♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - If you love cooking for the holidays, please stay tuned.

'Cause that's what we're going to do here on Milk Street, we have three great recipes.

Barolo-braised short ribs.

How to get the most out of the wine by reducing it separately.

And we're going to make sure those short ribs literally fall off the bone.

Then we're going to take a tenderloin, which is tender but doesn't have a lot of flavor, and use a great porcini rub on the outside.

And finally, one of my favorite desserts of all time, it's a chocolate terrine with coffee and cardamom.

It's based on a 400-year-old French recipe called marquise au chocolat, and it will become the centerpiece of your holiday meal.

So please stay tuned as we enjoy the holidays by cooking three great recipes.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - MOWI Salmon comes ready to cook, ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.

In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.

MOWI Salmon.

- We pass down traditions here.

We create and connect.

We enjoy special moments-- some simple, some grand.

The heart of your home is the kitchen.

The heart of your kitchen is The Galley.

♪ ♪ - So this, uh, short ribs recipe... is really not hard.

It takes some time in the oven, but I think you get a result that's every bit as good as boeuf bourguignon.

We're going to start by roasting some vegetables and prepping some dried porcini.

So this is some hot water.

Just enough water to cover like that, and we'll let that sit.

So we're going to take some carrots and celery, and you can just chop these coarsely.

Then we have some pancetta.

Put that in.

Some cremini mushrooms... as well.

Onions, of course.

Couple cloves of garlic, a little olive oil, three tablespoons... and a little tomato paste.

And now, mix it all together.

This is going to create a great base.

And Julia, if she were still with us, would love this comment, uh, to make a sauce.

You know, very few of us use sauces anymore.

But with short ribs, especially for the holidays, getting a great sauce with very little work is really a terrific idea.

So we're going to put this in a 475 oven for about 45 minutes.

Now, if you just put wine in, like with the beef bourguignon that's in the recipe, three cups of Burgundy, whatever.

I find, and we've tested it here, is that meat cooked in wine tends, uh, to become sour.

It loses a lot of its flavor, oddly enough.

And the texture is also affected.

So, it turns out that if you take the wine and reduce it down very gently, you're going to end up with a concentrated liquid that's not going to mess up the meat.

And the other thing you should do is definitely drink some of this wine, and not put all of it in the saucepan.

Because that's what you should do, just like Julia.

So we're going to put the whole bottle in.

And again, you want to do this, it's going to take some time, about half an hour, just sort of a sub-simmer, a little bit of bubbles.

So, it'll be about 30 minutes.

Reduce it down and then we'll continue with the recipe.

Mmm.

So this is reduced down to about a cup-and-a-half.

We soften the porcini, take them, put them in here.

And we will also with this little tiny strainer.

Sometimes there's some grit.

Goes in there.

Okay.

Bay leaves, rosemary, thyme go in as well.

And a couple cups of low sodium beef stock.

Okay.

And now... let's see what happened to the vegetables.

So those look great.

And now the short ribs, there are about six pounds of them.

And we'll just nestle them in here.

Okay.

Now we're going to pour this liquid in and that's going to be the basis for the sauce.

And... now we need to cover this with aluminum foil.

We don't have that much liquid in here.

The short ribs will exude some liquid, of course, but it's going to be in the oven a long time.

♪ ♪ We'll reduce this down to 325.

And then, we'll be back in three and a half hours.

♪ ♪ So that looks pretty good.

I guess it looks like the short ribs really did cook, because they're coming off the bone.

But we'll flip it meat side up.

We don't need the foil.

Now we're going to get some browning.

You want to cook, really cook this.

So the temperature is probably going to be up over 190 degrees internal.

It's kind of like barbecue.

And we'll give that half an hour, 45 minutes.

Are these...

They're-- you think they're big enough?

Like... (chuckles) Anyway... um.

(laughs) Enough fooling around with your oven mitts.

Someday I'm going to invent a great pair of oven mitts.

They come on and off easily.

You can never pick something up with this.

Now that looks good.

Now I promised you... the oven would do a lot of the work.

You can see the meat now.

It's, it's meat side up.

It really browned, right?

You didn't have to stand there and do that in a skillet or in a Dutch oven.

So, we're going to get this out.

One still has a bone... so we'll leave that here.

Okay.

Tent that, keep it warm.

What I often do at home is I have an old-fashioned chinois.

It's a strainer that's V-shaped like this, uh, and it sits on a holder.

And so if you have a whole bunch of stuff in a pan like this you want to get rid of, it's... has a huge capacity, but this will be fine.

