Smoked Pork Ribs….MMMMmmmnnn!!!!!…Pork!

So, a little more experimentation with US style smoked BBQ meats. This time I tried smoking pork ribs. Again like with the beef brisket (see below) the idea behind cooking this is to cook it slow and low. As ribs contain a lot of connective tissue, the idea is to smoke slowly at low temperatures (between 80-100 degrees centigrade) in order to render fat to keep it moist and to convert collagen into gelatine to keep the meat soft.

I started off with a basic BBQ spice rub which was taken from ‘BBQ bible: Sauces, Rubs and Marinades’ by Steve Raichlen and massaged it into my ribs for one hour before placing it into the smoke oven.


Above you can see the beautiful colour of the spice rub that was used and how it looks on the meat before smoking.

The ribs were then placed on a rack and then placed in the smoke oven at 100 degrees centigrade.

After one hour, they are taken out and basted with BBQ sauce (recipe again taken from ‘BBQ bible: Sauces, Rubs and Marinades’ by Steve Raichlen ‘Sweet and Smoky BBQ sauce’. Then again they are placed into the oven and taken out and basted every hour for 3 hours.

Then the ribs are ready:

You can see in the pics above that the ribs have a beautiful sheen to them from the basting of the sauce.

They are then cut into 2 rib pieces and served up.

The Finished Product:

The final verdict was that whilst they were very good, they were a little chewy and a little bitter in taste. Possible reasons are that whilst we thought the membrane on the underside of the ribs was taken off, there may have been remnants left on. Secondly, it is possibly that further cooking may have made the meat a little more tender. The bitterness may have been a result of the smoking process due to the type of wood used or the temperature of the smoke. This needs further investigation.

I have since found out that smoking too much at too low a temperature can cause the formation of creosote which firstly can produce some bitter and acrid tastes and secondly is carcinogenic…obviously not a goodthing! I will therefore keep this in mind and pay more attention to my smoke when I next smoke meat.

NOTE: I have looked at the ribs that we used and found that the membrane was in fact fully on. I have now made some more ribs with the membrane off which have produced a much more tender rib. Also everyone who ate these ribs found them quite spicy and some had indigestion. To fix this, I have cut out cayenne pepper and greatly reduced the amount of black pepper.These ribs were far superior in flavour as a result. The rub used on this second batch was Col Klink’s dry rub whose recipe can be found at www.egullet.com

Also as stated below there was no smoke ring. This could well be explained by the article below.