Blizzards, Butchers & BBQ

I took another stab at making smoked pork spare ribs this past weekend. I used the same rub recipe as before, but this time I had a new variable: 25-degree weather.

BBQ means different things to different groups of people. Up here (New York), when you tell someone you're going to barbeque, they see it as throwing a piece of meat on an open fire. Grilling, whether it's a steak or a bell pepper, is often referred to as barbeque. It's more of an event than a process.

In Texas - and other bbq savvy areas - the definition of bbq is more strict: cook it low, slow, and with smoke. The idea is to take cheap, flavorful pieces of meat and transform them into something slightly spicy, slightly sweet, and hopefully fall-apart tender.

Quoting McGee: "Meats with a significant amount of tough connective tissue must be cooked to a minimum of 160-180F to dissolve their collagen into gelatin, but that temperature range is well above the 140-150F at which the muscle fibers lose their juices. So it's a challenge to make tough meats succulent. The key is to cook slowly, at or just above the collagen-dissolving minimum, to minimize the drying-out of fibers." (p.163)

Ideally, when BBQ-ing, the cooking temperature is 220-250F. For pork ribs, about 4 hours does the job. I had trouble maintaining that temperature in the cold weather, so after 3 hours I put the ribs in a 225-degree oven for another 1.5 hours. They came out very tender. Jen and I ate one rack and chopped up the second rack to use as a tamale filling!

Gotta thank Staubitz Market, my newly found butcher, for the meaty ribs.