Cookbook Adventures: Another Take on 48-Hour Short Ribs

I had such a delicious experience with her awesome zucchini dumplings, I went right back to Susan Feniger's Street Food to try another dish. 

The inspiration for trying (and modifying) Korean-Glazed Short Ribs with Sesame and Asian Pear was the abundance of Asian pears hanging from the tree in my back yard. 

Maybe it was because the marinade reminded me of the marinade for Momofuku's 48-hour short ribs, maybe it was just because after cooking short ribs sous vide I would never cook them any other way, but I ended up straying pretty far from the recipe when it came to the cooking of the ribs...  Whatever the reason, the results were totally awesome...

The marinade/sauce was the first clear sign that this would be yummy: Sesame, ginger, garlic, scallions, honey, soy, sesame oil, mirin, and Asian pears...

The two parts of this recipe that use Asian pear call for the pears to be "peeled, cored, and sliced 1/8-inch thick.  That seemed like a good indication that they wanted me to use my apple-peeler-corer-slicer doohickey.  I almost left this thing in Boston because I hadn't used it in 3 years, and now I've used it 6 times in the last month.  (Sometimes gadget-hoarding tendencies pay off!)

For the marinade/sauce I cut the slices into half-rings, whereas for the salad (below) I cut the slices into a julienne.  There is no way I could be bothered to do something like this by hand...

I wasn't sure about the marinade as it first started cooking, since the sesame oil goes in early (before simmering) whereas I usually don't apply much (if any) heat to sesame oil...

After everything was simmered and puréed, though, the flavors were fantastic.  I had some "regular" short ribs in the freezer (as opposed to the Korean-BBQ-cut short ribs that are shown in the recipe), and that honestly seemed like the way to go...  (They aren't nearly as nice as the short ribs I used to get at H-Mart, but H-Mart here in Portland is really far away and those nicer short ribs also cost more than twice as much.  So...)

I sealed about a cup of marinade in with a pound of short ribs, and threw it in a 140°F water bath for 48 hours...

As is frequently the case with sous vide cooking, the meat came out looking pretty janky...

... but the bones pulled out completely clean, which is always a sign of impending tenderness...

I removed excess external fat, then blow-torched the exterior to add some charred flavor as well as color... Oh, and the marinade that was now full of beefy goodness?  That was reserved to become the sauce with dinner.  The salad, meanwhile, was super-easy (as long as you have an apple-peeler-corer-slicer doohickey...).

The vinaigrette is a simple mix of lemon juice, mirin, and olive oil, while the salad components are celery, celery leaves, scallion, and Asian pear...  I prepared the vinaigrette and non-pear components during the final minutes of beef cooking, and saved pear prep until the end to avoid oxidation...

The recipe refers to the side as a "salad," but I had it in my head that it should be a "slaw," which led me to go off-recipe and julienne the pear slices... 

As I've come to expect from 48-hour short ribs, the meat was meltingly tender yet not falling apart. The sauce was a perfect complement to the beefy goodness, and the bright crisp salad balanced the rich meat beautifully...

I will definitely be making this dish again.  (In fact, this was a test-run to see if it would be nice enough to serve to guests next weekend...)  I loved the Momofuku short ribs, but the presentation components were fairly fussy for a casual dinner and I loved how easily this meal came together...  A few minutes' prep 2 days ahead, and then dinner comes together in under 10 minutes.  Perfect.