I was a vegetarian, until moving to New Orleans, where some corrupting influence who shall remain nameless took me to Texas Bar-B-Que in Metairie and bade me try the ribs. Thanksgiving turkey, crown roast at Christmas, bacon, hamburgers, filet mignon etc., etc.: I had successfully resisted them ALL - but one bite, just one bite of unctuous, smoky, tangy-sweet, charred around the edges, melt-in-your-mouth and get-all-over-your-face ribs and there was no turning back.
Ever.
But few, if any, other barbecue restaurants make ribs so good. Why not? I have no concrete evidence, but I suspect it is because most chefs lack the time, the patience, and the temperature control to coax every bit of velvet tenderness out of their ribs. It seems they just throw them in the oven (or the smoker) for a couple of hours and call it good. But it’s not good – not that good.
Fortunately, yesterday (the Snow Day) provided NBB and me with time aplenty – patience we already had, and temperature control was supplied by the knob at the top of the oven. In short, it was the perfect opportunity to try to make ribs at home, made more perfect with a “manager’s special” at the next-door grocery store, on ribs that were almost past date.
Without actually looking at rib recipes, I had an idea of how to go about it – I remember when I was maybe 13 years old, my aunt and uncle and their 3 kids flew in from California, and the aunt made ribs. I remember being so surprised that she could make them in a regular oven – but she did it with tin foil. All I really remembered was the tin foil. But the ribs were delicious, and now she and my uncle own two rib restaurants in the Bay area – so, others seem to agree that she was onto something!
Tin foil, and a “slow oven” – these must be the ingredients to good ribs at home - plus barbecue sauce*. The rest was just a lucky guess and a leap of faith – that ten hours after saying “let’s make ribs!” we’d actually sit down to eat dinner, and not starve with an inedible (bloody or carbonized) lump of meat and bone.
Thus, the rib adventure began:
We don’t own a vessel large enough to brine ribs – and we didn’t really have time – but I sprinkled the ribs all over, both sides, with table salt while we ate lunch and drank egg nog plus. After an hour or so, I rinsed the ribs, patted them dry, and gave them a liberal coating of Cajun spice mixture (the best $6 ever spent at Sam’s Club!). Then the ribs got sealed up in tinfoil with a couple of diced onions -the idea being that they would “melt” over time and baste the meat with onion juice throughout the whole long slow cooking process - and then set the whole tinfoil package on a big cookie sheet inside a “slow oven.”
I somehow got it into my head that heat is the enemy of tender ribs – so I started with the oven at 200 degrees. I realized pretty quickly that this was too cold - I put my hand in the oven and didn’t even feel uncomfortable – so I cranked it up to 225.
That’s all.
The ribs stayed in there from 2:00 in the afternoon until 10:00 at night – no poking, no looking, no cheating, just pure blind faith that magical things were happening inside of that tin-foil envelope.
Well…
They were!
At 10 – having been tormented with the aroma of slow-cooking pork and onions all afternoon – we peeled back the foil and found the ribs inside thorughly cooked, moist-looking and fragrant with the meat just pulling back from the bone. To finish them off, I slathered the top with barbecue sauce and put them under the broiler (without even taking them off of the cookie sheet) until they began to char.
So easy,
so tender.
Such a reward for the faithful!
* A Note on Barbecue sauce: as far as I have been able to find out, Luling City Market Barbecue Sauce is the best barbecue sauce in the world. But if you’re not in Houston - or don’t feel like paying for shipping – you’re stuck with something else. Some day I will explore homemade barbecue sauce - in the meantime, we used Bullseye brand original barbecue sauce, which is spicy, inoffensive, a little sweet (it contains molasses) – nicey enough, and cheap.
