BBQ with Franklin: Pork Ribs part 1

You're watching barbeque with franklin Im Aaron and today we're going to cook some pork spare ribs make a rub wrap em sauce em and then eat em it's rib time we're gonna start off by making a rub for these pork spare ribs one empty cup this is what i'm going to use to mix as usual salt pepper of course is the base for anything awesome in my book going to start off with about that much black pepper about half that amount of salt my general ratio for pepper to salt for pork ribs is two parts black pepper to one part salt they're really thin and their really easy to over salt that's kind of the basic thing and this is what we do here at the restaurant but salt and pepper is getting a little boring so we are going to throw some other stuff in there a little bit of chili powder not too much put a little bit of garlic powder if you do a onion powder or garlic powder you're going to want to do more of a granulated kind of thing if they're really powdery it's gonna settle and its going to clump kinda oddly i might even take a little bit so just sprinkle a little bit of that for some savory spices and a little bit of onion powder not too much and for color not so much for flavor im going to add some paprika paprika is pretty standard for rib rubs it'll give kind of a nice red color to it real simple kinda mix it up im only doing one rack of ribs so im not making much rub here but what i am going to do im going to pour it in a shaker get the rub on the ribs really really even unlike brisket and other things where you can just kinda throw the rub on there put it on the smoker there's not as much smoke that goes on a rack of ribs so i think it's a little more important to have a real even coat so you can see just pepper it doesn't look kinda splotchy you dont want it too heavy on the thin side you don't want it to light on the thick side and that's why i'm using a shaker just to keep it kind of lookin pretty now we've got our dry rib rub made we're going to trim some ribs so what you're looking for when you go the grocery store is you're looking for pork spare ribs not saint louis cut and not baby backs baby backs come from a different part of the pig little leaner meat and spare ribs typically have a lot more fat they're going to be a lot more moist they're going to have a lot more flavor a full spare has the breast bone attached right here so we're going to cut that off here in a second it's got anywhere between eleven to fourteen bones you can normally count on twelve and it's not trimmed if you look around here it's just it's got the bones and that it's got the cartilage and stuff in there it's not trimmed it's got the skirt on it and it's got kind of a tip right there what you're looking for ideally is something that has a lot of fat and you dont want it to look too lean but you want to be able to see some fat right there that kind of go with the grain that's going to be a lot of flavor it's going to render more moist ribs hopefully it won't dry out quite as quick if you'll notice here that this end is really thick if i was doing a competition my competition ribs would come from right here because those are the thick ones and they have the straightest bones but we're not doing competition we're going to eat this stuff so we're going to cook the whole thing and the knife i like to use is a ten inch actually its a nine and a half inch just chefs knife you're gonna be hacking through some bones and stuff so if you have a really nice delicate knife that's kinda thin you probably don't want to use it you can use a cleaver you could use a debba which is a japanese butcher knife that shaped like a chef's knife i use them pretty often but they they get kinda heavy when you're doing sixty of these things so i like to have a lightweight one with a thick blade lets get to trimming first thing we're going to do is square this up and there's kind of a baby little rib right there its probably gonna fall out while we are cooking it and it's probably gonna burn up anyway so im going to put my knuckles right there you're gonna lose it regardless i kinda flip it around like that you can slide your knife a little bit and it'll hit something right there gonna cut like that kinda go through and there is cartledge right there if you feel something that's pretty crunchy there are little pieces of bones that go through there if you hit something just kinda go a little farther in until the coast is clear get rid of that or you could save it to use it for uh... beans or if you wanna make a pork or something you can certainly do that and this is what they kind of call a kansas city cut and that's a full spare minus the breast bone what i normally do is i just box off a little bit i get all the rough edges off because you kinda figure if something is sticking out it's going to burn any way kinda hit the skirt and the reason why i cut this off this is a great piece of meat if you want to use it for somethin great i normally dont if you dont cut it off when it heats up its going to pull up anyways so you'll have rub you'll have smokey color all over this part and