Year of the Pig

A few weeks ago, I got a new smoker because of the sorry inadequacy of my electric smoker. Do not buy one of those. They are lame. If you want a good and still affordable smoker for home use, get the one I got, the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, which you should be able to find for around 180 smackers. It comes recommended even by serious Pitmasters, and is capable of kicking out some top notch barbecue. Also, there is a great website obsessively dedicated to its use: The Virtual Weber Bullet which is quite helpful for getting you started and is loaded with clear instructions and lots of pictures. Here is a proud picture of my new Weber Smokey Mountain, happily cohabitating with Phil, the garden gnome:

Over the past two weeks I have fired off the Smokey Mountain a few times to test it out for shorter smoking sessions and have smoked trout and chicken a couple times, with good success. And so it was that yesterday was its maiden voyage for smoking ribs. The night before I had trimmed and generously coated 1 1/2 racks of spare ribs with Magic Dust, covered them with plastic wrap and put them in the fridge. Around 10 am or so I took them out and put them in the rib rack, ready for the smoke.

Then I got the smoker set up and lit a small chimney of charcoal, around 20 briquets. I decided to test out the Virtual Weber Bullet Page’s “Minion Method” which basically means that you start with a small amount of lit briquets on a pile of unlit ones, so that they gradually light the other ones at a slow, long pace, supposedly keeping a very steady, slow burning, low temperature fire.

I have to say compared to my other brief experiences with this smoker so far, this method really made it a breeze to operate at a steady temperature. After lighting a small chimney of charcoal, and loading the coals and meat in the smoker, it was off and running. I tossed 2 or 3 good wet chunks of hickory and a small handful of oak chips on the coals for smoke wood. At the beginning I babysat the smoker and adjusted the bottom vents some, but the temperature quickly stabilized right at what I would think is an ideal temperature of about 220-230 degrees (measured with a candy thermometer at the top vent). And that was that! The ribs were smoking away by around 11 am, and for the next few hours I went about my business. I checked on the smoker every 30 minutes or so, but it needed almost no adjustment, and just kept burning away at the right temperature. After a couple hours, around 1:30, I opened the smoker and turned the racks over in the rib rack and gave them a little spritz of apple juice:

After having the smoker open a while, I noticed that the charcoal did start to flare up from the oxygen, and I had to close the bottom vents all the way to try and keep the temperature down as it flared up, approaching 250. I was expecting to smoke the ribs for around 5-7 hours, so around 3 I opened up the smoker again, to turn them and spritz them again with apple juice. At this point they looked pretty close to done to me so I got my butt in gear making the sauce (see Apple City Barbecue Sauce Recipe from the last post) that I was planning to coat them with for the last 20 or 30 minutes of smoking. This sauce has ground up bacon and apples in it, so that is pretty cool. Everything is better with bacon right? So why not barbecue sauce!? I had cooked up the bacon earlier, and I whipped up the rest of the sauce as fast as I could, and gave the ribs a nice coating to let it set up for a little while. The sauce was quite tasty on its own, trust me, and at that point the ribs had a nice looking coating of Magic Dust that looked even better.

I let them smoke for another 20 or 30 minutes, and then opened up the smoker again. They looked wonderful!

I took them off. I had smoked 1 1/2 racks of trimmed spare ribs on the top grate, and the three large “tip” pieces that I had trimmed off on the bottom grate with some kidney beans.

I let the ribs rest on the cutting board for a little while. It was a lot of meat for me to contemplate since I was home alone with no one to share them with, but this was my first time trying ribs in my new smoker and it was nice to try it without feeling like I needed to feed anyone. I cut up some of the trimmings to put in the beans, and froze the others along with a half rack of ribs, to see how they hold up for freezing…

Of course, I didn’t hesitate to slice off a couple ribs for an early dinner, and sat in the back yard and tried them. My first impression was that they looked perfect to me with a nice solid but not charred outside. The inside showed a nice red smoke ring around the edge of the meat, the first time I have really gotten that in ribs that I have cooked. And how did they taste? Fine. Very, very fine. I was giddy about it really. The meat was juicy and succulent. The sauce and the magic dust rub gave it a nice spicy robust flavor that was delicious and went very well with the juicy, smoky pork flavor of the rib meat. The texture of the rib meat was firm and meaty, but moist and tender and full of flavor. I am sure there are lots of other ways I can learn to cook ribs equally well, but I really don’t know what I could do to make them much better. I just hope I can reproduce these!

