Note to self — when braising beef short ribs in three tablespoons of extremely hot oil, do not, repeat, do not attempt to introduce said ribs to said oil by hand as they stand a chance of falling from fingers to oil from a height of six inches, causing a molten lava splash; which, upon contact with self’s face, yields utterly gruesome Rotten.com-style wounds about 48 hours after the event.
The ribs — cooked according to the recipe in the Balthazar cook book — were worth the burn(s).
David,
Sorry to hear about your burns. This reminded me of my short stint working in the dish-room of the franchise steakhouse in my small hometown during my highschool senior year. The kitchen staff were a wild bunch and played nasty practical jokes on one another.
There were the grease fire contests… The cooking grills had a clamshell pull down with quartz rods that got really hot. You’d pre-heat these, then carefully dip a drink glass of hot oil out of the fryers and pour on the grill. Then you’d thrown on two cups of ice and pepsi that would instantly boil and blast the hot oil up onto the quart rods where the vaporized oil would ignite shooting flames to the ceiling and out the kitchen pickup and front line windows….
The front line staff would retaliate later in the night by tossing a cup of ice in the grease fryer while one of the cooks was standing with their back to it. This splattered molten oil all over the place. Chaos ensued.