February 14, 2026

Season Five Grand Finale

Since we were having some friends over on Saturday, which is Valentine’s Day, I figured why not do a special dinner that also wraps up Season Five?

Let’s start with dessert

It hasn’t happened for a while that my first attempt at a Good Eats recipe was a total, throw-it-away-and-try-again disaster, but it happened on Sunday. I’ve never made a cheesecake before, but I thought I had been doing a good job on it – my crust looked good and blind baked, my batter was smooth and not chunky, I had the water bath perfect. Well, I followed the Sour Cream Cheesecake recipe to a T, and when I finally turned the cake out onto a plate, it basically fell apart, looking more like cheesecake pudding than an actual cake. The flavor was really good though – we each had a piece (or two!) but I threw the rest away and vowed to come back and figure out what I did wrong.

I spent the rest of that evening scrolling through the 200+ comments on the recipe. Come to find out, what most likely went wrong was the cooking time – on the web, it says to cook it for 1 hour and then let it sit in the oven for another hour. Most folks who did that ended up in the same situation as me. Well, if you then go and look in the Good Eats: The Early Years book, it says to cook it for two hours, and then let it rest in the “off” oven for another hour and a half. People in the comments who did this all reported great success. So. This is what I did on my second attempt.

On Friday night, I prepared the cheesecake second attempt. I began like I did the last one, with a blind baked crust:

In the episode he used “33 graham cracker squares” but as you know we do things gluten free around here, so I used two 7oz boxes of Pamela’s Honey Grahams. I then got all my ingredients laid out for mixing.

Once the batter was finished and the crust was cool to the touch, I poured it into the pan and put it in a roasting pan to make a water bath.

This time, I cooked it for two hours, then turned the oven off after opening the door for a minute, and left it there for another hour before moving into the fridge to set overnight.

And now for the beef

I had always planned to make the Dry Aged Standing Rib Roast with Sage Jus my last recipe of Season Five, and it just so happened that it was perfect timing that we were planning to have 10 people here. I have to say this one made me nervous – rib roasts are very expensive so I did not want to screw this up like I did with the first cheesecake attempt. This time, I sat down and read almost all of the comments in the online recipe to see if there’s any gotchas I needed to look out for. More on that later.

I started by going out and buying an 8.75 pound three-bone prime rib roast.

This was on Monday. After unwrapping it I dried it off, wrapped it up in some cheese cloth, then popped it into the fridge to dry age.

There I left it until Saturday morning. A few times during the week I unwrapped it and changed the cheese cloth out, just to keep things as dry as possible. Saturday morning I took the roast out of the fridge around 9:30am, to let it start getting to room temp.

It had gotten much darker as it aged, but I didn’t really see any of the “gross” looking parts that folks often talk about on dry aged beef. So I didn’t bother trimming or cutting anything off of it.

Now, this recipe’s episode makes a big deal about oven cleanliness and AB uses a huge terra cotta planter as a safety mechanism to guard against dirty or inefficient ovens. I did try and find one at my local Lowe’s and Home Depot, but they had nothing like the one he uses in the episode. Going back to the comments on the online recipe, I saw that most people didn’t use the planter, instead opting for a roasting pan with a rack, lightly tented with foil. So, that’s what I did too. But first, I oiled the roast with canola oil, mixed up some salt and pepper (0.5 tsp salt per bone is what he said in the episode), rubbed it all over the roast, then put in my probe thermometers. I put the roast in the rack – bone side up – and was ready to go.

I figured I’d use two probes both because I had them, and because I wanted a bit of insurance in case I put one too close to a bone and got wild readings – it looks like there’s more than a few folks in the comments that did this, pulling their roast out when it looked done only to find it extremely rare. I’m going for a perfect medium rare here.

