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December 24, 2012 5:54 AM   Subscribe

Cooking a rib roast in wood stove?

We volunteered to cook Christmas dinner this year. We are doing a boneless rib roast in my in-laws' wood stove. This is their source of house heat so the Alton Brown method of turning off the oven for slow roasting won't work. Any tips for roasting in one of these? I have smoker experience.
posted by mkb to Food & Drink (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
You can do a rib roast at a steady temp of 350 degrees. 20 minutes per pound is a good guide. Get a meat thermometer to monitor the internal temperature of the meat. Take the roast out about 10 degrees before you like it, so the carryover heat will cook it to perfection.

The other option is to slice it into steaks and do them in butter on the stove.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 6:52 AM on December 24, 2012


It would be best to do this over night... when the fire is embers (unless they feed it throughout the night as well, in which case, pick a time when everyone is ok with it not being piping hot in the house). I'd do the roast in a dutch oven (or heavy duty stock pot), with a bunch of liquid (wine, stock, spices)- so long as the liquid isn't actively boiling, you should be fine.

Keep checking with a meat thermometor, and resist the urge to feed the embers until they get very ashy- if they've got the oven going 24/7 odds are it's a pretty warm oven, and will cook just fine low and slow.

(for sides, throw in some foil wrapped potatoes for the last hr of the roast, they will be amazing)

it'll be delicious.
posted by larthegreat at 6:55 AM on December 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


I think I would be tempted to try braising it over a double boiler (will take several hours and require a meat thermometer to know when it's done) and finish with searing it in butter on direct heat.
posted by mce at 10:01 AM on December 24, 2012


How hot is the oven normally? How hot does it need to be to keep the house warm? How much control over temp do you have? To what degree of doneness do you want it to be? You could make a great rib roast if you can get two hours at 225 or so, set it aside and then stoke the heck out of the fire and sear the outside right before serving it could work really well. I guess I don't know how cool you can hold the inside and still keep the house warm.

If you haven't bought the roast yet I'd buy something with more connective tissue and pot roast, but I'd really try to avoid pot roasting a rib roast.
posted by JPD at 10:04 AM on December 24, 2012


Response by poster: Thanks everyone. My father-in-law described eating that as a religious experience! I took the pan drippings and boiled them down with a bottle of Sam Adam Winter Lager. Yummmmm.

Since we were eating late in the day and the roast was still partially frozen in the morning, we let the oven get down to 250 for about 3 hours, then tented it in foil and wrapped it in a towel until the rest of the food was ready.
posted by mkb at 1:24 PM on December 26, 2012


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