EASY Pit Boss SMOKED PORK SPARERIBS!!! | Pellet Grill Pork Spareribs St. Louis Style

hey everyone welcome to Mad backyard today I'm going to show you how to make pork spare ribs on your Pit Boss pellet grill we're going to show you how to trim season and smoke your ribs on a Pit Boss or any pellet grill for that matter and get maximum flavor and tenderness okay guys I'm just going to come out and say it the 321 method is still King when it comes to smoking pork ribs with a few minor tweaks you see instead of going by thyme I'm going to show you how to use temperature so that you can dial in your ribs and get them to come out exactly the way you like them every single time pork spare ribs are different than the baby back ribs we did in a previous video baby backs are leaner and come more from the back of the hog while spare ribs are a little fattier but also a little more flavorful take a little longer to cook and come more from the front of the hog when you go to buy your ribs you may see some that are just called spare ribs and these are untrimmed full racks of spare ribs but I like to look for the ones that say St Louis cut spare ribs all St Louis cut or St Louis style means is that they've cut off some of the excess meat and cartilage around the outside of the full rack of spare ribs making it just a cleaner more easy to handle a rack of ribs most of the racks is St Louis cut spare ribs I saw at the store last night were about three to three and a half pounds while the full racks of spare ribs that were untrimmed were closer to five pounds for me personally rather than getting a full five to five and a half pound rack of untrimmed spare ribs I'd rather get two three to three and a half pound racks of St Louis cut spare ribs trim off some of the excess fat from your spare ribs using a good boning knife like this one from a Marco you don't have to go crazy trying to trim off all the fat just try to get off any hard chunks and big scraggly pieces that are hanging off from the top and the bottom leaving some in place is good as the surface fat will render and help keep everything moist as we cook next you want to remove this outer membrane from the bottom of the spare ribs this membrane can block our seasoning from penetrating the meat as well as keep the fat from rendering out some people just score it with a knife to help the fat render through but I like to just remove the whole thing the easiest way is to use a paper towel to keep a good grip work one of the corners loose and then pull from one end to the other you'll see another thinner membrane under this one that you don't want to pull off you can tell because if you start to pull back on this membrane you'll see the bones directly exposed if you take off this membrane your ribs will likely Fall Apart as they're cooking so make sure to leave it in place we're going to use two kinds of seasoning today on our spare ribs the first one is Cosmos Dirty Bird dry rub I like this rub because it's nice and savory and garlicky and has a little bit of heat on the back end as well the second rub is Three Little Pigs touch a cherry which I really like on pork ribs it's a sweeter rub with a lot more sugar in it than the dirty bird when I'm seasoning ribs I like to put the saltier Savory rub on first so the salt can really penetrate the meat and season it I then put the sweeter sugary rub on the outside to help set up the bark and get a nice color from all the sugars season both sides well but don't go overboard ribs have a lot of surface area relative to the amount of meat in them so it's easy to overdo it also the more you cake on the seasoning the less smoke flavor can penetrate the meat while it's cooking in the smoker make sure to get under any flaps of meat to get those areas seasoned and also the sides of the ribs too let the rubs set up for about 15 to 20 minutes as this will give it time to pull some moisture out and create a nice paste on the outside of the ribs this paste will help form a better bark as they cook and the moisture will absorb more smoke flavor right in the beginning while the meat is still cold I'm going to use these expert Grill brand pellets in the hopper today they were on a really good sale at Walmart last night and I couldn't help myself they make really quality pellets and they put out a nice smoke and consistent Heat at these low to mid-range temperatures make sure to always transfer your new pellets to an airtight storage container if you watch our Channel you know we love these ones from Oklahoma Joe's because of the mesh screen inside this allows you to shake out the sawdust before pouring them in the hopper which will give you a cleaner more consistent burn as we showed in our video on how to get more smoke from your pellet grill pellets will last a lot longer and perform better if you keep them in a nice dry airtight storage container when you're not using them rather than leaving them in the bag I set up my Pit Boss with the flame tamer over the fire pot to help give a some more heat diffusion in the center if you haven't watched our video on how to fix hot spots and Pit Boss temperature problems make sure to check that out as well because we're using indirect heat on our ribs I want to cut down on the direct heat from the fire pot in the center as much as possible next go ahead and turn on your Pit Boss and let it run through the startup cycle with the lid open then for our spare ribs we're going to set our temperature to 270 degrees I've cooked spare ribs at both hotter and lower temperatures in the past but found that cooking around 270 degrees really renders the fat nicely gets them done without taking all day and doesn't dry them out or burn the ends let's talk about how we're setting up our Pit Boss to cook these spare ribs I've got the top rack in place we're going to cook our ribs on the top rack so that on the bottom rack we can put our water pan the water Pan actually serves two functions