How to Smoke Beef Ribs

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue I'm Jeremy Yoder and today I'm gonna show you how I smoked my absolute favorite barbecue items beef short ribs [Music] now the first thing you have to do when you're cooking beef short ribs is get beef short ribs which is easier said than done you might want to know now these as you can see are big huge thick meaty ribs if you go to most grocery stores and get beef ribs they look nothing like this they look in comparison like the bony fingers of an old woman right these are very beefy no pun intended so what you need is beef short ribs make sure you get that because if you get those little ribs I have hardly any meat on them it's gonna be to me it's almost a waste I've made them before and I wouldn't go out of my way to eat them like somebody gave them to me for free I probably not even eat them these I absolutely love it's like you take all the good things in barbecue and condense it down into one food item and it's this right here so after you get your rib then you have to get to trimming it as you guys can see here you've got a little bit of fat on the top we've got some marbling right here but I don't care so much about the fat because that's gonna render really well especially how we're gonna cook these I'll show you that in a minute but I want to get all this silver skin off right and because it's going to be tough and it's gonna be less than enjoyable so what I do usually is I'll get in here with one of these trimming knives and it's hard to do the whole chunk of silver skin at once so you just slide the knife in and what I like to do is just kind of work it to the other side and the goal is not to take off too much meat because this is expensive stuff in relative terms and you don't want to waste your money by destroying the meat that you just got so I start like maybe in the middle and then work my way back I found that this is the easiest way for me to actually do this trimming because if you try to go through and lift the silver skin and just cut underneath it I think that a lot of times you end up taking off too much meat so let's get the rest of the silver skin off [Music] all right so this should be about what your beef rib looks like when you're done trimming it now I wouldn't worry a whole bunch about getting every little speck of silver skin off but if you get that huge chunk off and any big pieces that you see it should work fine now you can see from these trimmings that we didn't actually lose very much of this beef grip at all so we get off that silver skin and the rest is going to go into the cooker now after you've got your short rib trimmed it's time to season it and I always seasoned with salt separately because that way I have complete control of salt that's something I preach in almost every video I do so i season it similar to how I seasoned briskets and sounds gonna take some salt and sprinkle it on top you can use a relatively heavy amount of salt but you don't to go crazy like to me that's just about perfect now one thing you don't want to forget is to get the edges so make sure you get the edges with a little bit of salt because the edges and the top and we're going to build that bark we're going to build that flavor and you want to make sure that it's well seasoned okay so salt on and you can let this sit for a while I'm kind of in a rush today so I'm not gonna let it sit as long as I would normally want to maybe 10 15 minutes out like that but I'm going to take my beef rub and sprinkle liberally over the top here [Music] [Music] now to me this is a perfectly seasoned beef rib ready to go on the smoker one note guys notice I didn't season the back of this short rib now in my experience seasoning the back doesn't do any good I don't think anything really penetrates through there at least not in a discernible way to me and then also a lot of times all the seasoning just kind of falls off after cooking there because this membrane gets dried out and you you lose the seasoning there's no point in putting it on there another note is make sure you leave the membrane on because if you don't leave the membrane on what can happen is this rib this plate of ribs here will completely fall apart so the membrane actually holds it together so you want to keep it on there because there's plenty of meat on the top and you want to keep it nice and together as one solid piece so leave the membrane on don't worry about seasoning it now when you're selecting what kind of rub you like you can use any kind you want but what I would caution you against is using a rub that's got a lot of sugar in it or really even any sugar now I wouldn't put any sugar in your rub if you make your own or if you don't make your own I would go with something that's got very little or no sugar in it that you might buy off the shelf here's why we're gonna cook these unwrapped for almost the entire cooking process and what can happen is especially one thing I noticed with beef ribs is that the outside takes a lot of punishment because it's going to create a great bark but if you have sugar in there it can actually burn and that ruins all the goodness of the short rib so use whatever kind of seasoning you want but be careful and be mindful of how much sugar is in that rub all right now that this is seasoned and it's had about 15 minutes to rest some of the juices are coming out and so now this seasoning is sticking on pretty well it's time to throw it on the smoker at 275 now as you guys can see I have not just one instead of beef ribs in here but four because full disclosure I'm doing two videos at once and so you can check them both out the video that we're doing in addition to the how-to here is we're doing a