What kind of a BBQ summer would it be without Spare ribs! Wifey and I loaded the kids up in the car and drove to Sweden for a little meat shopping. We intended to get Baby back, since it is what wifey really wanted, but they did not have it, so we picked up almost 4 kilos of St Louis cut spare ribs. Oh well, as it turned out, I´m almost glad they didnt have baby back! So this is what happend on the BBQ that day:
1. Took off the membrane to make it as tender as possible.
2. Washed it off in water, to get rid off any bits of bone or other little bits and dry it with some paper towels.
3. Rubbed it first in with a sweet mustard to get the dry rub to stick nicely. There was little to none of the mustard taste in the finished ribs.
Dry rub:
5 T brown sugar
1/2 T Garlic powder
1/2 – 1 T Black pepper
3/4 T Chilli powder with cumin
1/2 T Salt
4. Applied the dry rub, and stuck it back in the fridge till the next day. Some say you don´t have to wait very long from applying the rub to grilling it, but surely, a little time to let it soak in can´t hurt.
5. Preheated the grill and put in one pack of apple wood chips. Used drip pans under the meat, and another drip pan with water over the heat to keep the meat nice and moist. I had the temperature sitting at roughly 225 F.
6. When the apple chips were done, I switched it out for a pack of Hickory woodchips. After that was all smoked out I did not add any more woodchips for the rest of the grilling.
7.After 5 1/2 hours the meat was just perfect, did the bend test on the meat, and poked it a little bit with toothpicks. I did not apply any wet sauce to the meat the entire time until the last 2 minutes. Then i brushed on a fair amount of some Baby Back Rays BBQ sauce, let it caramelize on both sides and wrapped it in foil until people were ready to eat.
It turned out perfectly if I may be so humble to say so myself. The guests really enjoyed it too. I thught i had gotten plenty and secured myself leftovers, but, no it was all gone by the time everybody was done eating.
We served the the ribs with corn on the cob and a coleslaw with an apple and a yellow pepper in it. It was good, but I think the next time, we will go back to a more traditional coleslaw.
Here is our daughter, Ida, giving her sign of approval of the ribs!