first it's obviously going to provide some moisture to the cooking chamber and help prevent our ribs from drying out as easily but more importantly the water is going to act as another level of heat diffusion to help block that direct heat in the center of our pellet grill using a water pan and any kind of smoker will usually act as a heat sink and keep the inside temperature of the cooking Chamber from fluctuating as much the last part of our setup for our spare ribs is going to be using a pellet tube smoker to get some extra smoke flavor during the first stage of the cook as I showed in our video on how to get more smoke flavor using a pellet tube smoker I like to save my more quality and expensive pellets such as these knotty wood Plum pellets I'm using today in my pellet tube smoker rather than the hopper in addition I'm going to mix a few tiny cherry wood chips in with the Knotty wood pellets this will provide just a little bit different combustion and a little more interesting flavors in the Smoke we're putting on our ribs if you're going to mix wood chips in with pellets in a pellet tube smoker don't use a ton if you use too many wood chips in with your pellets they can catch fire and ignite rather than smolder and smoke I find just mixing a small amount of tiny wood chip scraps in the pellet tube smoker with the pellets works just fine also don't soak the wood chips because that moisture will just transfer to the pellets and they either won't light or won't smoke very well make sure to watch that full video on how to light the pellet tube smoker for more step-by-step instructions on how to set it up for adding more smoke to your ribs and other Foods I'll put a link to it down in the description below okay the seasoning has had some time to set on the ribs you can see we've got a nice paste on the outside now that's what we want because that moisture is really going to absorb a lot of our smoke flavor so I'm going to go ahead and put these on the top rack you can see I'm wearing my Nitro gloves with my cloth liners underneath this makes it a lot easier for handling meat especially once the meat gets hot rather than trying to mess with tongs and spatulas and things for moving your barbecue around this side is the bigger side as you can see I'm going to put that more towards the left on my particular Pit Boss I found the left side gets a little warmer than the right side so it's just nicer to put the bigger pieces of meat over on that side we're going to go ahead and gently put it on here right over the water pot for the water pan and then once I put it on I'm going to smush it together a little bit just as that meat likes to contract once it starts warming up anyway and that way it'll keep it from moving around too much and possibly tearing but we don't worry about that for a little while we just let this go here for a little while and we'll check on it in a little bit okay now that we have the ribs on let's talk a little bit about how long we're going to cook them for you've probably heard of the three two one method and if you're not familiar all this means is that you cook the ribs for three hours with smoke unwrapped then two hours wrapped in foil in order to get the meat nice and tender and then one hour back on the smoker unwrapped to firm them back up before you serve them there's a thousand articles on the web and videos on YouTube talking about whether the 321 method is good or bad or outdated or whether you should always use it or never use it but here's my opinion on it the problem with the 321 method is that it's only addressing time think about it this way if someone came up to you and said the best way to cook chicken is to cook it for 45 minutes you might say okay maybe but what kind of chicken is it what are you cooking it in what kind of smoker and what temperature are you cooking it at those are all going to affect how long you cook that chicken for the same is true with ribs you can't just say cook it three hours this way two hours this way and one hour this way and they will always turn out well there's a lot of other variables at play now some people are so still against the 321 method that they don't wrap their ribs at all I've tried that in the past and I haven't been a fan of ribs that aren't wrapped they just don't come out as tender for me and they definitely don't pull away from the bone so what I like to do is still follow the three two one method but not pay so much attention to the numbers themselves we still start the ribs off for the first three hours or so with smoke unwrapped then we wrap them but we're going to let temperature be our guide not so much time and then we'll put them back on the Pit Boss at the end to firm back up but they usually don't need a full hour so we'll get into all that here next but let's let our ribs smoke for a while and we'll come back and look at them in a little bit hour and a half since we put the spare ribs on let's see how they're looking so we can go ahead and kind of pull the top rack out towards us a little bit to get a better look at them you'll see that the bark is starting to set up on here now if I rub my finger across it I'm not moving seasoning around anymore it's staying in place that's what we want to start to happen as the bark forms in this first stage now they're still not ready to be wrapped yet what we're looking for is a darker more amber color on them but at the same time during the stage we also don't want the meat on the top to start to dry out so I'm going to spray it with a little bit of a half apple cider vinegar half water I find that straight apple cider vinegar is a little too much so I can cut it with water to kind of tone down that vinegariness but you can really use anything you can use straight water if you want or you can use a cola or apple juice just really anything to kind of keep that outside nice and moist during this first stage here now we haven't gotten to the fat