Your Best Short Ribs

A bright array of ingredients assembled and ready to go.

You soak the dried mushrooms in hot water and then add both them and the soaking liquid to the braise.

As always, it's crucial to season the meat before browning it.

Amanda browns the short ribs in batches.

You really want to caramelize all surfaces -- there's no substitute for the flavor of well-browned meat.

Prep session!

After the short ribs are seared, it's time for the veg.

Mininally Invasive has you clear a hot spot to cook the anchovy and tomato paste for a minute on their own.

The mushrooms are nice and tender at this point, and they go back into the pot with canned tomatoes, red wine, mustard and herbs.

Once the short ribs are back in, you add just enough stock to cover them, bring to a simmer and cook gently for about 3 hours.

Amanda tests the meat for doneness.

Fork tender!

This perforated skimmer is very useful for fishing things out of the sauce, like the two bay leaves hiding among the veggies.

An immersion blender renders the sauce thick and almost creamy.

Shredding the tender meat.

If only there were a dog around!

Putting together the gremolata, as you can see, is a very complicated and labor-intensive task. Ha!

Polenta makes the perfect soft cushion for the rich, buttery shreds of meat.

The ingredients -- plus an errant chunk of fire-roasted tomato that must have wandered over from the Short Ribs Ragu slideshow.

Ask your butcher for extra-thin short ribs -- you're looking for 1/8-1/4 inch.

Once the ribs are arranged in a single layer, you pour a mixture of sake and pear (or apple) juice over them and put them in the fridge for a couple of hours.

For the second stage of the marinade, we threw the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and mixed.

Generous with the ground pepper -- as usual.

This second marinade gets poured over the short ribs, which then sit in the fridge overnight, getting nice and tender.

You'd think this looks adequately covered, right? Apparently, not enough to discourage the two squirrels playing outside (where we kept the meat cold because of a full fridge) from trying to abscond with a piece of the meat. Aren't squirrels vegetarians?

We laid the pieces that remained untainted by the squirrels on a baking sheet and put them under the broiler.

We didn't include too much of the marinade on the ribs, because we wanted to avoid flare-ups. They still got nice and brown.