Alison Roman’s Spicy and Tangy Short Ribs

Review by Jackie and Julia

Why did we make this recipe?

Our pièce de résistance for Christmas 2023. We’ve been dying to make this recipe since March 2021 when Alison Roman released her Home Movies video. It looked so delicious and we’d never made anything like this previously.

We’re not sure why we didn’t make it for Christmas 2022, but when our 2023 menu planning session came round, Jackie instantly recommended it as our main meat dish.

The only difference we made to the recipe was to not cook the potatoes with the meat, as we wanted to try another one of Ms. Roman’s potato recipes for Christmas.

What did we love? 

This required us going to the butchers to order short ribs, which Julia did a couple of weeks before Christmas (Julia: I had never ordered anything from the butchers before (let alone been in a butchers) so pre-ordering something for Christmas was incredibly exciting and I felt extremely grown-up. I picked up my order on Christmas eve, and immediately texted Jackie and my other sister to share the good news, it was a momentous occasion in our lives!).

This recipe is actually deceptively simple, it just takes time. But it’s time well spent. This is a standout dish that will surely impress everyone at your dinner table - even those that aren’t serious meat eaters. It just looks and tastes so grown up, and will really elevate you as a hostess (and who doesn’t want that?!).

We don’t cook with it very often because we’re always worried of undercooking the meat and inevitably end up overcooking it. However, for this Christmas we decided to trust in the power of Alison Roman and lay our worries at her feet. And we were not disappointed. In the beginning of the recipe, you need to sear the beef, which aside from being incredibly fun, is really cool to watch. The short ribs literally brown and shrink right in front of your eyes, and the bone becomes more exposed.

The ribs are then cooked in the oven for about 3 - 3.5 hours. That is a long time, but it must be something to do with the fact that you’re cooking them in a dutch oven because the result is perfectly cooked, juicy and tender meat that literally falls off the bone.

Accompanying the ribs is garlic, chilli flakes, onion, lemon, tomato paste, wine, vinegar and a few other bits and pieces. The recipe also suggests adding potatoes, but we decided to skip this part (although next time we are definitely adding potatoes). In "Nothing Fancy" Alison Roman explains how she mostly sees short ribs done in an “Italian way, all red wine-y and tinned tomato-y” but that she prefers to cook these in a “spiced and citrusy direction” to balance out the meat- and we really loved the spicy and citrus flavours of the accompanying cast of ingredients. It complemented the meatiness of the ribs perfectly.

What did we not love?

It was so good - there was really nothing to not love… only the fact that there weren’t enough leftovers :P

Recipe credit: https://www.alisoneroman.com/recipes/spiced-braised-short-ribs?rq=short%20ribs. Can also be found in Alison Roman’s Nothing Fancy cookbook.