rendering stage yet that starts to happen when the meat gets to about 150 160 degrees right now we're probably I'm guessing around yeah we're in the kind of mid 130s right there so still got a little ways to go in this first stage we'll kind of keeps spraying at every 30 40 minutes or so just to keep that top nice and moist we don't want to get any big splits we've got little bits here is fine here and there you can always add a little more seasoning as you go to fill in those areas we don't want any big splits in the pork as it dries out so keep it nice and moist and we'll come back and check on it in about another half hour or so it's been about two and a half hours since we put the pork spare ribs on what I did is I came out a little while ago and I rotated them so that the larger side is now on the right I noticed some more fat rendering on this side versus this side and it was uh pulling away from the bones a little bit too so that's those are little Keys you can look for to see if one side of your ribs are cooking faster than the others along with using your thermapen so we're just going to check the middle now we're still on the 140 range my pellet tube smoker has pretty much burnt out at this point I'm only getting some white dirty smoke so I'm going to go ahead and take that off as well we're going to spray these one more time let them get a little darker let some more fat render and then we'll go ahead and wrap them we're now at the three and a half hour mark since we put our pork spare ribs on the Pit Boss so I want to show you how they're looking at this point and how we know it's time to take them off so pull them a little forward here into the Sun so you can see them a little better so you can see we've got a nice dark amber color on the outside you can also see that across the entire set of spare ribs most of our surface fat has rendered out that's these little pools right here that doesn't mean all the fat on the inside is rendered out by by any means whatsoever yet but that's kind of a clue that that they're starting to be done so about three and a half hours at this point now you may cook yours at a little lower temperature they might take a little longer your Pit Boss may run a little hotter than mine and they may not take as long but rather than going dogmatically by three hours on the first stage we want to look for them to look like this when we're done so at this point when they're in that 155 to 170 range this is what's called the stall so they're basically just going to kind of stall out at this temperature until a lot of water evaporates from the meat the meat contracts more and then only at that point can they start rising in temperature more and above 170 is really where the fat and collagen starts to break down you can think of the fat and collagen kind of the glue that holds the meat to the Bone so when people talk about having fall off the bone ribs you've really got to cook the ribs until all that fat and collagen on the inside of the ribs melts just like we're seeing this surface fat melt on the outside of our ribs now we could just leave them on here and they would continue to cook and they would eventually get to a high enough internal temperature where all that fat and collagen has melted on the inside and they're easier to eat and more fall off the bone but a better way to do it is to wrap them in foil for the second stage so we talked about this in the beginning how if you follow the classic 321 method would say to just leave them in the foil for two hours we're gonna get these off the Pit Boss put them in the foil and show you a better way to do it when it's time to wrap your ribs this is how I like to do it I take two sheets of aluminum foil so that they're double wrapped and I put them inside of an aluminum pan like this that way if I do get a puncture or anything like that the juices don't run everywhere all over the table and everything's kind of contained so I'm going to kind of flatten them out here and then in the bottom of the aluminum foil we're going to add some ingredients as you saw from our baby back ribs it worked really well to put some butter and who doesn't like butter so we're gonna put some butter in the bottom we're going to drizzle a little bit of Honey on top of that a little extra sweetness and then what I like to do lately is I take some of the sauce we're going to use we're going to be using this Blues hog Champions blend if you watch this channel you know we love everything by Blues hog but especially their sauces the Champions blend is just a great all-around barbecue sauce and I love it on pork spare ribs so I'm just not going to just put some straight barbecue sauce in there what I did instead is I mixed it with a little bit of apple cider vinegar now having this little extra apple cider vinegar gives you a little more acidity a little more tang and that goes a long way on the ribs when you've got that little extra bit of acidic bite to kind of cut through the fat and salt and sugar and everything else that we've got plenty of already on the ribs I'm going to put a little bit on the bottom I put about half a cup of sauce in this measuring cup and then about two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and start it around so I'm putting half on the bottom here now we're going to take our ribs and we're going to put them face down in this mixture we've made so I have our ribs gently place them over this way so that meat is right on top of the butter and all the honey and sauce then we're gonna take the rest of our sauce and drizzle it across the back as well I'm gonna take the first layer of aluminum foil and wrap it over the ribs nice and tight against the meat and when we're wrapping this we want to think about that we want to be able to check our temperature here as they cook so you don't want to wrap them in such a way that you can't open them back up easily and get back at them so rather than