We can... We can catch, really everything.

This is exactly the same shape as the strainer.

So... You can use that to press down.

Now we want to de-fat the sauce.

Now, you should probably let it sit just a few minutes because the fat will rise to the top.

And then, I just use a ladle.

Now we're going to reduce this down a little bit, just to concentrate the flavors.

Now, because I keep talking about Julia Child, we'll do a beurre manié, which is softened butter and flour.

And it's just a way of thickening a sauce.

I'm just going to use my hands because it's easier.

So now we're going to thicken, and so I'll put a little bit in at a time.

We'll let that cook down just a couple more minutes.

So, we'll be right back.

If you taste just before you serve, you can take something that's good and make it great or something that's, not so great and make it really good... (chuckles) just by adjusting salt and pepper.

Ooh.

That's very tasty.

But it definitely needs salt.

There we are!

Now, that started out being good, but not great.

And just adding enough salt really, really pulls it together.

So, mashed potatoes... short rib.

♪ ♪ Bring back my wine-- very important.

Here we are.

So the meat is really fall- apart, still has some texture.

Mm.

This is so good.

You know, it's moist, it has deep flavor.

You make a great sauce and put that with it.

So, here's to Julia.

Here's to the end of beef bourguignon, at least in my household, and welcome Barolo-braised short ribs.

Mm.

♪ ♪ - You just saw Chris make some beautiful short ribs.

And short ribs are full of fat that adds flavor and body to a dish.

They also take quite a long time to cook.

This recipe uses beef tenderloin, cooks really quickly.

The tradeoff for that convenience, though, is that it has a much milder flavor.

So we're going to use a lot of mushrooms to boost the savoriness of this dish and give it that depth of flavor you're looking for, the elegance that we want at the holidays.

So here we have our dried porcinis.

(grinder whirring) So we want to put this back in the bowl.

And then we're going to put in fresh rosemary and add some salt-- two and a half teaspoons of salt in with it.

It's going to help grind it up and keep the blades of the grinder from getting too gunky.

(grinder whirring) Beautiful.

All right, and last, what sort of can take the longest are black peppercorns.

(grinder whirring) All right, so we're going to mix this all together.

All right, you want to take about a tablespoon of this and set it to the side for later.

And then all of this-- make sure the hands are clean-- we're going to rub it into our beef tenderloin.

Really coat it so that you get all of the flavor and as much possible flavor boost to your dish.

While I was doing that, you probably saw that the beef tenderloin has a much thinner end.

You fold that over so that the whole thing is about the same thickness.

That ensures an even cooking rate.

Now we're going to tie this at one-inch intervals.

Get enough twine off that you have plenty to work with, and then we'll cut it into pieces as needed.

And start there.

And start from the far end.

And it's okay to give it a nice firm knot.

It's the holidays, and beef tenderloin is not the cheapest cut of meat.

And so it's nice to take the time to make sure it cooks perfectly, and you're really happy with what you bring to the table.

Okay.

We are going to actually pre-roast the vegetables for a little while.

So we don't want to go ahead and put the beef tenderloin in our roasting pan.

We're just going to put it in the rack over here to wait until we're ready to add it to the vegetables.

Let me wash my hands, and we'll get our mushrooms prepped and into the oven everything will go.

So I gave the twine a little bit of a snip so it looks nice and neat and I've washed my hands.

And now we're going to brush the beef tenderloin with about three tablespoons of oil.

The extra oil is really going to help develop a beautiful color and also extra flavor for this tenderloin.

So we can set all of this aside and get out our roasting pan.

So we have portobello mushrooms that we've cleaned the gills out of, and that's important.

The flavor's fine, but they can add sort of a muddied texture.

And this is the holidays, so it takes no time whatsoever to use a spoon and clean the gills out of your portobellos.

So they go into the roasting pan with some slices, some nice sort of thicker slices of onions.

And we haven't put any of the spice rub in here, so we want to season it with a little bit of fresh black pepper and some more salt, about half a teaspoon of each.

And then we're going to add in three more tablespoons of olive oil.

Let's toss this all together.

So we're going to put these into our 450 degree oven for about 15 minutes before we add in the beef tenderloin.

Okay, so it's been 15 minutes, and our mushrooms are cooked down enough.

Let's see, we're going to put our rack in, and then you might need to turn the beef.

Okay, so we want to put this back into the 450 degree oven for 35 to 45 minutes, or until it registers 120 degrees for rare or 125 for medium rare.

