A Bank Holiday Weekend and an opportunity to try a new recipe requiring hours of slow cooking: my sort of recipe. I bought the beef with no particular recipe in mind so I was pleased to find I’d bookmarked this one for Glazed Sticky Longhorn Short Ribs over a year ago. I have no idea if my ribs were from Longhorn cows but I bought them from my excellent local butcher, Ruby and White, which has never let me down.

Ingredients

Serves 6

• About 3kg beef short ribs
• Rapeseed oil
• Seasoning

For the sticky BBQ glaze

• 2 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 2 tbsp light soy sauce
• 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 300ml passata
• 100ml tomato ketchup
• 2 level tsp five spice
• 1 level tsp all spice
• 1 level tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
• 1 level tsp Sichuan pepper
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• 6 tbsp dark brown sugar
• 1 level tsp rapeseed oil

Method

(Preheat conventional oven to 100ºC)

• Place the ribs in a large roasting tin, season and drizzle with rapeseed oil
• Cover with a double layer of foil and place in the simmering oven to slow-roast for about 8 hours but can be longer. The meat will be tender and falling off the bone
• Alternatively, if you want to eat at lunchtime, place the ribs in the oven before going to bed. Could probably leave them there until you’re ready to add the glaze (see below), but if you’re worried they will be falling apart too much (is this possible?), remove them at breakfast time and replace them, with the glaze, a couple of hours before you want to serve them
• A couple of hours before the end of the cooking time make the glaze
• Place everything in a saucepan, add 100ml water and stir on a medium heat/the simmering plate until the sugar has dissolved.
• Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Or bring to the boil and leave uncovered in the simmering oven for at least half an hour
• Then pour about ⅔ of the sauce over your ribs, replace the foil and return them to the simmering oven for a minimum of 30 minutes but can be longer
• I didn’t have all the ingredients for the seasonal slaw so I served our ribs with Nigella’s Hot and Sour Shredded Salad (recipe in her book “Kitchen”) and steamed Basmati rice, with the remaining glaze drizzled over the ribs

Nigella’s Hot and Sour Shredded Salad

Serves 6

• 3 carrots
• 4 spring onions
• 1 long red chilli
• 1 long green chilli
• 20g/small bunch coriander

for the dressing:

• juice of 1 lime (if you don’t have one, a lemon will do)
• 4 x tbsp Thai fish sauce
• 1 tsp caster sugar
• Cut the carrots into long slices and then julienne them (i.e. cut into matchstick-like strips)
• Trim and halve the spring onions and julienne as well
• De-seed the chillies and cut into juliennes
• Finely chop the coriander
• Mix all of the above in a bowl. In another bowl mix the lime juice, fish sauce and sugar and dress the vegetables with this

The finished beef

Hot and Sour Shredded Salad

Hot and Sour Shredded Salad

Making the glaze

The ribs about to go in the oven