Practice Dinner

First we need to talk about the important bit. Meat! High-choice level prime rib smoked @225 from about 1:45 – 5pm. 6-8 lb meat. Three big bones left on, sometimes we cut them off and tie them back before cooking. Not this time.

Approximate dry rub ingredients:

1.5 tbsp garlic

1 tbsp pepper fine ground

1 tbsp kosher salt

Couldn’t get hickory wood for the smoker so we used a combination of pecan which is very mild and mesquite, which is a strong flavored pellet.

We have two pellet smokers, a pit-boss upright which died a bit ago and gave the excuse to buy the camp chef woodwind grill. Has a cool propane burner on the side.

She is well loved as you can tell from the smoke stains on the outside of the lid. The propane stove on the right side is a very nice add on but didn’t get used on the prime rib.

Set for 225 degrees almost an hour early to give it a long time to get up to temperature in the 10 degree weather. I usually pull it out when the center reaches 128ish Fahrenheit but this ran a bit over to 130-133F in places. This is what the remaining slice looked like after 5 of us ate the entire rest of the monster. Each year we have a larger party after Christmas so this was about our 20th practice run 😀 . Someone in the family is cooking the big one in a couple of weeks. The meat finished early so it stood for 45 minutes under several layers of aluminum foil, it was still very warm when served.

We ended up doing baked potatoes and strawberries and some kind of pre-made Demi-Glace sauce that was just kind of a fun adder for those who wanted to play around.

Oh my……. Came out fantastic, the crust was firm and flavorful and the center was a nice euro-medium. We will definitely cook with pecan-mesquite in the future as it had a great mix of flavors.