sous-vide or sear them with various pieces of industrial
machinery?
Leave the fancy-pants methods to the fancy-pants. In my
experience, cooking large roasts—whether prime rib or
turkey—in a sous-vide water bath certainly guarantees
perfectly, evenly cooked results, but the deep roasted flavor
notes you get from meat roasted in the open air are
completely absent. It’s also a pain in the butt to vacuum-seal
an entire prime rib. I much prefer mine done in a low-
temperature oven.
As for torching, it looks really cool, but the results are not
worth the trouble. Torching before roasting gives you a
surface that’s nearly burnt in spots and barely browned in
others, while torching after roasting doesn’t do nearly as
good a job as a hot oven or roasting pan set over a couple
burners.
HOW TO ROAST BEEF (AKA
PERFECT PRIME RIB)
A four-pound roast of well-marbled prime beef rib is not
cheap. And while my friends provide me with as many
mental and philosophical riches as a man could ask for, and
my wife supplies an adequate amount of emotional wealth,
dollars and cents are not something I, being a humble food
writer, part with lightly. As such, when I buy a good quality
piece of beef—and honestly, does beef get any better than
prime rib?—I have a strong impetus not to mess it up, as do,
I imagine, most of you. In writing this section, I decided to
get through a lifetime’s worth of messings-up so that I (and,