The last three years I’ve cooked a Beef Rib Roast for Christmas. I find this very difficult as its an expensive cut of meat and its not something I cook except on Christmas. Here are my notes to my future self should I cook this again.

I’ve followed the “serious eats” reverse sear technique for the last couple of years the process basically is:

• Dry brine the beef for 2-3 days before in salt and pepper
• Roast the beef at 200F until it reaches 115-120F
• Let the beef rest for ~60min. The beef will rise 5-10F
• Sear the beef in a hot oven (500F) for 5-10 min.
• Serve

The challenges with this recipe are its easy to not give yourself enough time to roast and rest the beef. Its also easy to smoke up your house searing the beef at 500F.

My father in law loves a good beef roast and he purchases it every year. He tends to buy a boneless roast.

This year I cooked a roast that was a little over 6 lbs. I cooked it in my low cost upright smoker for ~3.5 hours. The mistake I made was I didn’t give it enough time. I thought the roast was going to take 2h30m to roast at 200F to reach a temperature of 119F. It was clear this wasn’t going to work out and I increased the temperature in the smoker to 250F about half way through. Even with the temperature increase it took 3h30m to reach 119F. Because of the increased roasting temperature the beef increased in temperature to >130F while resting.

After resting for about 45min I put the roast int he oven at 450F on convection mode. The roast lasted maybe 5 min the oven before I noticed some serious smoke starting. I’m not sure what to do about this but this year I choose to just pull the roast at this point and serve it.

Over all the roast turned out a little more of a medium rather then medium rare. I think there’s a few reasons for this

• Increasing the temperature to 250 lead to a higher “rise” in temperature when the roast was resting
• Being pressed for time because the roast was late I probably should have let it rest a bit longer, when cut I found it a little bit more steamy then I would have liked.
• Lack of bones cuts the meat insulation a bit.

What worked well

• Using the smoker worked fine.
  • I put the pizza stone in it to give it a little more mass inside. I think this didn’t hurt anything as the stone was placed below the internal temperature sensor in the smoker.
  • The weather outside was warm, probably about 40F so that helped the smoker regulate temperature fine.
  • I preheated the smoker for at least 30 min to an hour before I inserted the roast.
• When searing it pulling the roast once things started smoking was fine. I think I could try searing it at 425 convection in the future and see how that goes. 5 min at 450F is probably ok.

Things to do next year:

• Cook at 200F give myself AT LEAST 35min a pound. Its better to be 1 hour early then 1 hour late.
• Use a little less salt. I felt like I put to much on during the dry bine and the end pieces were just a bit over salted
• Leave some time for a short rest after searing. The outside was very hot and it was hart to handle.
• Stop cooking at 119F for 200F, if cooking at 250F stop at 115F

Good Luck!