So it's only about an hour of cooking time total.

♪ ♪ The tenderloin is ready.

You should be about half an hour from when you want to eat when you take it out of the oven.

You want to transfer it to a cutting board.

All right, so we're going to let this rest.

And then we want to take our rack out.

We saved that tablespoon of spice blend at the beginning.

Sprinkle in about half of it now with a tablespoon of sherry vinegar.

I like to use the sherry vinegar to scrape up as much fond as I can.

And then I add in the parsley.

That way the parsley stays a little bit fresher.

Pile it together so it stays as warm as possible while we let the meat finish resting.

And then we're going to slice it and dinner's ready.

This first one maybe becomes the cook's treat because it's not as pretty and it's the holidays or it's great for leftovers.

And then you want to slice it really straight down.

And look at that pink interior.

So this is beautiful.

This is about 125.

If you want it a little pinker, go to 120.

But I find 125 is what makes most of my guests the happiest.

And then to finish, you just want to sprinkle with a little bit of our remaining spice blend.

And really for texture and just the fun little pop of salinity, if you have flaky sea salt, it's a nice touch.

So I'm going to put some mushrooms on my plate.

I'm the kid who wants to steal them all, but I will try and be nice and leave my guests some-- maybe.

I'm going to be greedy and take one of these nice rare ones from the middle.

Little bit of mushroom.

Some beef.

This is a really elegant and relatively quick holiday main course.

It's surprising how much flavor we can add to beef tenderloin with the simple addition of a dried porcini mushroom.

♪ ♪ - So the trick to keeping entertaining, well, entertaining is not play bartender all night.

And that's where batch cocktails come in.

Mix it, bottle it, put it out, let people serve themselves.

So let's make a batched buttered rum cocktail.

So we're going to use a technique called fat washing.

So what we're going to do is start with 18 ounces of aged rum, and to it we're going to add an entire stick of melted butter.

I know it looks like a lot of butter right now.

Don't worry, the butter is actually coming out, the flavor is going to stay in.

So leave this on the counter for about ten minutes.

Stir it every minute or two because you want all that flavor in the butter to come out.

Then, after about ten minutes, pour it in the fat separator, because that's going to make it really easy.

What's going to happen is eventually the butter is going to settle to the top, it's going to solidify in the freezer, and all that flavored rum is going to be on the bottom.

It's going to be really easy to pour off.

All right, so after about an hour in the freezer, you get this.

Now what we're going to do is strain off the butter solids.

And to do that, take a mesh strainer, line it with cheesecloth, and just slowly pour it through.

And just give it a little mash with a spoon.

You don't want to lose any rum.

That's it.

Now we're ready to build the rest of the cocktail.

We're going to do that back in the bottle that the rum came in.

So just grab a funnel and pour your butter-flavored rum into the bottle.

And as long as you do the math right, it should all fit back in.

So that's our 18 ounces of butter-infused rum to which we're going to add two and a quarter ounces of orange liqueur and two-and-a-quarter ounces of agave or simple syrup.

You can use whichever you like.

And two ounces of water.

The reason we add water is because with batched cocktails, we're not stirring or mixing them on ice, so you don't get the same sort of dilution that you would get from a traditional cocktail.

That's it.

Now give it a really good shake.

This can be stored in the refrigerator or even on the freezer door.

It'll be fine and ready to serve in about an hour.

After about an hour in the freezer, you are ready to serve.

So put out the bottle, or multiple bottles, with some coupe glasses.

And all you're going to do is pour in about two to three ounces of your cocktail base.

And we can't forget a play off of the apple cider that is traditional to a hot buttered rum.

But since this is a cold drink, we are going to use sparkling cider and just one or two ounces as a splash on top.

And then, also traditional to a hot buttered rum, a little dash of nutmeg.

♪ ♪ And there we go.

Cheers to easier entertaining.

♪ ♪ - So let's finish off this holiday meal with a dark chocolate coffee and cardamom terrine.

This is based on a make-ahead chocolate mousse from France.

It's called marquis au chocolate.

We're doing a modern twist on that, so it's pretty easy, even though there are a lot of steps.

But we're going to get started and make that now.

The first thing we want to do is line our loaf pan because we want to be able to get our mousse out of this.

What we found was the easiest way to do that is to add some water to a loaf pan.

Make sure you get the sides of it wet.

We're using a four and a half by eight and a half-inch loaf pan.

This is a 15-inch piece of plastic wrap.

