Slow-Cooker Beef Short Ribs

This recipe started a little less deliberately than most: we were walking through the aisles of our grocery and noticed a sale on boneless short ribs. We snapped up a package and went on our merry way, confident that we could easily find a recipe somewhere that called for them.

Boy were we wrong. Most short rib recipes we found online, it turns out, call for bone-in ribs. This might not make much of a difference in the long run, but since our con ops for this blog is to follow recipes as closely as possible, we wanted to be sure we were specific.

After a largely fruitless search on the Internet, we eventually stumbled on a recipe with a 4 and 1/2-star rating on Food.com: Slow-Cooker Beef Short Ribs. We scaled the serving size to match the 1.5 lbs of ribs we had and then set to work gathering ingredients.

Fortunately, the ingredient list didn't require anything we didn't already have. In the interest of making things a little lighter, we omitted the 1/4 cup of butter in favor of cooking spray. The substitution worked just fine, although you could also reduce it to 1 tbsp if you still want some buttery flavor in the dish.

Even more fortunately, it only took 15 minutes to prepare everything for the slow-cooker. The first step is to dredge the ribs in flour, salt, and pepper, after which they're browned in butter (or cooking spray). Then they're moved to the slow-cooker and the pan is used to combine all the remaining ingredients for the sauce.

In our experience, the recipe provided too little sauce, which left us with a charred black mess at the bottom of our slow-cooker. It's likely that we should have amended our cooking time to account for a smaller quantity of meat, but it also couldn't hurt to make double the recommended amount and let those ribs stew in twice their own juices.

We were pleased by how these ribs turned out. The finished product was delightfully tender and proved a nice accompaniment for some egg noodles and broccoli. Furthermore, this was a no-fuss dish that allowed us to come home to a wonderfully fragrant home - which is always a plus!