Competition Ribs On A Pit Boss Pellet Grill | Competition Ribs For Beginners

[Music] how you doing i'm darren with ash kickin barbecue if this is your first time to the channel then welcome if you've been here before then welcome back today i have something truly special for you we're going to be talking competition style ribs now i did this before it was my very first video it was absolutely awful so i've been meaning to kind of do one of these and it just so happens that this is also my entry for the barbecue pit masters of youtube competition joe over at smoke and joe's pit barbecue is putting this on it's awesome there's 20 youtubers in this competition i'm really honored they asked me to do it and i'm really looking forward to doing this the first person i'm going up against in round one is cj from cooking with cj so he's going to be doing a rip video i'm doing this video you guys will watch them both then go over to joe's channel and vote and whoever has the most votes is moving on to the next round before we jump into this i just want to say thank you to our sponsors we have yoder smokers doll strong suckle busters midland meat company haley home meter and thermoworks so a lot of those products i use now so that's really exciting and also for you as the viewer yoder smokers is giving away a ys640 pellet smoker to one of the viewers who votes throughout this competition so be sure to follow the links down in the description and go and vote you have a chance to win one of the best smokers made in america and that's huge that's awesome so thank you to joe for getting this put together cj good luck buddy i'm gonna have a link for cj's video down below enough chatting let's just get into this so for me i'm a kcbs competition cook i have my team ash kickin bbq and what i like to do when i cook ribs is i like to buy full racks of spares that way i can get big thick racks and i can cut them down to what i use so this is actually an eight and a half pound rack of spare ribs and we're gonna pretty much whittle this down to what we're gonna cook in the competition now there's gonna be people out there that say i'm wasting a lot of meat i'm not wasting any of this i'm going to cook it all it's not getting thrown away and i don't throw away anything that i trim for competitions my briskets and pork butts i make into sausage so it may look like there's a lot of waste but i promise you i'm not wasting this food i don't like to waste food so this is strictly for competition purposes so let's just jump in and i'll show you how i'm gonna trim this rack down okay guys you can see we have our full rack of spares here it's exactly what i like i like to be able to trim them down into st louis cut myself so again this is an eight and a half pound rack this is a big rack this hog cannot stay away from the feed but hey i'll take it so the first thing i like to do is i like to flip them over bone side up and i'm just going to come in and you have this kind of skirt meat right here just like to pull that up and then we're just going to come in and we're going to just remove that and we'll say like i said we'll save this and cook this up and use it for tacos or whatever so now we kind of got that out of the way next thing i like to do is you got this sternum bone right here i just like to come in and we're just going to take that out because we're not going to cook that so then we kind of come in and i like to kind of find the longest bone here and just feel around and it's seems like it's this one right here so i'm just going to come in and i'm going to make an imaginary line with my knife and just kind of fall that down and if you do this right you're just cutting through cartilage there should be no bone you're cutting through so we're just going to go ahead and take this down making it as straight as possible because when it comes to competition barbecue presentation is a factor we'll set that off to the side now at this point here i like to come in and this bone right here there's not much to it it's a little bit of junk there so i typically will come in and just take that off like so and then i like to typically cook nine bones so i'll come in and one two three four five six seven eight nine bones right there and then we'll just come in and we'll come straight down take that out like that and we'll set this off to the side again we'll cook that for a little snack that's all really nice well marbled meat so definitely not going to waste that we'll flip it over and you can kind of see we have what's getting close to being a rack of competition style ribs so all we want to do here is kind of square things up make them look nice and you can spend as little or as long as you want doing that i usually like to be pretty anal about these things because i feel like you can control your appearance scores generally so why not spend a little extra time doing so making sure you get a good appearance score so we'll just come in and take off any sharp corners and another thing you can do is get your rack out in front of you and just kind of push down and see if there's any meat that overhangs and then just come in and take that off like that just to straighten it out so that's starting to look pretty good there that's a nice looking rack here now we got some fat over here i'm not overly concerned about that but i am going to take a little bit off here because chances are my turn and bones are going to come in here when i do a competition i usually cook three racks of ribs and i'm hoping to get at least two bones out of each but i'd really prefer to get three i generally like to do four by four so four down four on top five down five on top if i can manage it if i got really good ribs but you need at least six pieces for kcbs barbecue so obviously today we're just gonna go over how to cook these but i'm gonna come in and i'm just gonna take a little bit of this off here just so we can get some nice color and some nice rub on and i