taking this part and folding it over I'm now going to take the second one and put this on top as well and then this part get it nice and tight in there and now I'm going to take the edges and fold them over this way that way when we go to check our temperature it's really easy to just pull these open pull it open check it real quick and then fold it back up as we need to so our Pit Boss is still running at 270 we haven't changed anything as far as temperature I'm going to open it back up here and I'm going to leave the water pan here not because we're going to get moisture we're going to get plenty of moisture inside the foil as is but leave it there just so that we get uh still that heat diffusion we want from the fire pot underneath so I'm going to take the rack of ribs now wrapped in foil and put it right back where it was and you'll notice the ribs are still upside down I want that meat to kind of baste inside the butter and the sauce and the honey and everything we put on the bottom there so ribs are upside down inside the foil and we go to check the temperature later just pull it out open it up check it and you can be on your way get it wrapped back up and back in the Pit Boss so the first stage was smoking our ribs getting that bark nice and firm and getting a lot of smoke flavor on the spare ribs the second stage we're in now is the wrap stage the point of this stage is to really increase that internal temperature of our ribs like we talked about to get the fat and collagen to break down and get them up to a good internal temperature where all that fat in collagen breaks down so that the ribs fall off the bone now there's a lot of reasons that people hate on the 321 method but the main reason is because people have a lot of disagreements over how long the ribs should be wrapped or if they should be wrapped at all now I like them wrapped because I think they're more tender and fall off the bone style when I wrap them versus when I don't but the debate is really how long they should be wrapped now if you follow the classic 321 method you would keep them wrapped for two hours but like we talked about it doesn't take into consideration uh what temperature you're cooking the ribs at what type of smoker you're using whether they're baby backs or spare ribs or even just your personal preference maybe you want a little more chew to your ribs maybe you want to have them a little tougher to pull away from the bone maybe you want them completely falling apart uh or maybe you're just somewhere in the middle so just doing for two hours blindly doesn't take any of that into consideration so a better way to track them when they're in the stage is by using your instant thermometer if you take them out at 190 they're going to be more competition style where they stick to the Bone and you get a good solid bite through if you let them go all the way up to 205 they'll still stick to the Bone but they're going to pull away a little easier if you really want fall off the bone like literal fall off the bone style ribs let them go all the way up to about 210 or so once you unwrap them and for the third stage put them back on the Pit Boss they will never go higher in temperature again at least not anytime soon so once you unwrap them from the foil they're actually going to start to drop in temperature so you need to keep them in the foil all the way until they hit that perfect temperature for you likely if you've never done it before you're going to perform somewhere in the 200 to 205 range if you really want to fall off the bone like I said go all the way to 210 but if it's your first time I'd recommend 200 to 205 so they were still only at 165 when we put them on they got a power through the stall and rise up in temperature a little more so I'm going to leave them alone for at least an hour and then we'll check them just to kind of get a gauge of where we're at at that point we're about one hour into the second stage now we're going to open them up and just take a look at where our temperature is starting to look good I don't think they're going to be quite done yet but we'll get an idea of where the temperature is and how fast they're moving so I'm gonna check with my instant thermometer I want to look you don't want to just check right in this little flap of meat here you want to really get in between the bones in the middle right there we're still at about 180 or so so like I said we're trying to get up to about 200 degrees in total so that's the very center there if we kind of check the edges over here a little higher closer to 190 there make sure you're not touching right up against the bone and a little less on the right side so what I'm going to do is I'm going to wrap these back up and then turn them because this side's cooking a little faster just like it was doing during the first stage so we're wrapping back up and at this point we're probably going to check every 20 minutes to half hour just to see where we are so we don't overshoot it okay we checked it after about 20 minutes and it had moved up a little bit but not quite to where we want it we're now at an hour and 45 minutes and we're gonna check again see where we are so let's go ahead and open up the uh wrap here he smells so good I think these are I'm guessing they're going to be ready you can see how they're really pulling away from the bone on this side that was cooking a little faster so let's go ahead and check our internal temperature right between the bones there yeah we're getting close to that uh 200 Mark about 197. let's check some of the edges yeah those are definitely getting up right in that range we want that to uh 200 205 if we check this side this is probably going to be even higher maybe not about 200 almost 200 there that's close enough for me especially because these edges are starting to cook a little faster than the middle and getting a little further along than I would want to push them too much more so