Got a swell chap that works with me, and he had a birthday this past weekend, and invited me to his place for some swillin and chillin – I decided I would bring some smoked and grilled treats to his place and feed people, so we could engage in the full trifecta of leisure ‘illin’. I also did it because I’ve been curious how my product would start faring with the public. If I ever want to make this a side gig or retirement gig – bringing BBQ to parties is the best R&D you’re gonna get. Start picking people’s brains, tell them how you might make it better, get their feedback.. you know.

So I knew I was going to make some ribs – I used the ribs that I picked up from Save-a-lot a couple weeks back for $1.29/lb – thing with these ribs though is that they were spare ribs – full ones.

I put a can of diced tomatoes and chiles in there so you would get an idea of how big a ‘spare rib’ is. You’ll see that they are a lot larger than most ribs that you buy at the store – most of those ribs are ”St Louis Style” or ‘Baby-Back’ ribs. They are trimmed and ready to rock. These ribs need some love before we can turn them into food. Here’s a naked one:

First thing you’re going to want to do is get any blobs of fat off of there like these:

You can pull them right off, and release them with a knife. easy. At this point, you’ll want to get a bowl to gather up any other loose bits you feel like trimming off or pull off. You want to square your rack up and trim any flapping stuff off.

Now, like I said, you can cook them like this, but you’re going to have a lot of cartilage to mess with in your finished product, cutting them will be difficult, and there will be a lot of weird ‘nibbly’ pieces in your meat. I find the best thing to do is separate the cartilage portion from the rib portion, cook them separately – and use the cartilage portion for other dishes – like beans and rice or a vegetable dish. I use a knife starting with the thinner end of the ribs and you can feel a definite line where the cartilage meets the bone – just slice with a decent knife until it stops towards the end, you’ll eventually hit denser cartilage and/or bone –  just continue cutting in-line over the bone.   (and yes, I did peel the membrane as well – no pictures though, I’m a 1-handed camera man in my pictures, and that’s a 2-hand / messy operation)

At this point, you’ll want a cleaver. I have my $3 cleaver I got at a flea market brand new in a box. (picture taken out of order)

Use the cleaver to finalize the cut. I purposely took my cut farther into the cartilage section so I could have some bigger ribs, but to make sure they were easy to deal with later, I make a couple cleaver hits on the cartilage that was running perpendicular to the rib bones.

I cut the racks in half so they would fit nicely in my Dyna-Glo (still getting the hang of it) – and hit them with my signature rub.

I smoked them for 3.5 hours, then wrapped them with beer in aluminum before cooking them for about 2 more hours.

I unwrapped:

They were falling off the bone – I probably could have gotten away with 1 hour of wrapped smoke, but whatever – free ribs are free ribs, right?

I brushed them with a sweet bbq sauce, and then blasted them on a smoking hot grill:

From there, I had some friends over – we ate a bunch of them. The rest were packed up:

Hopefully at this point, your mouth is watering, and you have an idea on how to prep a huge slab of ribs and shit.

The ribs were a hit, a little over-done for my taste – a lot of people see ribs ‘falling off the bone’ as a great accomplishment, but Championship ribs should stay on the bone – coming away easily when a bite is taken, but not falling apart. That’s what I strive for anyways – you’re eating meat off a bone – there should be some degree of ‘working for it’ involved in your meal.

Anyways, here’s some more pics from the rest of the night. Headed down to Allen St. for some live music and met up with a good friend at an old watering hole. Also almost fell on my ass, slipping on a patch of ice.