don't want them too too fatty i don't really so much care about this end but kind of right here where my money is gonna be i'm gonna go ahead and just clean those up a little bit and this is all pretty soft fat so it wouldn't hurt anything to leave it but i think it's just worth it to take a little bit extra time and get that out of there now you can see here on the opposite side if we push down we got the meat coming out here we're just gonna take and get that out of there like so a little piece hanging on there we'll take that off okay now at this point everything is looking pretty good i like the way it's looking i like the marbling we have here i like the shape of the ribs now obviously you want to go ahead and remove your membrane because you don't want the judges to bite into this you want them to have a nice clean bite so some people will actually leave this on until after they're done cooking them and then remove it i don't really like to play that game i just like to have everything ready to go so you can come in here with a butter knife or you can use your hand whatever you want to do get underneath the membrane and just kind of give it a pull and get it off of there you can use a paper towel to help grip it if you want to do that sometimes you get it clean in one sometimes it rips like it did here so we'll just go ahead and get this off i'm gonna work at it okay so now that we have our membrane off there's a little bit of fat on these bones you can come in and clean them off if you want i don't think it's huge that you get it completely cleaned up because the way i cook these a lot of this fat is gonna render down so it's not a huge deal to come in and get these all cleaned but we'll go ahead and take off some of the harder fat here it's nice if you just hold it up at an angle here run your knife along the bone you can get a lot of that out of there i'm not too concerned about this like i said it's going to cook down it's going to render down the way we cook and that is looking pretty good there now you can see here from the butcher it's a little mangled that's all right there's not much we can do about that it should be all right when we cook them but obviously we will have to take that into consideration for turn-ins and that's why we cook it cook a few extra racks i'm just going to come in and remove a little bit more of this meat that's hanging off the edge try and get these looking as nice as i possibly can all right and then so i like to just come in and i just like to score each of the bones here and that just kind of helps with the pull back so you get some nice even pull back so i'll just come in with my knife and just give it a little score just to kind of loosen that up around them you don't want to cut through them obviously but just a little scoring here to get them so they kind of break free a little easier now at this point we are going to season our ribs and on the bottom i'm going to go ahead and use tailgater's barbecue party rub and i actually do use this rub in competition on all of my meats as a base layer i think it adds a really nice savory pop it's absolutely delicious so we'll come in with that and then on the bottom we're going to come in with a little texas pecan just a little bit this has some sugar in it so we definitely don't want the bottoms to burn especially the way we're cooking these it can happen so you want to be careful with your sugar content on the bottom of your ribs so we're going to let this soak in for about 10-15 minutes and i'll bring you back then okay guys so it's been about 10 minutes we're going to go ahead and we are going to get the top side season here and this is what you're looking for when you lift these up you don't want any rub to fall off so we know the rub is sticking nicely and at this point i want to transfer to a cooking rack and i will be cooking these ribs on that rack i think it's really nice for transporting purposes being able to rotate your meats when you're cooking them for even cooking so i think that's a really nice feature here is being able to cook on these racks which i really enjoy now at this point we're going to go ahead and get our top size seasoned we're going to come in with the tailgaters barbecue party rub we're just going to give a light coat on top here this is our savory rub like i said before so this is our base layer coming in with that we're going to get our sides our edges come in here up top you can also get your edges by picking up the loose seasoning on the board afterwards if you so choose all right and that's looking pretty good there for our first layer now we're going to come in with our suckle busters honey barbecue rub now this is going to add a sweet element which i really enjoy and i think is important for competition barbecue this is going to kind of be our main rub here so we're going to go ahead and not really bury it but give it a nice healthy dose here kind of get everything coated up just kind of press it in you don't want to rub it in but just press it in make sure you have everything coated up evenly you want a really nice presentation here we'll go ahead and get our edges again okay so we have our edges here just give that press in and then the last rub that we're going to come in with is our sucklebusters texas pecan barbecue rub and this has a little bit of heat to it but not too much but this is going to give us a really really really great color so we're going to go ahead and do that and we're just going to go with an even medium coating on this this is strictly to give us some good color they also have a competition rub that gives a really great color but i kind of want to test this out and again i do use the honey barbecue rub in competition so you're just kind of seeing a little bit of what i'm doing here now the pecan is something new i'm trying so you guys kind of get to be my guinea pigs here go ahead and get our edges we're just going to give that a little press get our edges