For Max’s 18th birthday, we asked him how he wanted to celebrate. Because of his busy school & sport schedule, he opted to have a couple friends over for dinner instead of a fancy dinner in the city.
This was his menu choice:
Roast Prime Rib
Crispy roasted potatoes
Roasted mushrooms
Green Beans (because I made him choose ONE green thing)
Garlic Bread
Cherry Pie
The best prime ribs I’ve ever made were shio koji marinated. I saw a video where they added black fermented garlic to the shio koji, plus hot Korean mustard and then coated it with a spice rub of shio kombu and various peppercorns. Knowing that Max loves garlic but not sure how his teenaged friends would like a bunch of uncommon funky flavors, I opted to just use shio koji and black garlic marinade and pink and black peppercorns for the crust.
I used a hand blender to mix the koji and black garlic cloves, then slathered the whole thing and put it on a rack, uncovered in the fridge for 2 days. after I coated it with the roughly ground peppercorns, I put it in the steam oven to sous vide for 7 hours at 130F. I rendered all the fat trimmings and ladled scorching hot tallow over the roast to start the crust. The roast was then pooped back into a 475F convection oven for 5 minutes just to finish it all off.
Sourcing sour cherries was the hardest part. I usually order from Baldor, but they’re out of the ones I usually buy and the only other option was a FORTY LB box meant for bakeries. I finally tracked down a few bags of frozen NY State Sour Cherries at Wegmans.
It was a hit! I’m definitely going to do more with the koji + black garlic combination!
BTW - I totally cheated and bought garlic bread from Costco’s bakery section. It’s LEGIT! Butter and real roasted garlic! Everybody loved it. I’m definitely buying more for as long as they have it.
