One of the best dishes you could ever serve regardless if you are in the restaurant business or simply serving your entire family a good dinner is an entire rack of prime rib. Now, roasting the prime rib is something that you can learn from other recipes as there are plenty of ways for you to do so. But once you do get the prime rib cooked, you need to make sure that it is warm enough because prime rib tastes better when warm. So, how do you keep a prime rib warm?
Allow the prime rib to rest for about half an hour so that the juices will redistribute throughout the entire slab. From there, pre-heat your oven to about 170 to 200 degrees F and then wrap your prime rib with aluminum foil. Place the slab of prime rib on a roasting pan and then keep it in the oven until ready to be served.
The tricky part when it comes to keeping a prime rib warm is to make sure that you don’t allow it to continue to cook while it is warming up. That’s because you want your prime rib to be at the exact level of done-ness that you prefer. As such, it is important for us to look at how you can keep your prime rib warm enough so that it will stay juicy and moist when ready to be served.
Read More: Does Meat Cook Faster Covered or Uncovered in the Oven?
Why do you need to keep a prime rib warm?
In a lot of different restaurants, functions, and parties, an entire slab of prime rib is one of the biggest eye-catchers that people will flock over to. That’s because there is nothing that can beat the juiciness and tenderness of a well-cooked prime rib that has a good marbling score and comes with a good combination of fat and meat. Of course, aside from how delicious a roasted prime rib is, it is also quite expensive, and that is why people would want to flock over to it because it’s not something that most people can eat on a regular basis.
That said, when it comes to your prime rib, there is a need to make sure that you cook it at the desired doneness that you want to achieve. There are some who might want their steak rare while others prefer their meat on the well-done side of the spectrum. However, in most cases, the best doneness tends to be medium-rare because that is when the prime rib tends to be at its best in terms of flavor, tenderness, and juiciness.
But the problem when it comes to prime rib is that this is an entire slab of meat you are talking about. As such, it will require you to cook it hours before the event so that you can make sure that it is ready by the time your guests arrive. Then again, if you do end up cooking it several hours before your guests arrive, what happens is that the prime rib might get too cold.
No one wants to eat a cold prime rib that no longer has the same kind of juiciness that it did when it was still warm. While it might still retain the flavors, the experience won’t be the same as the prime rib might end up getting too cold for anyone to enjoy.
And the problem here is that, if you do try to roast it again after you have already cooked it to the desired doneness, the meat will continue to cook and it will move past beyond the right level of doneness. As such, your medium-rare prime rib might end up becoming well-done by the time your guests arrive.
All that said, the trick here is to find a way to keep your prime rib warm in such a way that its doneness won’t be affected. What that means is that it will stay warm without the meat getting cooked all the way through or possibly becoming overcooked. And when a slab of prime rib gets overcooked, it becomes harder to chew through it.
How to keep a prime rib warm?
Now that you know why it is important to keep a prime rib warm such that you shouldn’t be continuing to cook the meat, how do you even do that in the first place? What is the best way for you to keep your prime rib warm without cooking it all the way through?
So, one of the easiest ways of keeping any food warm is by keeping it in a warmer, which is just a metal pan with a small burner underneath to make sure the food stays warm without overcooking it.
While this might be useful for a prime rib to some extent, the problem here is that you might only be warming one side of the prime rib, which is a big slab of meat. And if you do slice the prime rib and then keep the slices in the warmer, there is a good chance that the individual slices will end up cooking all the way through.
As such, what we recommend here is to not use a warmer but to use your oven again. You might be wondering why we should even use the oven again if we actually just roasted the entire prime rib there. But the thing we need to keep in mind here is that we are not cooking the prime rib but we are only going to keep it warm in the oven. So, how do you do that?
To keep your prime rib warm in time for your function or even, here’s what you need to do:
- The first thing you need to do after cooking the prime rib is to allow it to rest for about half an hour or more than that if you do have a particularly large slab of prime rib. This will allow the juices to redistribute all over the meat.
- While allowing the meat to rest, pre-heat your oven to somewhere between 170 and 200 degrees F, which is a lot lower than the cooking temperature (somewhere between 350 and 500 degrees) that you used to roast the prime rib.
- Don’t let the temperatures go over 200 degrees because that will allow the prime rib to continue to cook. This will ruin the doneness of the meat and will turn a medium-rare prime rib into a well-done or even overcooked slab.
- When the prime rib has already rested long enough, wrap aluminum foil around it and keep it on the roasting tray.
- Put the entire roasting tray back in the oven. This will keep the prime rib warm but not cooked all the way through as the foil acts as an insulator that will merely allow the meat to feel enough heat to stay warm without it continuing to cook.
- When your guests have arrived, that is when you should take the prime rib out of the oven. You don’t even need to rest it anymore.
Sources:
https://www.leaf.tv/articles/how-to-keep-prime-rib-warm/
https://cheftalk.com/threads/keeping-prime-rib-hot-during-service.101355/