Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
As promised, today I will share my recipe for baby back pork ribs. This is a work in progress. I have made baby back ribs three times now and this was the most successful attempt–one of them being such a failure that I had to throw them out.
Many years ago, I had a friend who used to host what he and his brothers called “Porkapaloosa!” He had a twin brother and two other brothers who would get up at 4:00 am and start smoking and barbecuing pork ribs, pork belly, pork chops, etc. and then throw a big party in the afternoon. These boys knew their meat. My buddy used to keep us in stitches telling us tales of his childhood when he and his brothers vied for food at the dinner table. They were only allowed one piece of meat at a time, and they had to finish the first helping of meat before they could take another helping. They would all take their first helping of meat and then eat it as fast as they could, all the while eyeing each other to see who was the weakest link that night –in a house of four boys, dinnertime was something of a blood sport!
Anyway, probably partially out of survival instincts, they all became excellent bar-b-quers and threw this party once a year. I remember walking into one of the parties and having my buddy usher me to the kitchen where he gave me a taste of the baby back ribs they had been smoking all day–incredibly tender, juicy, succulent meat that was falling off the bone–I was hooked! I’m still trying to achieve that level of goodness, but this recipe is a pretty good one.
It’s based on the 3-2-1 method of smoking baby back ribs: 3 hours of indirect smoke at a low temperature; two hours at a slightly higher temperature, wrapped in foil with flavorings like more dry rub, brown sugar, honey and, critically: fluid, such as apple cider; and finally, one more hour of smoke (without the aluminum foil wrap), but this time with bbq sauce slathered on it.
There are some basic things to look for when making this recipe: make sure the slab of ribs you get is thick and meaty. For my first couple of cooks, the butcher just pulled off a slab of ribs from the top and it wasn’t that they were bad, they were just a little scrawny and came out dry. This was more inexperience and pilot error than anything else–I didn’t realize that I would need to adjust for a scrawny set of ribs and just picked a recipe and cooked. For the cook pictured, I chose the slab I wanted–thick, meaty, hefty ribs, which stood up to the long cook time much better. I also kept a better handle on the temperature. What I didn’t do was season them enough. Baby back ribs can take A LOT of seasoning–kind of more than you think.
Also, I didn’t pay much attention to the temperature. When a cook time is six hours, you know the meat is going to get done–what’s more important is keeping the meat moist enough, and that means you gotta have enough fat in the meat to begin with, and you gotta add liquids to the meat to steam it and keep those juices basting the meat–that happens in the second step when you make a little steamer oven pouch out of aluminum foil and add apple cider to directly into the pouch, keeping the liquid and the meat juices in contact with the meat. It’s easy, it’s tidy and it works! [A note here–I did try using a foil pan for this step in one of my experiments, but I wasn’t happy with the results. I think the meat really has to be in tight quarters with the juice and meat juices in order to achieve the steamy conditions to get the meat very tender without drying out.]
And finally, you smoke the meat unwrapped at the higher temperature for about an hour, but you’ll want to adjust this time depending on how done the ribs are when you take them out of the foil. For the final step, you’re going to slather the ribs with BBQ sauce just to give them that extra punch of flavor.
So I hope you try this recipe out and share what you thought worked or didn’t work.
In my next posts, I’ll be sharing a wonderful side to go along with the ribs and a great recipe for any leftover meat!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food!
Keri