These ribs were basically cooked following the “Apple City Barbecue Grand World Championship Ribs” recipe out of the book Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue which I plugged in the last post. I used the rub and sauce from the recipe, but used different smoking methods and hickory and oak rather than apple wood, which I am sure would also be delicious. I think this rub and sauce are a winning combo, but if I had to give most of the credit to one over the other, I would say the Magic Dust is a real winner. Try it out!

As for the rib count for the Year of the Pig, counting what I had the day I cooked them and for leftovers over the next week plus the half rack that I froze, I had another 14 ribs, putting me well over the 3 pig mark at a 102 ribs. And thank you piggy!

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I had bought a 1/2 a pork picnic at the supermarket and I decided to smoke that and make pulled pork for dinner on Sunday. I had invited over Corin (Crushinator) and Renee and Matt (our own Squidocto) for a relaxing Sunday evening dinner in the back yard and also found out that my housemate Kat and her friend Matt were planning to make a bunch of food too, including some ribs that they had made before and told me about. Sounded promising!

Neither Alissa nor I had ever cooked a Pork Picnic before, and the night before we had trimmed off the thick layer of skin. Wow that pig skin is a pain. This was a half picnic, weighing in at about 3 pounds. I figured I would just smoke it like a Boston Butt, and it would be fine. I read that it was less fatty than a Boston Butt, so I planned to baste it frequently. We used the same Mustard Slather from the day before, and put together a new rub from the Paul Kirk Book, called the “The Baron’s Cajun Rub” (see below for recipe) because we wanted something a little spicier. We tossed it on the smoker around 10 am. I let the rub set in for a few hours, and then started basting the picnic every 30-45 minutes, with the Memphis Basting Sauce from the previous post.

Meanwhile, Kat and Matt prepared their Ribs (see Ribs-a-la-Kat):

To make a long story short, I smoked that picnic for a good 7 hours and it did not appear to have gotten tender yet. I got out the left over ribs from the day before and heated them up so that we would have dinner, and just let the Picnic smoke on, thinking that my smoker was just too low of a temperature (around 200) and that it was gonna take a long time. We had a fine dinner with swiss chard, bbq beans, coleslaw, corn and ribs. And soon after, Kat and Matt were down with the 2nd course, finishing off their Stout-boiled ribs on the grill and then grilling up some seriously delicious red bell peppers stuffed with hominy and jack cheese and avacado. Nice job Matt! As for the ribs, I thought they were very good. Very tender, but not of the falling off the bone stew meat variety. The sauce was tangy and spicy. It was a good method, definitely worth experimenting with, although I must add, smoking is definitely my favorite way to go so far.

As for the picnic, we continued to smoke it and baste it. It ended up being quite dried out. We still pulled the meat apart and mixed it with the a BBQ sauce from the Paul Kirk book and a little apple sauce. It ended up being good for lunches during the week, but definitely not worth showing off to your friends.

Anyway, another 4 ribs brought me up to 67 ribs. Thanks to all the piggies, near and far!

**The Baron’s Cajun Rub
1/4 cup Cayenne Pepper
1/4 Sweet Hungarian Paprika
2 Tbs Chili Seasoning
2 Tbs Fresh Ground Black Pepper
1 Tsp White Pepper
1 Tsp Dry Mustard (I used Coleman’s)
1 Tsp Ground Thyme
1 Tsp Garlic Powder
1 Tsp Onion Powder
1/2 Tsp Rubbed Sage

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INGREDIENTS:
1 rack of spareribs, cut St. Louis Style
1 little can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
a jar of clover honey from upstate ny
1 jar of chipotle mustard
some bourbon
a six-pack of stout beer
some tomato paste
brown sugar
chili powder
garlic powder
paprika
onion powder
salt & pepper to taste.

1. Clean your ribs – remove external fat and that funny little membrane that you see on the outside. To do that, grab as much as you can with your thumb and index finger of your left hand, and then use a short serrated knife to cut underneath the membrane while pulling the membrane back with your left hand. You should feel like you’re skinning an animal. ARGH!

2. Put your ribs in a wide pot, large enough to hold the ribs in one layer, maybe two. I like to use my Le Cruset pots, ‘cause they hold their heat really well.

3. Pour in your stout beer, enough to cover the ribs by an inch.

4. Bring to a boil, and then reduce to a slow, bubbly, simmer. Bloop….blooop.

5. Simmer for an hour or so, until the meat has pulled back from the rib ends about ¾ of an inch.

6. Remove the ribs from the beer, and place on a tray

MEANWHILE, prepare your sauce

1. Take a big squirt of your chipotle mustard sauce and put it in a medium size mixing bowl. If you don’t have chipotle mustard, use brown mustard.

