The micro-luxury of short ribs

Plus a waste-not strawberry daiquiri

I’d never actually bought short ribs until a couple of years ago – but I always saw them in the pages of Bon Appetit, and Allison Roman seemed particularly fond of them (they’re also on an episode of Salt, Fat, Acid Heat). Now, they’re one of my favourite things to pick up at the butchers because they’re versatile – hence why they’re taking star billing in this week’s issue. One recipe is a fast sear that mimics a steak, and the other is a low-and-slow braise. Compared to steak-steak, short ribs just feel a bit more interesting, and they’re cheaper (though not cheap - we bought enough for four people and it cost £16). Actually, that’s quite good value isn’t it? I bought a can of San Miguel at Brixton Academy earlier this month and it cost me £7. In other words, for the cost of two cans of weak lager at a gig, you could essentially buy enough glorious beef for four people. Economics!

Playing this horizontal, Rostram-produced chillbanger a lot this last week. “Do you feel home from all directions? <3

Also before I share this week’s recipes I want to say hi to the hundreds of new subscribers Scraps got this week. I was interviewed in the Guardian as part of a piece on intuitive cooking – which was really great to be asked to do, thanks Elle! And I was featured in Dua Lipa’s Service95 newsletter as part of a package on sustainable food consumption. I think the amount of people here has now doubled in less than a week, which is mind-blowing, so thank you.

1.The sear: short ribs With charred scallion* salsa

*they mean spring onions

This is from the New York Times Cooking app, which I am conscious is paywalled, but the thing is, this is outrageously simple, so I am going to sneakily share it with you anecdotally.

First, the short ribs: if you’re braising them or slow cooking them, you want to keep the bone in. For this recipe, you need the bone out, so ask the butcher to do that for you (and take the bones home for stock, if you’re feeling extra). Now, I like a rare steak but even these were a smidge too rare for my taste, but they were perfectly seared on the outside with a really nice crust. What I’d do next time, and I’d recommend you do now, is cut the short ribs into cubes rather than the lengths I had. This will reduce the cooking time, and you’ll get more colour in the middle. As I did it, the middle of the ribs just couldn’t get cooked through even after resting. So that’s the first thing.

The recipe goes like this: season the short ribs, and seat them in a hot pan (I actually used a cast-iron casserole dish), 4 minutes or so on each side, including the ends. They should then rest on a chopping board for about 10 minutes – they’ll continue to cook, so this step is important.

In the same pan, which will have crusty steaky schmaltz all over it, you add in whole spring onions and tomatillos (I actually used tomatoes because I couldn’t find tomatillos, which are a sort of their greener cousin). You add salt and pepper and you let the tomato and spring onion char, melt, burst, sear, and generally collapse into this fragrant, savoury, jammy sauce. As it cooks down, add half a teaspoon of ground cumin and a drizzle of olive oil as necessary.

Meanwhile, roughly chop another tomato and a couple of spring onions. Season with salt and pepper and the juice of two limes. This forms a very simple but obscenely good salsa. Once the short ribs have rested, slice them thinly and spoon over some of the thick, jammy sauce. We had ours stuffed in flour tortillas with the citrussy salsa and some hot sauce.

I can’t tell you how good this recipe is – and it’s just really simple. I kind of don’t understand how it’s this delicious. The short ribs don’t have a dry rub or anything, there’s no long list of ingredients. It was absolutely amazing. The leftover salsa was great the next day with some tortillas chips, but I think it would also be great in a rice bowl with some grilled chicken.

2. The slow: braised short rib ragu with fresh pasta

I mentioned earlier that I’d bought enough short ribs for four – so I kept half of them back, freezing them knowing full well they’d come in handy. We were heading into central London one day and I decided to slow cook the rest of the short ribs while we were out. I’d chuck in some liberal scatterings of bits and pieces, including a half a bottle of red wine I wasn’t that fond of, and when we got back, we’d make some fresh pasta – one of my favourite things to do. The result would be a sort of made up ragu.

You could find a good recipe for a ragu if you’re not confident just eyeballing it (I’ve used the one on BBC Good Food – it’s really simple), but here’s what I did: I cleared some onions and garlic out the fridge, and some spring onions, too, and added them to the slow cooker with the short ribs. I added water and some wine, and a decent amount of salt and pepper (as a fatty cut, you need to really season short ribs), and I just left it to cook while I was out. At this stage, we’re just braising the meat and imparting tons of flavour.

A good ragu has a base of aromatics – celery, carrot, onion – but I didn’t have the first two, so instead I sweated some onions and garlic, before adding tomato paste and a tin of tomatoes. By this point, my meat had cooked, and I took a generous ladle of the aromatic braising liquid and added it to the tomato sauce, and let it simmer away while we made the pasta.

The pasta! It almost deserves a separate post really. I’ve always come back to this Bon Appetit recipe (in fact, I did a video on it for the Strategist) because it cuts out a lot of eggs in favour of good olive oil. This adds richness but makes it way cheaper and a much more malleable pasta dough, even if it isn’t as classic as the ones you might see on Instagram with six egg yolks being gently beaten into the flour. But I like it. The result is almost spongy (I use 00 grade pasta flour, but by using different kinds you can impart more chew) – it’s almost noodleesque. But it’s easy and cheap and takes no time. It all came together so easily – I took a few videos for Instagram but no pictures. We kind of had our hands full.

3. Waste-not strawberry daiquiris

Little bonus thing, this. I had a tuppaware of strawberries and wasn’t planning on doing anything with them. On a whim, one night, I chucked them in a blender with some limes, rum, sugar syrup, a bit of salt, and made an impromptu frozen daiquiri. It tasted amazing.