Our best beef ribs

And why it’s worth befriending your butcher

Welcome back to Fallow Chefs, lifting the lid on restaurant cooking for you at home.

This week is the turn of Fallow’s beloved beef ribs - on the menu since the COVID era (anyone remember that?) and a personal favourite of ours, we’ll talk you through how we came across this cut, what’s the best way to cook it, and the detailed recipe to replicate it at home.

Before we get there, a quick reminder that we’ll be sharing a recipe every week, along with lots of other extras on our Substack page including our subscribers only chat, Q&As, and behind the scenes deep dives. Subscribe to join us and get in on it all.

Let’s get started.

Jack & Will

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For Will and I, a big part of how we’ve approached building our menu from the start has been talking to suppliers. Getting all the insight we can from the people who know their products the best and getting an understanding of what is readily available.

When we went to HG Walter for that conversation it was during COVID. The owner Adam showed us round, pumped to give us a view on stunning product after stunning product. Near the end of our time together he pulled out the big guns and opened up 5 stand up fridges - each one completely stacked with beef dandy ribs. One of the many bizarre byproducts of COVID? Steak nights were on the up. For HG Walter’s it meant that their sales of portioned ribeye box kits were through the roof, and these beef ribs were effectively the off-cut.

The beef ribs at Fallow

Dandy is a 19th century slang term effectively meaning excellent and it’s been coopted by Butchers in this context. Just one of many secret bits of Butcher’s terminology which exist to remind you that they are the ones in the know. The term is relevant here because thanks to being located at the back of the ribeye, the dandy ribs are incredibly collagen rich and have a tonne of flavourful marbling. Both factors which make them an absolute pleasure to eat.

The ones at HG are a cut about of the rest. They remove the ribeye from the ribs after dry ageing the lot together, so along with the fatty, decadent, fall apart texture, you also get intensely concentrated flavour.

But for all they had going for them, there was a good reason HG had so many of these ribs; they were a painfully underused cut in the UK. And while we’d been sleeping on them over here, in cultures across the world the beef rib intercostal muscles were and still are widely used. From Korean ‘rib fingers’ to Latin American birria tacos, to skewers in Istanbul. For us, as soon as we saw those stand up fridges we knew we were in love and we set to doing our homework and getting them on the menu, first as an homage to the baby-back-pork-ribs vibe: serving them as a whole rack with a sweet, sticky bbq glaze on it.

It made for a pretty gorgeous sharing plate and it went down a storm with customers, but while people were ordering, we were tweaking to get the absolute best out of this cut.

BBQ rub, at home

We developed a BBQ rub to flavour the meat. We started with a brilliant Pitt Cue recipe but adapted it so its foundation was more of cayenne, paprika blend; a little more punchy and a big hit of that smoky sweet vibe.

At Dinner we’d cooked the equivalent cut (short ribs) for 36hrs under vacuum at 58°c. Cooking it under 60°c meant retaining the pink colour which was a huge win, but we wanted to avoid vacuum packing (thanks to all the single use plastic it relies on) without compromising on the texture. So we started to steam them overnight at 100°c. Slapping that beautiful rub all over the ribs and then cooking them in a single layer with a little bit of stock from the previous days ribs. That stock? BBQ infused, beefy rich, briny stock. Our master stock as it came to be known. Reused 4 or 5 times it just got better and better and enriched the beef with a tonne of flavour.

It was important enough to us that we even switched out our ovens - ditching the cheap ones which kept turning off part way through the night and leaving us with a less than ideal, waste-of-beef, surprise in the mornings, and getting something pricier and more reliable.

In the oven last thing at night; oven off first thing in the morning. It’s become something of a ritual for our chefs. The ribs haven’t left our menu since those COVID days and I can’t see that ever changing. They’re one of the home-runs of our menu. Walking through the room and seeing the piles of bones on people’s plates? It screams special occasion. Not to mention the never failing ‘oohs’ when the beef slides off the bone. It’s a moment of wonder and it’s one you can have at home, this week.

Fallow’s beef ribs, at home