2. Add half of your honey jar. Perhaps ¾ to 1 cups worth

3. Chop up 2 of the chipotle peppers really fine, and then add those, along with some of the adobo sauce. BE CAREFUL – HOT!

4. Add a few tablespoons of tomato paste, a couple shakes of pepper, salt, and what ever other dried flavorings you think will taste good.

5. Stir it with a fork, add some bourbon, drink some bourbon, add some stout, drink some stout., stir.

6. Put it down and let it sit for 20 minutes or so. Drink your beer.

7. Adjust flavorings to taste.

MEANWHILE, prepare your grill

You’re just re-warming the ribs and searing the outside, so you don’t want it too hot so that the ribs burn, but you want it hot enough so that you’re not waiting around forever to eat. Interpret that how you want.

Lather sauce on both sides of ribs – and deposit on grill. Grill for ten to a maximum of fifteen minutes, making sure to turn them to get those purty grill marks.

Enjoy!

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WOW. I feel that I have a lot to report on from this weekend, as there was a lot of Pig action. Let me start by mentioning that for the past couple weeks I have been reading Paul Kirk’s book “Championship Barbecue” which I got shortly after my review of his restaurant, R.U.B. (see the Ribulator, Entry #15). It’s a pretty great book with a lot of good information about barbecue, and a ton of recipes. It will make you dream about delicious smoked meat. Last week, I had busted out the smoker to try some of his suggestions for chicken and I was not disappointed, but this weekend it was time to smoke the real deal: RIBS.

***A BASIC WORD ABOUT MY SMOKER: First off, I have THIS SMOKER which is an electric “bullet” or “water” smoker. I think that review is pretty accurate. This smoker is ok, but definitely not awesome, so I wouldn’t run out and buy it. I may have to try some of the modifications that guy suggests, or just go for a Weber Smokey Mountain. That said, the advantage of this smoker is that it is damn easy and low maintenance. Turn it on and it basically keeps a constant temperature, and you can walk away and not worry about it. It certainly has its limitations, including the fact that it seems barely able to get up to the temperature it needs to be at. Also, I don’t think that it generates quite as much smoke as a a charcoal smoker would, but that said, it does a pretty nice job and is a good way to get started smoking. For those of you that don’t know, the electric “bullet” or “water” smoker is basically a little cylindrical tower that looks a little like R2-D2. Inside, it has a heating element in the bottom, around which you put your wood chips or chunks. This provides the heat and the smoke. Above that is a water pan, which helps to stabilze the temperature, and keeps the smoker moist. Above that are 2 18-inch racks, where the smokables go.

Anywho, I got up early on Saturday morning and got out the ribs I had bought the day before from the local supermarket. The ribs looked pretty good to me, trimmed St. Louis Style. Alissa and I did our best to remove the membrane from the bone side of the rack. It definitely takes a little skill and is annoying, but it’s a must. Once done, I followed a basic technique from the Paul Kirk book, coating the rack in a Mustard Slather (recipe below) and then sprinkling them with a basic leftover rub I had from last summer. After that, it was into the smoker. I put the ribs on the top rack, and under them I put a big bowl of pinto and kidney beans (mixed with onion, garlic, bell pepper, leftover mustard slather, and ketchup) to catch all the porky drippings. I put a mix of hickory, apple and oak chips in the smoker pan, and let it smoke.

It seemed like that temperature stayed around 210 or so, and I smoked it for a total of about 5 1/2 hours. For the last half of that time I basted the ribs with the “Memphis Basting Sauce” (see below).

We took the ribs out and I thought they were pretty damn good. They were tender and tasty. This is definitely on the track to my ideal cooking method for ribs. I mean, you just can’t beat smoking.

I think the rub could have been set a little more, and maybe been a little more assertive, but the actual meat was nice and tender, smokey and flavorful. We ate some for dinner–I had 4, bringing me up to 63 ribs–and wrapped the rest, about a half rack, in the plastic wrap and put them in the fridge. I would like to add the that beans were delicious. I think that smoking under pork is about the best way known to man to cook beans.

But that is just about half the story cause there was more to come on Sunday…stay tuned for part 2.

