Sous-viding short ribs

I got a sous-vide machine for Christmas. I took it out of the box and found it its own happy home on the counter, but it had been sitting there, lonely, for some time now. Finally, I decided to make something in it. After looking over the recipes on the Sous Vide Supreme website, I settled on short ribs.

I was at BHFM (yeah, that solo trip) and was in the Angus meat section looking over the selection of short ribs. I like the English cut and found a package of really meaty beautiful ones but it had eight of them and I thought we only needed about half that. Plus, it was over $30! I kept digging through the short ribs until one of the employees pointed me to some other packages of English-cut short ribs, except three of them were together uncut. Two to a package. And $11. Perfect! I thanked him and took the package.

The recipe for these sous vide short ribs is stupid easy. I took my short ribs and cut them into three pieces each. I figured this would make it cook more consistently. Okay, I also thought it would be better for serving. You salt and pepper them, and then put them into the bag, but don't seal it yet. You put it into the freezer for 40 minutes. I assume this step is so that they will harden and keep the shape in the sous vide. And now that I think about it, I realize I put it into the fridge. Oh well.

After your 40 minutes in the freezer is up (and now I think you can skip that step since I messed it up), you vacuum seal it and put it into the sous vide machine at 156 degrees F. It took about 40 minutes for it to get up to 156 so the time worked out. I wonder if that is by design.

Forty-eight hours later, you take them out of the machine. Voila! Dinner on a weeknight!

When I cut open the pouch and started to pull the short ribs out of the bag, some of them started to fall apart and off the bone. Since I read that they are good caramelized as a finishing step, I put them all onto a paper towel to dry.

And there was a good amount of juice in the bag -- pure delicious beefiness. I put that in the bowl you see here. When it cooled a bit, the fat cooled and formed a layer. I took some, but not all, of it off.

I sauteed the short ribs in a hot skillet. Let me tell you: short ribs this tender pop and splatter their meaty bits all over the place so I didn't saute them for THAT long. They look good. I don't have any pictures of the meat as I was eating it, but it was unctous and rich and meaty and yum all over the place.

Josh likes favas and they had some smallish ones at the BHFM. He pre-peeled, I blanched, and peeled em the second time. I put them into a pot with some Plugra butter and a bit of water. Yum.

And then: kale. Sauteed in a hot pan with some smashed garlic and a wee bit of oil.

Well, we still had leftovers. I shredded it up and added it to some minced garlic and chopped onion. Then I added some san marzano tomatoes. Boom, sauce!

I tossed that sauce with some ziti (though I wish we had rigatoni because I wanted ridges...) and there you go.

Need to do that again. Need to buy more short ribs.