Summer has arrived! We’ve had great weather for most of the last week (except for the 10 minutes that it rained on Wednesday that happened to coincide with me having to walk up to work from the train station). To celebrate I thought I’d try ribs on the BBQ.
Never having done them before, which is the usual state of affairs around here, I did some research and came across this amazing site. There’s more info here on ribs and how to cook them than you’ll ever need. There are a few methods that people recommend; you can either cook them slow on the BBQ for a few hours, or speed it up by boiling or putting them in the oven first. I decided to go the whole hog (pig joke!) and just BBQ them from start to finish, as the Amazing Ribs site recommends.
I bought the meat from Costco in the morning. It cost around $20 for two huge slabs of baby backs. When you start to prepare them, the first thing to do is to remove the membrane on the bone side. It’s like a piece of thin rubber and once I got the hang of the technique (Louise figured it out first) it was easy to get off. Then you cut off any non-uniform ribs at each end of the slabs, and trim any excessive fat or thick meat.
For the rub, I decided to make Meathead’s “Magic Dust”. I divided all the quantities on that page by 4 and still ended up with enough for at least another 4-6 slabs, that I’ve bottled up and put away for next time. Then I added a bit of mustard for a base and applied the rub. The mustard cooks off and you can’t tell that you ever put it on there when it comes to eating.
After doing all that, the slabs looked like this:
My Weber BBQ has “flavorizer bars” (god I hate that non-word) under the grill, and apparently the trick with cooking the ribs for a long time is to fill foil roasting pans with water and put them on the bars, under the grill. Once you do that, you can start getting the grill to the right temperature. You’re supposed to cook them at 225F for around 3 hours, but that’s the temperature at the GRATE, not at the dome where my (only) thermometer is. I just used the center burner, but I’m pretty sure I made it too hot (I figured the dome would read higher than the grate, given that the ribs would be on the non-directly heated sections of the grill), so for next time I’m getting a decent oven thermometer with a cable that I can leave at the grate to get the real temperature. I noticed later in the cooking that as I increased the burner setting, the dome temperature didn’t seem to increase but I’m sure the grate temp did.
So after an hour at an indicated 250F, the ribs were starting to smell great and looked like this!
In total I cooked them around 250F for 2.5 hours at which point they seemed to pass the bounce test for doneness, then put all the burners to maximum and basted the BBQ sauce on (Tony Roma’s Original, we both love that stuff). The idea is that you sizzle them for about 10 minutes per side, in practice I found that too much and they started to char pretty quickly, so I just did 5-7 minutes per side. We kept them warm in a very low heat oven while Louise quickly made some mashed potatoes, and voila!
So how were they? Very very good, but not perfect; not surprising as it was my first time. First, they weren’t the most tender ribs I ever had. I think that I need to cook them at a lower temperature and for longer next time. Also I didn’t foil them – something that I’ll probably try next time and see if it helps. Secondly, I charred the bottom of them a bit. I’m pretty sure this was down to the fact that the water-filled foil pans I used weren’t long enough to cover the whole slabs so I used two side-by-side, meaning there were small gaps between them, and that’s exactly where the charring occurred. So next time I need longer pans.
Otherwise, they tasted great and were a very successful first attempt, I think! It was also a lot of fun, and made for a really enjoyable Saturday afternoon as I prepared them and looked after them as they cooked. I didn’t really think I’d ever make my own ribs at home, and yet here we are!
#1 by Dr. Banner on May 24th, 2009 - 7:40 pm
You could always try and boil, pressure cook or crock-pot them before you BBQ them. The wife makes a mean rib in the crock pot. I think you could 1/2 the time and them move them onto the ‘Q’ for the remainder… hmmm… maybe I’ll try that… puny human.