Again from the comments, on average people reported it takes about 45min per pound at 200 degrees. Figuring after dry aging that it was about 8 pounds (I wish I had thought to weigh it), that means it would take 6 hours to get to the ~124 degrees that folks recommend cooking it to. Again, this is another little difference from the original recipe – in the episode he cooks it to 118 and it carries over to 130, but folks observed that it doesn’t carry over anywhere close to 12 degrees, more like 5 or 6. Hence, the 124 target.

Back to the cheesecake

Once I got the roast situated, I turned my attention to the cheesecake, which had been in the fridge all night. I took it out, pulled the parchment from the sides, then put it in a shallow bath of hot water to help loosen up the bottom. Once I did that, I put a piece of parchment on top of the cake, put a sheet pan over it, and flipped it over. It took a few whacks to get to going, but the cake then fell right out of the pan, upside down, onto the parchment. I put a big glass plate on the bottom of the cake (currently on top) and flipped it one more time. It worked WAY better this time than it did on Sunday – perfectly set, a bit springy, and it all stayed together nicely. Finally, I grabbed the left over graham cracker crumbs and spread them over the sides of the cake. This part was a bit of a pain, and if I did it again I would crush up the ones for the cake sides way finer – the large chunks might be good for the bottom, but they don’t work well for the sides, and it would look way better with smaller pieces there.

Once that was done, we had to cut a slice to test it, then it was back in the fridge to wait for tonight.

Cooking the roast

I put the roast in the oven at exactly 11:45am, meaning my calculated finish time to 124 would be about 5:45pm, leaving enough time for resting and searing to get us to my 6:30pm dinner time target. During the cook I wanted to watch the meat’s temperature carefully, as some folks reported that they needed to bump the oven to 225 or even 250 in order to get it cooked in a reasonable time. So I checked both temperature probes every hour. Here’s the log.

So you can see a few things here. First, about 4 hours into the cook I decided it was going a bit too slowly, and I pushed the oven up to 225. This is something that was suggested in the recipe comments, so I felt OK doing that.

Second, you see that one of my probes kicked the bucket in the middle of the cook. That was unfortunate, but also it was lucky I had the second one in there. The second probe was always behind the first, so when I pulled the meat out, I waited until it showed 127, because the second probe would have been about 122. The other thing you can see is that I was about 30m off – I had originally thought it would take 6 hours, but it was more like 6.5 hours. It’s funny because if you take the original weight of the roast (8.75) and figure 45min per pound, you ger 6.5 hours.

I rested the roast while the oven was heating to 500, and it peaked at 133, which is one degree above the top of medium rare. The second probe probably would have peaked at about 128, so I feel like I hit my target. Once the oven was 500, I put the roast back in, this time uncovered, and let it go for another 10 minutes to crust up. The result was a beautiful crusty prime rib.

I let that rest while I made the sage au jus that is part of the recipe. Also, AB notes in the episode that you can add a few pats of butter to thicken it up, so I did that, too. While it rested I also finished up some roasted carrots and some instant pot baby potatoes, and once those were done I got to slicing.

The meat was perfectly medium rare. The au jus was amazing. This recipe was a huge winner, and I was so relieved because of the time and expense put into it. After the steak we then had cheesecake for dessert, and that was a huge crowd pleaser as well.

All in all, this was an awesome way of wrapping up season five, and I was so happy to be able to share that with some close friends. Now, on to season six! I love the start of a new season – the world is wide open with the recipe choices, and I really enjoy planning out when and where to make them.

Sour Cream Cheesecake

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used two 7oz boxes of Pamela's Honey Grahams
• Next time I'd make the leftover crumbs for the cake sides way smaller
• Cook this for TWO hours, not one. Cooking only one hour results in pudding.

Dry Aged Standing Rib Roast with Sage Jus

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used a three-bone, 8.75 pound pre-aging weight prime rib roast
• Dry aged about 5 days in the fridge, wrapped in cheesecloth
• Did not use the terra cotta planter. Cooked in a roasting pan with a rack, lightly covered in foil.
• Took 6.5 hours with the first four hours at 200, and the next two and a half at 225.
• Added a few pats of butter to the au jus after taking it off the heat