Restaurants

The cut: wing rib
The dish: roast
You remember rib roasts. This column addressed them a couple of weeks ago – well, a particular species of rib roast: the côte de boeuf (wherein the trimmed bones are left exposed, French style). Wing rib is a similar – though at the same time very different – proposition which comprises the last three ribs at the front of the sirloin. A ‘chop’ cut from this area is known as a porterhouse steak. These are prized by beef aficionados because they contain two types of meat: strip loin and tenderloin.

A French rib roast is neat and pretty. A wing rib roast, on the other hand, is unprepossessingly squat – it looks like the base of one of those Flying V guitars beloved of ’70s glam rockers, except made out of meat. The core next to the ribs is lean, but enfolding it is a thick swirl of yellow fat, then another thinner layer of lean meat, then an outer layer of fat. I haul it out of the freezer at 10pm the night before I intend to cook it and put it on the top shelf in the fridge. Big mistake. It’s still frozen solid in the morning. I leave it out on the worktop for the next five hours, but when it’s still frozen at 1pm I panic and shove it (literally – it weighs about 5lb/2.2kg) in the microwave.
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Half an hour later I’m still worried about it being insufficiently defrosted, so decide to cook it slowly and thoroughly, which sounds sacrilegious – shouldn’t roast beef always be rare? – but there’s an authoritative precedent: Heston Blumenthal recommends roasting wing rib for 20 hours at 55C, having first browned it all over with a blowtorch. I can’t manage 20 hours, but I can do six. I smear the surface of the joint with olive oil, then pat it all over with salt and black pepper. (Aged beef has so much flavour, it’s best to cook it simply.) As it cooks, the benefits of the fat become obvious. One, it keeps the meat tender. Two, it pours off the joint, giving you loads of dripping to use for the roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding.

The end result is more like a pot roast than a conventional oven roast, where the point, nowadays at least, is to cook as little of the thing as possible. The meat is soft and tender, with a creamy texture (that’ll be the fat, then) and a flavour that suggests toffee apples soaked in ale. For wine, we settle on a 2001 Gigondas – a full-bodied Rhône red that’s a bit like a cheaper, more rustic version of Châteauneuf du Pape. The only disappointment is the Yorkshire pudding. Doughily undercooked in a way that reveals rather than conceals the vast quantities of eggs and fat that have gone into its construction. Bleurgh! John O’Connell

Roasted wing rib
Take wing rib. Rub all over with olive oil, salt and pepper. Cook for 20 minutes at 100C/212F, then reduce heat to 65C/150F. Cook for five to six hours, draining off the fat every so often. Use this fat to cook the gravy, roast potatoes and (if desired) Yorkshire pudding.

We bought our longhorn, Del Boy, at Ginger Pig. For further information about Borut’s butchery classes, see www.thegingerpig.co.uk.