here and i'm going to wait to get my edges on this side because i don't want to lift this up and have any of the rub come off so at this point we're going to go and get the smoker fired up and we're just going to let these sit here and sweat and once they look like they're wet on top that's when we're going to get them on the smoker so i'll bring you guys back at that point okay guys it's been about 20 minutes you can see here the ribs are starting to sweat they have a great color already i went ahead and seasoned my edges already off camera but yeah these are looking phenomenal that's exactly what i'm looking for so i'm gonna go ahead and get the smoker fired up and i will bring you back at that time now i struggled with which smoker i should be using to cook these on i am going to be cooking on the pit boss pro series 1600 strictly because i think a lot of people who are looking to get into competition barbecue are on pellet grills and actually in kcbs pellet grills are completely legal and you're allowed to use them and people have done really well with them you can take a look at david bauska at butcher barbecue and pellet envy and many others so i'm going to be cooking these on my pellet grill today now i almost thought about cooking them on my gateway drums because that is what i actually use to cook my ribs on at competition is gateway drums but i'm going to have a series coming on competition bbq for beginners so i think we're going to kind of do pellet grills and drums and kind of cover all our bases on that and we're gonna go really in depth in you know how to cook competition barbecue for beginners so today just to keep it easy keep it simple we're just gonna rock the pit boss pro series 1600 we're gonna be cooking hot and fast we're gonna be cooking at 300 degrees now hot and fast on a pellet grill is going to be way different than hot and fast on a gateway drum smoker so i'm just going to kind of show you that process one thing i did want to mention is with these ribs here i did kind of just squeeze them up and shape them because how these go on that cooker is how they're going to cook so you can see here that i kind of bunched them up so they look nice and thick and they're relatively uniform so i'm gonna get the smoker fired up and i will meet you guys outside okay guys we're outside we have the pitboss pro series 1600 running at 300 degrees give you a look at these ribs here they look absolutely awesome nice color already now this is the side that we cut on right there we are going to actually face the bone side towards the fire pot that way we get even pull back along here so we're going to go ahead and get these in and like i said here pull back side towards the fire pot we have a smoke tube running just for a little bit of supplemental smoke running at 300 degrees however we're using cooking pellets today and they actually smoke really well even at 300 degrees so this may not be necessary in the future using these pellets but we're gonna run it today just to make sure we get a nice smoke ring and nice smoke flavor on these so again pull back side towards the fire pot just so we get some even pull back i'm gonna close this down and we're gonna let this go for one hour and then we'll come out and check for color see if they're looking dry if they are maybe we'll give them a spritz but we're gonna close this down for one hour so i will see you then okay guys it has been one hour you can see our ribs are looking absolutely fantastic we've got some really nice color on there now the rub hasn't quite set it's still coming off a little bit there you can see so we're just gonna let this go for another hour maybe in a half hour we'll come out and check it again and spritz if it needs it but right now it's looking really good there's no need to spritz you can see we're starting to get a little pull back there so we're just gonna let this go for another hour and i will bring you back see you then okay guys so it has been 45 minutes these ribs have been on for one hour and 45 minutes and you can see they're looking absolutely awesome we have some fantastic color here and if we do the scratch test we don't have any rub coming off so our rub is set so at this point we're going to go inside and get them wrapped up and i will show you how to do that the main thing to keep in mind here when cooking these ribs is you want to wrap at color it doesn't matter how long it takes if it takes an hour and 40 minutes or two hours you just want to wrap when your color is good and your rub is set now how your timeline goes depends on how hot you're cooking etc so you're going to have to fine tune that for competition but i know for me cooking at 300 degrees that about an hour and 45 minutes to two hours is typically where i'm gonna be wrapping so i'm gonna get these inside and show you how we're gonna wrap we'll see you then okay guys you can see we have our ribs here they're looking really good look at all that moisture coming out of them they're nice and juicy now at this point what i like to do is kind of flip them over and i'll show you here is i'm just going to go ahead and pull off any of this junk coming out of the bones we don't want that for presentation purposes so we'll go ahead and set that off to the side and i'm just going to come in and i'm just going to get a reading here with my thermapen and we're at about dead center we're probably about 182 degrees if you can see that so in my mind i'm going to throw these on and then once we get them wrapped and then i'm going to check them after about a half hour because i just kind of want to see where they're at but right now they're at about 180. i can tell you it's probably going to be close to an hour but we're just going to monitor them closely because we don't want to overcook them for competition so at this point what i like to do is i like to come in between each bone and just kind of break that skin loose so we're getting some even pullback all the