Do you love prime rib? Does the thought of cooking prime rib yourself make you go all primal and start beating your chest like a caveman? That’s pretty much what happens when my husband decides he’s going to make prime rib for the family during the holidays.

Over the years, we’ve tried several different recipes in search of making the perfect prime rib. One recipe that my folks raved about was from a now-closed small restaurant in northern Missouri. We waited with anticipation when we tried that one because it had such good reviews, but alas, it just didn’t do it for us, and we felt like we had wasted a good piece of meat.

We eaten prime rib in restaurants lots of times, and there you can find it prepared in any number of ways—garlic crusted, rosemary crusted, so on and so forth. But to cook a rib roast at home, we wanted to get back to basics and do a simple yet tasty recipe. Once you know that we don’t even like to use steak sauce with a sirloin (we think it covers up the taste of perfectly delicious beef), you’ll understand why we think this recipe is the best we’ve come across. It’s super simple, and there were no complaints at the dinner table when this was on the menu.

I found all kinds of tips and tricks on how to fix a rib roast on the What’s Cooking America website, including cooking time instructions based on the weight of your roast, and I’ve provided a link to it here. Be forewarned: if you go to print out the recipe, you may end up with pages and pages of instructions.

I admit that the picture of the sliced prime rib is not mine. While I remembered to take a picture of the rib roast when we took it out of the oven, I got busy getting everything else ready for the meal, and then we dove in—with no picture of how delicious it looked when sliced. I used one from the Internet, but you get the idea of what it looked like. We did have garlic mashed potatoes with our prime rib, though, which were also delicious.

We’ve used this recipe to roast a huge 14-pound rib roast, and we’ve used it for a smaller 7-pound prime rib. Just adjust your roasting time based on the size of your roast, and you’ll do just fine. Enjoy going primal!

Perfectly Cooked Prime Rib Roast

Prime rib roast

Butter

Several hours before you plan to cook your beef roast, take it out of the refrigerator, and let the roast come to room temperature, anywhere from 2 to 4 hours. This is necessary so that the roast cooks evenly.

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pat the room temperature roast dry, and liberally smear softened butter on the ends of the roast. Do NOT salt your rib roast (this will dry it out).

Place the rib roast in a large roasting pan fat side up, on a rack if you have one is preferable. If you’re using a bone-in rib roast, you can omit the cooking rack.

Sear the rib roast at 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Then turn down the oven temperature to 325 degrees Fahrenheit for the remainder of the cooking time. Do NOT cover the roast. Every half-hour or so, baste the roast from the juices that accumulate in the pan.

Cook roast until the internal temperature reaches 120 degrees Fahrenheit (for rare) or your desired level of doneness. Remove roast from the oven, and lightly cover it with aluminum foil. Let rest for 15 to 20 minutes. Remember that the internal temperature will continue to rise as it rests, so take that into consideration before you remove the roast from the oven. After roughly 20 minutes, the internal temperature will be around 125 degrees Fahrenheit if you removed it from the oven at 120 degrees. For us, this is perfectly done (rare), but you may wish to cook your roast longer. You can find cooking times for level of doneness and sizes of prime rib roasts on the What’s Cooking America link I posted above. Enjoy!

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