we're going to take this uh whole uh boat of ribs and sauce and everything else and we're going to move it back over to our aluminum foil pan now for the final stage we're going to move the ribs back onto the Pit Boss unwrapped so just carefully bring it over nice and close we're gonna keep that side that's cooking a little faster over to the right and get these back on and get that bark to firm back up there make sure to save these drippings here that we left in the foil because we can add them to our barbecue sauce and give our sauce a little extra flavor if we followed the conventional 321 method we would leave the spare ribs on during this final stage for an entire hour however I found you really only need to leave them on during this stage long enough that the bark sets back up if you lost any of your bark during the second stage you can add a little rub back to the ribs and give it some time to reset on the meat this usually only takes about 20 to 30 minutes if you leave them on longer than that you risk drying out the meat at this point we've rendered out most if not all of the fat and collagen on the inside of the spare ribs you'll be able to see the bones separate more easily from the meat and you have more fat dripping down when you push on the ribs while they will continue to tenderize a little bit during this stage the longer you leave them on the more you risk drying them out so just give them long enough for the bark to set back up while you get your sauce ready today I'm using Blues hog Champions blend I usually mix a couple spoonfuls of juices from the foil wrap into the sauce just to give it a little more richness once the bark is set back up on the ribs go ahead and brush on your sauce using a silicone basting brush now leave the ribs on for another 15 minutes just to get the sauce warm and tacky and then remove them from the smoker transfer the ribs to a cutting board and use a good meat slicing knife like this one from Americo to carve your ribs you can see that these ribs came out incredibly tender and juicy all the fat and collagen has rendered down and we can now easily pull the meat cleanly away from the bone but they aren't falling apart either as we took them off the smoker at around 200 degrees this is exactly how I like my ribs done and by using an instant thermometer and temperature as a guide rather than thyme I know that they will come out exactly like this every single time so these look extremely tender and juicy and most important what I'm happiest with is that the meat is pulling away from the bone but it's not completely falling apart off the bone so let's go ahead and take a taste and see how we did it just has everything you would want in a rib you immediately breathe in a little bit of that Smoky flavor hits the back of your palate you take a bite you get tons of flavor from those rubs we used the touch of cherry Three Little Pigs and then you get a little bit of heat at the end from that dirty bird rub as well plenty of Sweetness from the sauce and the honey and everything but most importantly it's got that little hit of acidity from the apple cider vinegar we used both when we sprayed and then also when we wrapped it in foil so it's just cutting through everything and just firing on all cylinders these are delicious so I still maintain that the method behind the 321 method is still King but you need to go by temperature and not time on pork spare ribs for the first stage yes you are going to cook for about three hours we ended up going three and a half hours and you want to get a nice amber color you want to get that bark set up and you want your internal temperature to get to about 160 degrees where that Fat's just starting to render and you're hitting the stall for the second stage you're going to double wrap tightly in aluminum foil and then it's really just going to come down to how you like your ribs if you want them pulling off the bone aim for a final temperature of 195 to 200 degrees if you want them really falling off the bone completely let them sit in the wrap for a little longer you're going to go more to a 205 to 210 degrees even it's really up to you it may take two hours it may take less it may take more and for the final stage we put the pork spare ribs back on the Pit Boss they don't necessarily need a full hour back on maybe 30 minutes or so to just let that bark set back up add your sauce for another 15 minutes and then you can slice and enjoy your ribs and if you follow these guys guidelines and use a good instant read thermometer they should come out exactly how you like them every single time we hope you enjoyed this video we'd appreciate if you hit the like And subscribe button and you can check out the full step-by-step recipe that accompanies this video at madbackyard.com I'll put a link down in the description below along with links to all the other videos I mentioned today as well as products we used if you want to check those out too and let us know in the comments section how you like to make your pork spare ribs are you a fan of the 321 method or do you use something else we'd love to hear your methods we're always looking for new ideas and love to try new things and as always thanks for watching [Music] thanks for watching [Laughter] and thanks for watching thanks for watching [Music] watching

Channel: Mad Backyard

Views: 40,614

Keywords: pit boss, smoked ribs, how to smoke ribs, pork ribs, pit boss ribs recipe, pork ribs recipe, pit boss ribs video, smoked ribs recipe, fall off the bone ribs, easy smoked ribs, pellet smoker ribs, pit boss smoked ribs, 321 ribs pellet grill, pit boss pro series, 3 2 1 method, 3-2-1 ribs, spare ribs, 3 2 1 ribs, pit boss 3 2 1 ribs, pit boss ribs, smoked ribs for beginners, smoked ribs pellet grill, fall off the bone spare ribs, pellet grill smoked ribs, 3-2-1 ribs recipe

Id: 2ezbM9D64Dg

Length: 25min 41sec (1541 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2023