way across you can kind of see here we got some more pullback on this side than on this side reason for that is just kind of the heat flow and everything so we'll just go ahead and break those free so we can get some even pull back and if you're not careful here these are very hot so maybe wear some liners underneath your gloves if you're not used to it go ahead and break that through and now you can see here we got some nice pull back on these bones now that's going to be really great for presentation wise and that's optional you don't have to do it pull back isn't you know a factor in competition barbecue but like to kind of be consistent with everything so at this point i'm just going to lay down some butter and i'm using kerrygold salted butter here i don't think salted or unsalted makes a huge difference uh so i just go ahead and run with the salted and then i also want to add some brown sugar and you can use light or dark it's up to you this is dark i'm just going to run dark today because it's what i have on hand so give that kind of a nice healthy dose there and what the butter is going to do is the butter is gonna help keep these sugars from burning being that we are cooking at a higher temp and it's just gonna impart some more flavor and richness into these ribs so then what i wanna do is come in with some honey barbecue sauce from sucklebusters now a lot of people just use honey in there wrap and that's fine i like to use this barbecue sauce because it actually helps with the color it gives it a really nice color when you take it out of the wrap so i'm just going to go ahead and i'm just going to add some sauce to it and again there's honey and sugar in this sauce so that butter is gonna help keep that from burning now i'm gonna go ahead and take my ribs and i'm going to put them meat side down on top of all that goodness and you'll see some guys they'll come in and they'll repeat the same process on this back side i typically don't do that uh if i'm going to add any other flavors to this back side here it's going to be with my finishing rub or with my sauce stuff like that i don't really like to mess around with this side too terribly much so now we're just going to go ahead and get these wrapped up and to do that i like to have two sheets of aluminum foil here and i like to try and bring it over that bone or over the bones there and then i'll come through on the other side and come up so we actually have four layers of protection so we're not going to get any puncturing through that bone and then i'll just kind of find the end on the end and make a nice crease here like that get all the air out so it's nice and tight and we're going to get these back on the smoker we're going to put them back on the rack and we're going to have the bones facing the fire pot again and we're going to cook them meat side down so i'll meet you guys outside okay guys you can see we have our ribs on the smoker here we're still running at 300 degrees i'm going to set a timer for 30 minutes and then we will come out and check them for tenderness kind of take a probe reading see where they're at we're not cooking the temperature on these we're cooking to tenderness that probe breeding was just to give you an idea of where these ribs are sitting so set a timer for 30 minutes we'll come out and check them and see how they're looking we'll see you guys then okay guys it has been 30 minutes we're gonna go ahead and check the tenderness on these ribs go ahead and get in here and then i'm just going to go ahead and open these up you may get a little juice that spills out that's all right go ahead and see here and what we're going to do is we're just going to come in and you know they're at about 1 85 183 there's about 189 so about 185 dead center is kind of where we're at still so kind of hit a brief little stall there but you can tell here it's tight we come in you can see it lifting up so okay and another way you can tell is by picking them up you see they still got some spring to them they're not tender yet we're probably gonna lose this bone right here but that's all right we wouldn't turn in that one anyways so no big deal but we're gonna go ahead and get these wrapped up and then we'll come out and check them again in a half hour okay guys it's been another 30 minutes we're gonna go ahead and check for tenderness now see how they're looking and i mean i can tell just by picking these up that they're tender you can see we have some blood on the bones i mean those are looking good they're nice and tender we'll go ahead and just double check with our pen here come in and we're about 205 but more importantly it's probing like butter so that's looking really good it's feeling really good now at this point i'm going to set these off to the side here i'm just going to flip those over pull those out and you can see we did in fact lose that end bone not a big deal don't really care about that i'm not going to turn that in anyways so no big deal now you kind of see here we have a little bit of wash out where the fat is so all we're going to do to alleviate that is we are just going to get some of our rub we're just going to kind of hit it in some spots that need it and that's looking good like that you can see we have great pullback on these bones here we got a little bit of hanger on there so we're gonna get that out of there but look at that looks fantastic great pull back all across so now i'm gonna go ahead i'm going to get these back on the smoker just for a few minutes just to get them to dry out and bring that color back so i'm going to give them probably three four minutes and then we'll check back in so we will see you guys then okay guys it's been a few minutes you can see here that we got our color back on these ribs they're looking absolutely fantastic starting to dry out a little bit so at this point we're just going to go ahead and get them sauced we're going to be using that honey barbecue sauce and it's not going