And I'm just going to push it right into the corners.

And the water's going to help it stick.

So that's all set.

I'm going to put that aside.

And then we're going to start with our chocolate.

This is 12 ounces of bittersweet chocolate.

We're going to put it over a double boiler.

There's about an inch of water in here.

It's simmering, but not boiling too much.

You don't want to get water in chocolate because it'll seize up.

And we're going to add some butter and we're going to let that melt.

That'll take a few minutes.

So this looks great.

Everything is melted.

In this terrine, we're going for more of a Turkish coffee kind of flavor profile, and cardamom is perfect with that.

And some salt, because I know we talk about this all the time, but in dessert, salt makes everything taste a little better.

And then the second part of this is we're going to whisk together some egg yolks... Sugar... We talked about Turkish coffee; we're going to add some coffee.

But the other thing about coffee and chocolate, coffee really intensifies the flavor of chocolate, so it's a great thing to add to this as well.

We have our double boiler still going here.

I'm going to whisk this until it reaches about 145 to 150 degrees.

You want to make sure you're whisking this the whole time, because if you don't, you could scramble the eggs and then you're going to get lumps in your terrine.

And you don't want that, so just have to keep it going.

So we're at 145 degrees.

And as you can see, this is foamy.

It holds a little bit of a peak; not much.

But I'm going to take it now and put it on my mixer.

So I'm going to move this to high until it holds a peak.

It's still going to be a little bit warm, but we want to get a lot more volume.

That'll take about two minutes.

So this has pretty much doubled in volume.

We have a little bit of a peak.

So it's ready to fold into our chocolate.

So I'm going to add half of this to my chocolate, and I'm going to fold it in.

I want to try to maintain all of the airiness that's in here.

I don't want to punch down any of that air because we want that for our terrine.

You can already see this dessert has a lot of potential already.

And the last thing we want to do is whip a cup and a half of heavy cream.

And we just want, like, a medium peak for this, so it's only going to take a minute or two.

Okay.

And I'm going to add this in thirds.

And fold that in.

A lot of times, a terrine like this will use egg whites.

We're using whipping cream because the fat molecules have a little bit more structure, whereas the protein in the egg whites will deflate easier.

So we found using whipped cream worked better for this.

And it's whipped cream, so another reason to use it-- it's creamy and delicious.

Try to make sure there's not any streaks.

If there's a few, I think you'll be okay.

But try to get it in there as much as you can without over-folding it.

And now we're just going to pour it into our loaf pan.

So this is going to fill that all the way up.

So when we turn it over, be a nice tall terrine.

Okay, so I'm just going to spread this right to the edges so that it's even on top.

Although you could fold this over, it's a little bit neater if you have a separate piece of plastic wrap that goes on the bottom, and then you can easily pull the pan off.

And then you refrigerate this for six hours, up to three days.

That's the other thing that's great about this.

If you have holiday things going on and you don't have to be thinking about dessert when you've got things in the oven and things on the stove, put this in there for three days, you can take it out, and serve a beautiful, beautiful dessert.

And it's all done ahead of time.

So let me refrigerate this now.

♪ ♪ Here it is.

We've chilled this overnight.

I'm going to take off that first piece of plastic, And I'm going to invert it onto my serving platter.

The easiest way to do this is put the platter on top, hold the plastic and the loaf pan, and flip it over.

And there it is.

I'm going to peel the plastic off.

But it's impossible to not get some of these wrinkles on the outside.

So you just take a little palette knife like this, put it in some warm water, wipe it off, and then you can just smooth the edges.

And then to finish this, there's a couple of ways you can do that.

You can just sprinkle it with cocoa powder, Which is very pretty.

Another thing I like to do is take a chocolate bar with a vegetable peeler.

And if you just run that across the bar, you'll end up with these tiny little curls of chocolate.

I think that looks beautiful.

So there you have dark chocolate terrine with coffee and cardamom.

How pretty is that?

Here we go.

♪ ♪ Mm.

This luscious, undeniably rich dessert is perfect for the holidays.

It's kind of light, even though it seems like all the ingredients are very rich.

I'm going to be serving this at my holiday this year, and I hope you will too.

To get this recipe and all the recipes from this season, go to MilkStreetTV.com.

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Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $27, 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - MOWI salmon comes ready to cook, ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.

In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.

MOWI Salmon.

- We pass down traditions here.

We create and connect.

We enjoy special moments-- some simple, some grand.

The heart of your home is the kitchen.

The heart of your kitchen is The Galley.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