So what was the result? It was a pleasant afternoon, one of the beauties of slow cooking is that you can get on with other things and just occasionally go and check on your food or even completely forget about it if you’re confident enough. The garden was weeded and mulched and the lawn mowed. The kitchen floor was also swept and hoovered twice owing to my wonderful daughter plodding in and out of the garden in fairy costume and mud caked wellies.

The cooking process wasn’t quite what I had expected. 75 degrees on my slow oven was too low. It was barely warming it. After about two hours I had the impression that the beef was getting little more than a light steaming so I cranked it up to 100. A big change perhaps but still a very low heat nonetheless. It stayed there for about an hour and a half longer, then I dropped it down for two more hours in the knowledge of when we were likely to be eating. It was a very slow juggle between oven temperature and meat thermometer, neither of mine I fear are accurate or calibrated. Using my environmental meter that I use for work against it I think I’m about seven degrees out!

Close to eating time I had another oven very hot at 240 degrees, ready for Yorkshire puddings cooked in the dripping of a roast a fortnight ago. I did think the beef looked a little anaemic and needed a bit of a crust so I decided to be brave and give it a quick blast to brown the outside. This is completely against everything anyone is ever told regarding roasting beef where you start hot and roast on a falling heat. However I did it purely for aesthetic reasons and I wasn’t disappointed in the end. Less than ten minutes was enough to finish it off but in retrospect this could just as easily have been done right at the start of the cooking process and might have helped keep some extra flavour in but I didn't find it lacking any. A nice half an hour of resting was allowed before the moment of truth.

Carving a roast you have never done before makes you rather nervous. Beef rib isn’t that easy to carve either. But the result was immediately apparent and quite divine. Pink from the centre, right to the edge but not bleeding anywhere. And this was after nearly six hours in the oven. The herb flavours of the thyme, rosemary and bay leaf still tasted fresh and leafy and really permeated the meat. But more than anything, it was ultra-tender and ultra-tasty. There’s no need for gravy when the flavour has remained in the meat rather than trickling out into the roasting tray. I made a small amount of jus with any fluid that had come out along with a little red wine and some mushroom ketchup. It was then served with an almighty array of roast spuds (my wife’s recipe), cauliflower cheese, Yorkshire puddings, peas and some horseradish sauce. A nice Shiraz-Cabernet that my brother had dropped off a while ago complemented it well.

As perfect as it was for me, a few little alterations did have to be made. My son has a strange aversion to any roast dinners so it had to be renamed “roast dinosaur”, Apatosaurous to be exact. We also had a guest whose age is still measured in months. I’d happily give such rare meat to my own children on the basis of my knowledge of pasteurisation temperatures, but a little portion was duly heated a little further for the sake of our youngest guest. In terms of weight consumed against own body weight, she ate more than anyone and was the perfect dinner guest.

I was in beef heaven. I will do this again.