then you'll have a bald patch right there you don't really want that grab that point and flip it around we've got this and if you like bacon or anything this is where the pork belly is the pork belly is just the fatty back side of this so this meat's pretty good right here it's got a lot of fat but i always trim that off could've been a snack but it's not trim that off because after it's cooked when say if i'm having a lunch service and i'm cutting these things if i left that piece of meat on there the fat woiuld cook out from between the two pieces of meat and they would just slide right off on the board and that's not very attractive and it's not going to have any bark on it thing is we like bark trim it off a little bit so while you're doing all of this got it kinda trimmed run your hands across the bones right there a lot of times if you're getting mass-produced ribs from various companies or even smaller companies when they run these things through a saw they will go too fast and chip the bones sometime now we've got our pork spare ribs trimmed up got breast bone off got it trimmed up nicely skirts trimmed back little piece of fat is cut off the back we're going to pull off the membrane here at the barbeque place i dont pull off the membranes but most people do they definitely turn out better ribs and if you know we got a couple racks you might as well pull them off and what the membrane is its exactly a membrane it's a membrane goes right here its going to be on the inside of the rack of ribs kinda protects the the muscles from the organs and kinda the stuff we're not gonna cook to get that off take a little knife kinda get under there a little bit and kinda peel it up just a little bit tipically butter knives work really good if you have a butter knife i'm right handed so im going to flip it around that way it gets really really slippery so grab you some paper towels that'll help you grip it kinda go to town hopefully it will come off in one big strip if you're lucky oh i like getting lucky it's a pretty nice looking rack of pork ribs got the breast bone off the skirt off the membrane pulled off unfortunately we've got a few bones poking through right here we've got a little term for that its called shiners what shiner typically refers to the other side but in this case its this side not much you can do about it just going to have to kinda deal with it it's an imperfect meat well barbeque is an imperfect thing to cook anyway i think we are ready to put a rub on so we've got our rub made going to open that up just a little bit i always like using a shaker for ribs instead of using a cup or like a hand and throwing it on i think it's a lot more important to have a nice presentation with pork ribs because it's more delicate meat but we need something to make the rub stick i like to use olive oil normally i use a squirt bottle just put a little bit on there useing olive oil is pretty awesome for steaks or really any kind of meat if you're going to grill somethin it's really a pretty great way to start off anything i think it's great for tri tip kinda rub it down just a little bit flip it over get the other side not too much just enough to make the rub stick that's kind of the thing with brisket i don't do anything like this because there's so much blood that comes with the brisket it makes the rub stick anyway the ribs dont really necessarily have a whole lot of blood they don't really have a whole lot going on anyway so we got to add some stuff to it i like to do the meat side first if you've got granules that are of different size you want to keep it moving all the time so something doesnt settle to the bottom and something doesnt end up too salty salt normally settles towards the bottom so i put the holes up top when i'm holding it so kinda sprinkle it on there and i like to look at a lot of pepper i think that looks pretty good if you'll notice that its really even there's no splotchiness i didn't get too much here i didn't get too little here i think it's pretty good if you've got ribs that are really really thin be careful with the salt cuz it doesn't take much salt to get it in there delicately flip it over for this side and it's just me being a little OCD perhaps but i typically do the rub that way so if there is a streak it's actually going parallel to the bones doesn't really make any sense or mean anything so there you go we'll put this puppy on

Channel: BBQwithFranklin

Views: 3,991,770

Rating: 4.6684074 out of 5

Keywords: Barbecue (Cuisine), smoker, ribs, pork, austin, texas, klru, pbs, pbs digital studios, Aaron Franklin, Franklin BBQ

Id: 0eSFdddaRnk

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/MBuddah]

bah! i just rubbed and threw my ribs in the fridge literally 10 minutes ago! now i see this... oh well, ribs sound good for sunday too haha.

[u/theangryburrito]

Ha, I just bought my first set of spare ribs to do for the superbowl. Perfect timing. Thanks.

[u/thegabeman]

Interesting, no sugar in his rib rub. Is that a texas thing?

[u/Oswald_Bates]

The man doesn't put any brown sugar on the ribs. No brown sugar. Texans. Jeesh.