comparison of Wagyu Prime and then that choice short rib so we're going to be cooking them all at the same time and if you're interested in how those turn out go check out that video right now when you're cooking these beef ribs there are two things you got to keep in mind okay number one is clean smoke if you look up here at the smokestack what do you see not a bunch of gross smoke and the reason for that is you're cooking these things unwrapped for a long time so the quality of the smoke is really going to show up in the final flavor so if you have clean smoke you're gonna get delicious smoky goodness if you have dirty gross smoke you're gonna get some bitter gross make you feel sick type of smoke you don't want that now the second thing you got to think about when you're cooking beef ribs is it's one word bark okay beef ribs are all about the bark that you create on the exterior surface of the meat even more so to me than brisket brisket pork is delicious and wonderful but for me the joy of eating a beef rib is that bark where all that flavor accumulates on the outside of the meat and then you have perfect moist succulent meat underneath but those are the two things you're thinking about during the cooking process now toward the end we're gonna think about tenderness and some stuff like that but right now we're thinking bark bark bark bark so clean smoke is going to create delicious bark and you want to cook hot enough so that bark forms really well and so we're cooking at 275 I always start at a lower temperature than I finish and the reason behind this for me I don't know if I have any scientific validation for this but my theory about it is when you start cooking at a lower temperature you heat up the inside of the meat and you start to liquefy some of that fat and that protects the meat because some of that fat kind of oozes to the outside surface and keeps it from crusting over too much it kind of keeps everything wet and you don't burn anything on the outside so I start relatively low by 275 and then I end up finishing them off usually closer to 300 but it can go to 75 the whole way through but we'll keep you updated as we go it's 275 right now and my plan is to leave it there for about three hours before we start to open it up and spray all right we're five and a half hours in and we're gonna take a look at these ribs in here and see what they look like as you can see I'm starting to get good color on they're starting to bark up a little bit let's grab this choice rib from the back and take a look at it all right so this is what we're working with here now I've had this end toward the fire the whole time you can see it's getting darker than this side so what we're gonna do at this point in order to keep the bark as uniform as possible and to get tenderness as even as possible they're actually gonna flip it around we're gonna flip it around just like that and so I'll have equal amounts of pullback on both sides of the bone so you don't have it all just over to one side we're gonna do that and there's not enough bark here yet for me to start spraying it I wanted to bark up just a little bit more maybe another 45 minutes or so before I actually start spraying and I'm gonna use 50% water and 50% apple cider vinegar as you want the best possible bark you can the priority is bark bark bark so I want to get delicious smoky bark I'm gonna put this back and let it keep going the temperature in here right now is about 170 okay let's give this a try and see what it looks like about 174 so we're gonna weigh maybe a couple more hours and we'll get there now a couple of tips if you're smoking beef ribs number one if you have two racks in your smoker where you have like a top and a bottom we're one significantly hotter than the other I would put the beef ribs on the lower rack well the idea is you want the heat to hit the meat on top rather than coming up and hitting the bones below because the bones can kind of serve to protect the meat if you're cooking real hot but they get so much hotter than the meat that a lot of times the bottom of the rib can overcook before the top gets tender enough so keep that in mind you don't want the bottom to get overcooked so however you have to arrange that on your smoker so however you have to arrange that on your smoker is the way you need to do it so that you get the perfect final product now in terms of spraying you don't want to spray so much that you spray all the seasoning off so what I want to do in getting that crust around the outside without spraying at first is just get the most flavorful bark I can possibly get and will tenderize it later I'll show you that but you want it to be nice and moist from the fat that's coming up from the meat so that you don't have to spray it if you spray it you could spray off seasoning you can lose some of that flavor you've worked so hard to achieve by burning a clean fire with clean smoke so the combination of fat salt the seasonings you use and smoke are gonna produce that bark on the outside that's gonna make everybody say wow my friend Jules messing up my shot by flying his plane out of here I was thinking about that today actually what like Joel flying out during the video now the last step in our process and I want to do this while we still have daylight because we're gonna have to wrap this up when it's dark but the last step in the process of cooking these beef ribs is we're gonna actually wrap them in butcher paper and the reason why isn't so much to speed the process but I'm just gonna do it for like the last 10 degrees so from about 190 to 200 I have the wrapped in butcher paper because that crust that forms on the outside I want to soften it up just a little bit I don't want to turn mushy or