RECIPES
The Baron’s Special Sauce (aka Mustard Slather):
1 Generous Cup firmly packed light brown Sugar
1 Teaspoon Kosher Salt
1 Teaspoon White Pepper
1 12-ounce can beer, flat
1 32-ounce jar prepared yellow mustard
2 tablespoons Louisianna hot sauce

Memphis Basting Sauce
3 cups water
1 1/2 Cups red wine vinegar
3/4 cup Heinz 57 (I substituted KC Masterpiece BBQ Sauce)
1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons Worcestershire
1/2 cup tomato ketchup
1/4 prepared yellow mustard
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 Tablespoon Seasoned Salt
2 Teaspoons Liquid Smoke (optional)
***Combine and simmer over medium heat for 15 min. Use Baste warm.

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I hate to disappoint people, especially my loyal reader(s). After I read Squidocto’s comment yesterday morning, I realized that my plans for the day had changed. I needed to cook some ribs. I was on Staten Island, driving back to Jersey City from Mandolin Brothers, when I realized this, and I thought, “Well, I am on Staten Island. I outta look for a butcher!” I started scanning the store fronts as I drove and a couple traffic lights later, I spotted Bruno’s Pork Store on Forest Avenue. That seemed like good luck so I swung left through oncoming traffic and parked in front of the store. The place was filled with Italian grocery staples, prepared foods and deli items, and of course, a meat counter. The guy behind the counter seemed friendly enough, chatting up a crane operator with a super NY/NJ accent who was getting some lunch. I waited and when the butcher asked me if he could help me, I replied, “Whatcha got in the way of Ribs?” He looked confused and said “What?” to which I clearly replied, “What Kind Of Ribs Do You Have?” That, he understood, and he pulled out a rack of spare ribs, which looked impressively huge.

The ribs were $3.39/lb, and the rack was about 4 lbs. He wrapped them up and I drove them home.

I had a recipe in mind, from the 60′s Time Life “American Cooking: New England,” called Maple Barbecue Spareribs.

I looked at the giant slab of ribs and thought of my inspiration for cooking them, and so I called up Squidocto, inviting to come over and sample them with me.

A few hours later, the Ribs were cut up, and coated with mustard.

I put them in the broiler for 5 minutes on each side. Squido knocked on the window and I let him in. After a very formal handshake, we followed the recipe, coating the ribs with the Maple Syrup sauce and putting them in the oven at 350 and basting them every 15 min or so.

After an hour, they needed a little more time to brown up and we gave them another 20 minutes or so, finishing them for a couple of minutes in the broiler again. By this time we were both starving. But that is good timing.

I excitedly bit into the first big ass rib. I liked the sauce pretty well, although it lacked a certian “umph.” It was sweet and tangy, and I thought it has a nice unexplained citrusy flavor (that Matt did not detect). I thought the crispy parts of the rib were delicious, but overall we were both very disappointed. We blamed the ribs themselves, thinking that they were just overly fatty. I was hungry and proceeded to plow through 5 big ribs, liberally discarding the fattier parts.

A little later Kat got home and we reheated a couple ribs for her to try. I made her nervous, watching as she gnawed a couple ribs. I anxiously awaited her opinion, which was that the sauce was fine, but that the cooking method was bad. She thought that a slower and lower temperature would have benefited them, breaking down the fat and making them more tender. I think that is a good possibilty, but its hard to know whether it was the cooking method or the ribs themselves that were responsible for the disappointing ribs. The ribs were huge and they did seem to have a lot more fat and gristle than a lot of the other ribs I have tried. I think that I need to learn more about selecting ribs and the way they are trimmed and cut.

One way or another I was disappointed. The ribs were unsatisfying despite that fact that I ate 5 of them. They just didn’t sit well and that is sad for such a nice looking rack of ribs. Anyway, that makes for 23 1/2 ribs, and I still thank the Piggy. Sorry we did not do justice to your ribs!

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So tonight, while I was taking sweet comfort in my Ribs, my culinary-adept friend Kat joined me and sampled a rib with me. She agreed that the Ribs could be improved, but I think she was more impressed with the sauce and the ribs than I was. On second thought, the sauce is pretty good, for those who would like the recipe, here it is:

1/4 cup Lemon Juice
1/2 cup Crappy BBQ Sauce
1/2 cup of tomato paste
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, quartered
1/2 cup distilled white vinegar
1/2 cup mustard
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
5 tablespoons red pepper sauce (I used Cholula, Tabasco is fine)
1 tablespoon salt
3 tablespoons finely chopped garlic
1 teaspoon dried hot red-pepper flakes
1 teaspoon black pepper

Add ingredients to a 1 1/2- to 2-quart heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally, then reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until thickened, about 30 minutes to a million years.

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