to take much you don't want a lot you don't want a super saucy rib you just want enough for a nice light glaze on there so we're going to start off with that and i do advise preheating your sauce i've had this sitting out for a little bit but if you warm it up a little bit it's going to go ahead and alleviate your brush strokes here so go ahead and just give your rack a nice coating of sauce here make sure maybe paint up those bones a little bit i think we're just going to grab a little bit more sauce on here just like that and we'll go ahead and blaze up these bones just get all of this nice and glazed up and as it heats up that sauce should go ahead and alleviate those brush strokes on there so that is looking pretty fantastic there see we have a nice glaze on there now we're gonna go ahead and set this for about five minutes still at 300 degrees we'll come out and check it we just don't want these getting too dark on us so go ahead and get these back on okay guys it has been five minutes you can go ahead and see that our sauce is set it looks absolutely wonderful we have a beautiful glaze on there no brush marks nothing so i'm gonna get these inside and let them rest for i don't know 10-15 minutes and then we'll slice into them and see how we did so we will see you guys inside okay guys you can see we have our ribs here they look fantastic they smell wonderful there's juice coming out of them you can see they're tender as can be here so i'm gonna flip these over and we are gonna get to slicing them now some people will slice these and then sauce them and truthfully i typically do that but we're gonna do it this way today what you can do is so you don't mess up your sauce go ahead and lay some sauce on this board here and this is just a disposable cutting board go ahead and lay some sauce on there and then that way it won't mess up your sauce i'm not too worried about it today it looks like the sauce is set up pretty good so we're gonna go ahead and just flip these over and you can see here we can definitely see the bones we actually lost one right here so that's fine so we'll just come in and cut through that and looks good has a nice smoke ring let's go ahead and get the rest of these cut up and these bones are actually fairly straight so what you want to do is just come in and keep your cuts as straight as you can and helps have a good sharp knife here and just do long smooth strokes and just try and keep them as straight as you can if you can't that's all right but do your best we want to make sure we're completely through here and right here they're starting to turn a little bit so we're just going to do our best to keep them straight okay and we'll grab one of these thick ones here and look at that look at that juicy wonderful smoke ring but look at that moisture in there that is a juicy rib right there i mean that looks absolutely fantastic i can't wait to try this so we'll just kind of go ahead and get these all spun around facing the same direction see we lost that bone too these may have been taken a little bit too far over in some spots but where i'm looking to turn in you know these two look really good even these i'd consider putting these on the bottom but looks really good so i wouldn't really be turning that in maybe this one but these four probably two for sure here look good and i'd hope to get you know two to three more out of my other racks that i'm cooking but overall they're looking pretty good here so let's go ahead and give these a little taste test all right so what i would typically do is i would take one of the end pieces i know i'm not turning in and i would go ahead and just give it a try and see how my flavor profile is here nice clean bite off the bone really good flavor it's got sweet it's got a little heat and now this is the point where i would think to myself is there too much sweet is there too much heat what do i have to do to accommodate for that and that's where your finishing dust comes into play doesn't need a little more sauce stuff like that so let's go ahead and try the other side very well balanced which depending on your region you know you're going to have to adjust your flavor profile this isn't meant to be a tell-all competition recipe because you know barbecue subjective judging is subjective some people down south might want a little more heat come up north you know they think ketchup is spicy so you gotta kind of play with your flavor profiles and figure out what works well for you and your region but my best advice is stay middle of the road don't get too salty too sweet too much spice you know find a nice balanced drip i mean barbecue is all about balance you don't want anything that's going to knock your socks off one way or another when it comes to competition do whatever you want at home however you enjoy it but when it comes to competition barbecue these are things you have to keep in mind so guys i hope you enjoyed this video it's been a lot of fun be sure you go and check out cj's video down below and also be sure to go and vote for which one you liked better over on smoke and joe's channel link down below i have a link for everything i use down below and guys if you have any questions feel free to let me know down in the comments i hope you enjoyed this video if you did be sure to like subscribe ring that bell stay safe and we will see you next time

Channel: Ash Kickin' BBQ

Views: 190,911

Keywords: competition ribs, smoked ribs, competition bbq, competition ribs on a pellet grill, competition ribs for beginners, pit boss, pellet grill, pit boss pro series 1600, pro series 1600, competition rib recipe, smoking ribs, pellet smoker, bbq ribs, smoking competition ribs, competition style ribs, competition spare ribs, pork ribs, bbq competition ribs, competition ribs malcom reed, spare ribs, competition ribs recipe, bbq ribs recipe, how to cook competition ribs, ribs, bbq

Id: NoWFJDCMkFc

Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021