  3. An asian-inspired sauce would go really well with these (maybe something like I used for the Flaken-style short ribs, or in @trevin’s forthcoming rib recipe).

    I also had some great coconut-milk braised short-ribs served as a thai dish last week. That’s a direction I’d like to try too.

    Your question about a more economical sauce is interesting. My starting place would be: reduce 4 cups of chicken stock and a bottle of wine down, then add in the cooking liquid from the bags (and skim off all the scum that forms on top), and reduce until it was nice and thick.

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