Five salt dinner 2.1 - Salt-Crusted Prime Rib 1

Warts and all cooking, folks, that's what you'll get when you roll with me. This is the story of how I screwed up the main course. I'll tell you in about five hours if what I did to fix it actually worked.


When it comes to meat, I'm one of God's grillers. I like the grill. Meat? Fire. Fire? Meat. They love each other, I love both of them, and without a whole lot of effort you can make something that generally tastes amazing. So the opportunity cost of cooking meat NOT on the grill is high. It's hard, and the results are uncertain. However, in keeping with the theme of the week, I figured I needed to do something other than just slap a little kosher salt on a tenderloin and throw it on the grill. So I decided to salt-crust a prime rib.

Now, salt crusting something is different from salt encrusting something, in the same way a jewel encrusted sword is different from one surrounded in a giant diamond. As I talked about the other day, when you're cooking something IN salt, you're using the salt as a medium, not as a flavoring. Let me show you.

Here are my working parts:

If you ever do this, do me a favor and actually take the time to wrap the edges of the foil around the pan. 

Trust me - it'll be worth the effort.

I've got a 3-bone prime rib, four pounds of rock salt, the whites of four eggs, several mixing bowls, a pan lined with heavy foil, a little bowl full of salt and pepper, and a digital probe thermometer. (The eggs are in the bowl nested in the larger one. I have a picture that actually allows you to see the eggs... but I noticed that picture also features my socks on the floor in the background. The kitchen seemed like a better call.)

Okay. Step one is easy - that little bowl is full of sea salt and fresh ground pepper. Apply liberally.

There are those who would say I do almost everything liberally.

Step two, we're making the crust. Now, the recipe that I read called for five CUPS of egg whites, beaten stiff. (For those who don't know what that means - it does not mean that the eggs are BDSM freaks. For this recipe, it's sufficient to just go at them with a fork until they're frothy.) That couldn't possibly be right, so I started with the whites of four eggs - about half a cup - and eventually added another four in.

This is my picture of eggs and rock salt.

Now, add the two together, a bit at a time, and mix.

NOTE: Rock salt is basically two things - a rock, and salt. It's hard, and it's sharp, and it's salty. Here's what mixing hard sharpy salt rocks with your hand feels like:

OW.

Put on a glove. Like this.

I learn these things the hard way so that you don't have to, folks!

Your goal here is to get a consistency that you can basically pack a snowball with. My problem was, the best I got to was this:

 

Wet and sticky, but not quite where I wanted to be. I figured it was probably going to be enough, so I decided to get the party started. First, you lay the bottom part of the crust down in the roasting pan:

 

Then, put the meat down, and pack the salt mixture all around it.

 

Before you start on the sides, insert the meat thermometer, then pack the salt around it.

Now, here's where my problems started. I was wrong - that wet, gloppy mass of rock salt WASN'T, in fact, strong enough to stick to the sides of the roast; most of it wound up down in the pan. And four pounds of rock salt wasn't really going to be enough to coat the whole piece of meat. Unfortunately for you, my son just woke up - and from the smell, he's been dreaming about toxic waste. In part 2, I'll tell you what I did to solve those problems.

Oh dear God, Benjamin.