anything like that but I want to soften that bark so it's bite through and you get all that good flavor and you don't have to deal with any bits that are too crunchy and so you get the perfect marriage of great bark and softness when you bite into the succulent beef rib so we'll show you how to do that in a minute but one thing I would encourage you not to do is don't wrap in foil number one and number two don't wrap too early a lot of times people will get to the point where they're at 165 170 and they're like oh I'm in the stall I need a wrap with foil don't do that you're gonna ruin the bark that's so delicious so wrap for only about the last ten degrees I've tried a bunch of different stuff with cooking beef ribs and cooking a lot of barbecue items for that matter but with beef ribs I've discovered that wrapping them just for the last bit just to soften up that outside is the perfect way to do it geez it's really green after all the rain it's weird it's always brown all right so it's been six and a half hours now and we're ready to start spraying so if you open this up take a look here let me actually pull out my phone and check some light on there all right now you can see that guy in the back is nice and dark so now we don't want the bar to get too crusty the internal temperature right now is about 184 degrees so we're getting close so I just want to keep everything nice and moist because the bark has really started to form now and I still want it to get too tough so this is looking really good right where I want it our brisket is Matt Preston okay now it's time to wrap our short ribs so they've reached just over 190 191 internal we're gonna go for about 200 and now the bark has really started to stiffen up on the outside and so what we want to do to make sure that that doesn't get too hard because we're gonna wrap it now another reason I didn't mention earlier why we wait so long to wrap it is if you wrap too early the membrane on the bottom can actually rehydrate and break so it's kind of getting dehydrated right now during the cooking process and if you wrap it holds all that moisture in and then it softens up the membrane and then a lot of times the the meat will actually break free from the bone itself what you don't want to happen now invariably this happens sometimes even if you wait super late to wrap even if you don't wrap sometimes it can still happen but it's a huge problem if you wrap really early so now it's time to wrap and so I'm gonna grab the ribs out and we're gonna wrap them in some butcher paper now the butcher paper we're gonna use is different than the butcher paper I use for briskets I use the 18 inch butcher paper right here for briskets and that's not quite wide enough to be able to wrap beef ribs in comfortably without using a double layer and if use a double layer it's way too much so we're going to use the 12 inch butcher paper right here and use two sheets and we'll lay those down and wrap them up one tip for wrapping a butcher paper is if you fold this last part in it's easier to pick up whatever the item is alright so we're just gonna leave those in there to finish cooking we're gonna look for 200 is the final temperature roundabout but what we want to do is probe and when it feels like you know softened butter in there then we know that they're done so the temperature tells us we're in the ballpark but the feel of the probe going into the meat tells us okay we're done the ribs have reached 200 degrees are close enough one ninety nine point two when I program that felt like butter so new it's time to take them off and so what we're gonna do is gonna take them put them in a cooler to rest and I'm gonna use the styrofoam cooler because if it fills with grease I can just throw this away and I don't have to worry about cleaning it and getting it roast and I don't like to use towels because they get soaked in Greece too and I don't do that so styrofoam coolers are my favorite way to do this so it's time to get them off so if you probe the side it feels just like butter feels real nice alright so we pulled these off and let him rest for about thirty minutes in the cooler and so let's unwrap them and see what Waterloo [Applause] okay so we said early on in the video and that we're all about bark bark bark we want flavorful bark so we got flavorful bark all over this and none of it's too crusty and it's not gonna be crunchy or too hard to eat but it should be packed with flavor so let's cut one of these guys off and so what I like to do is I like to go to the back side and one of the reasons we've wrapped late is so that this membrane stays intact so they don't fall apart and the meat separates from the bones which is less appealing than a huge chunk of meat sticking on top of the bones so let's cut one of these off there's the second membrane and that is a perfectly smoked beef rib now the last step to any barbecue process is tasting so let me cut off a chunk here and give it a try Packers flavor all in the bark nice tender juicy all that intramuscular blink makes it just super rich but just just bursting with juice so you get everything you like in barbecue all in one bite get beef short ribs smoke them with a real wood fire and you're gonna be glad that you did all right thanks for watching mad scientist BBQ if you guys enjoyed this video hit the like button down below you can subscribe to the channel or follow me on 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Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 1,059,187

Rating: 4.8564515 out of 5

Keywords: smoker, barbecue, bbq, beef ribs, jeremy yoder, yoder, smoke, ribs, rib, mad scientist, mad, scientist

Id: fSSBUgPiGuI

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 25 2019