The Most Tender Short Ribs, the Most Satisfying Soup

Hmm, I thought to myself as I did an emoji-quality chin scratch by the light of the refrigerator door late one night last year. Hmm.

It was a quandary I’m sure you’re familiar with: I had found myself, quite unexpectedly, with a few spare short ribs in my fridge. Twenty pounds of them, in fact, each more meaty and perfectly marbled than the last. They were the leftovers from a beer-braised short rib dish I had been testing for my restaurant. The question was, what was I going to do with them?

I had recently been drooling over a post on The Woks of Life about Taiwanese beef noodle soup, a dish based on the mainland Chinese technique of red cooking, in which meat is simmered in a mixture of soy sauce, rice wine, stock and rock sugar, giving it a rich, reddish-brown color. The Taiwanese version includes a few extra aromatics as well as a dab of doubanjiang, a fermented chile-bean paste from Sichuan.

The broth is spicy and sweet, fragrant with warm spices, with an ultrarich, almost sticky texture that comes from the high concentration of gelatin extracted from the collagen in the beef tendons and shins it’s typically made with. It’s one of my favorite dishes of all time and, given the large proportion of collagen-rich connective tissue in short ribs, I thought they’d be a prime candidate for success with a beef noodle soup-style broth.

I threw together a batch that night, following the classic technique I use for beef shins: searing the beef in a pot and cooking down an aromatic base of onions, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, scallions and dried chiles in the browned drippings. Then, I toast a bouquet of spices: a cinnamon stick, star anise, fennel and coriander seed, and Sichuan and black peppercorns. (Of these, I found star anise to be the most essential.) Next, I added my broth ingredients and a dab of doubanjiang. (For stir-fries, I’d bloom it in hot oil before adding other liquids, but, in this soup, I didn’t detect any difference either way.)

After returning the short ribs to the pot, I let it cook just until they were done. If you stop as soon as the ribs are tender, they retain a pleasantly juicy bite. If overcooked, braised meat loses its ability to cling onto moisture as you chew, resulting in juices that gush out but leave the remaining meat with a dry, pulpy texture.