How to Smoke Pork Ribs

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue i'm jeremy yoder and today i'm going to show you how to smoke one of the quintessential barbecue items pork spare ribs before we get into the video i want to take a chance to thank our sponsor skillshare now i don't know if you can tell but i am covered in metal dust and i have no idea what my hair looks like because i spent the day learning how to weld and if you've ever learned how to weld you know that if you're not a good welder you become a good grinder and that's where all this dust came from now what skillshare offers is a community of millions of people and thousands of classes where you can pursue your interests and find things that capture your attention or things you've always wanted to know how to do but have never done right now i'm taking a class on iphone filmmaking by kayla babcock and niles gray and it is phenomenal now the reason i'm taking that class is because i'm planning a hunting trip this fall and i want to film it so that i can kill some wild game and use it for barbecue this class is exactly what i need because i can't carry a bunch of camera equipment along with me as i'm hiking up and down mountains it's just not going to work the other problem is i don't know how to use this camera full disclosure i do not even know how to turn on the camera my wife does all the filming and so this is a class that i desperately need now the first thousand subscribers who click on the link in the description are going to get two free months of a premium membership to skillshare and what you could learn in those two months is incredible also if you find that it's totally worth it as it's going to be because it's zero dollars for two months you can get an annual membership which is less than ten dollars a month now if you could spend less than ten dollars a month to get guaranteed quality stuff with no ads and a great user experience skillshare is the way to go the link is in the description i've done a video in the past where i show you how to make pork baby back ribs also called loin back ribs but i've kind of settled on pork spare ribs as the superior ribs to cook now they can both be done extremely well and this method works for both of them but what's changed in the time since i did that video is i have made i don't know probably thousands of racks ribs on the smoker behind me and i've kind of dialed in the process to exactly what i like now this might not be what everybody else likes but this is what i found to be the best and the most popular when i do you know barbecue pop-ups and catering events people go nuts for these ribs and i find that i like them the best too so it's kind of a win-win also this is to me kind of quintessential barbecue you get real smoke flavor you get fat render you get some barbecue sauce in the end you have salt and pepper you have all of the elements that you really want in barbecue and because barbecue is really the only uniquely american style of cooking it makes me really happy to do it this way and it's just so tasty that i can't help but do it this way every time i've tried tons of different rubs i've tried tons of different sauces i've tried a lot of different methods probably 30 or 40 different cooking methods on these and this is what i've settled down into what i was doing for a long time was using cooks that i did for catering for pop-ups as experiments so i never did anything super crazy but i would try to tweak the method every single time changing only one thing at a time to figure out if i like it or i don't like it and this is the method that i settled on and this is the method that i'm going to share with you now there are a couple different things that i want to address number one the kind of cooking people do in their backyard is going to be different than what people do in competitions which is going to be different than what people do in restaurants so those are kind of three streams of barbecue styles but what i want to do is give you the best backyard version of how to make pork spare ribs i want to basically address the two different cooking styles that we're not going to be focusing on today the first one is competition barbecue and this is a mistake that i fell into and i see lots of people fall into they try to do their own backyard cooking competition style well the problem with that is in competitions people are only taking one bite of whatever that barbecue item is and scoring it and so it's not going to be the same kind of food that you'd want to make a meal out of and what ends up happening usually when people do competitions with ribs is they'll use a very complex dry rub and they'll rub it a lot and then they'll put it in the smoker for uh maybe three hours or something like that and then they will wrap it with you know margarine and brown sugar and all kinds of sauces and a bunch of stuff and then they'll take it out of the wrap and maybe glaze it with the sauce at the end what ends up happening is you get too much going on some people even inject ribs there's a lot of stuff going on there and it's good for a bite but it's not good for a meal now with restaurant style cooking what happens a lot of times is in order to keep things very simple because they're doing you know tons and tons and tons of food every single day what they might do is they might just keep it as simple as possible just so that there aren't layers of complexity in what they're trying to produce consistently day after day and on time so what they'll do is maybe just salt and pepper throw it on wait until it gets good color it's starting to get tender and then pull it off that's probably not ideal for what most people want at home so the backyard cooking style is kind of somewhere in the middle you might take more care in doing backyard cooking than you would with restaurant style cooking but you're not going to go through all the craziness of competition style cooking so all that's to say is try it this way i bet this is the way you're going to be doing it in the future now the last note the ribs themselves these are st louis bare ribs unless you are very skilled or you've done tons of ribs and you just want to get the full spare and trim them down to exactly what you want i would suggest starting off with something like this st louis bears this method also works for baby backs but i think it's the best with st louis bear ribs other note if you get these at the grocery store make sure that they're not filled with some kind of solution if you've ever cooked ribs and it tasted just like ham it's because it's filled with some kind of moisture solution that is going to make the meat taste different than just the pure meat by itself so avoid that just get unadulterated completely normal non-seasoned st louis spare ribs and this method will be a winner every time now the first step is taking them out of the package and for some reason spare ribs almost always in my experience come in two packs which is totally fine with me because i don't want to go through the trouble of cooking them if i'm gonna make one rack so two pack let's open it up and take a look at what we got [Music] now the beauty of doing st louis spares is there's not a lot of trimming involved sometimes you'll get just a bone shard like this is right here i'm going to take that guy off but really you don't have to do much trimming at all if there are little chunks of meat that are hanging off you can take that off but really these are pretty much ready to go the only question is how are we going to deal with this membrane that's on the back of the ribs now there are three options to deal with when you're cooking ribs number one you can remove the membrane on the back number two you can score the membrane on the back and number three you can just do nothing to the membrane and throw it on the smoker after you've seasoned it there are benefits and drawbacks to each one if you just leave the membrane on there do nothing it's the easiest thing in the world you season it throw it on done number two if you remove the membrane well now you don't have anything that's going to be kind of snapping at the back of the rib and when you take a bite that is and the drawback is it takes a long time like if i'm doing 40 racks of ribs that's going to take a long time of me just pulling membranes off pulling membranes off there are tricks around it you can use a butter knife to get under the membrane use a paper towel to pull it off but it's going to take a long time if you're doing anything more than you know three or four racks and then the other option is to score the membrane on the back so you go with your knife this way and then this way and basically you're breaking that membrane up into little squares so that whenever you eat the rib you're not taking off a huge chunk of membrane with any one bite so that's kind of the middle ground in between those options now my preferred method is to score the membrane on the back and this is typically what you'd find at a restaurant because they're doing lots of ribs and then i want to take a long time to get them ready if you're doing competitions i think everyone removes the membrane on the back of the ribs now in my experience if you cook the rib to proper tenderness that's not going to matter at all you might be able to tell that it's there both by looking at it and then maybe by biting into it you can tell that it's there and that might matter in a competition maybe they'll get you know scored down for not removing the membrane but i've never had anybody complain about the membrane being on ribs if they've been cooked to proper tenderness so what we're going to do today is we're going to score the membrane on the back of the ribs because i think it's just as good as removing the membrane but there's one thing that it doesn't do that removing the membrane often does when you remove the membrane on the back a lot of times you'll expose a bone completely it's called a shiner and while you're cooking it a lot of times that bone can fall out that bone just looks ugly it's not just that bone sometimes it can happen to multiple bones in the process because a lot of times the membrane doesn't pull off evenly i just try to avoid that entirely and i think you get a more consistent product and you get it more easily if you simply score the membrane on the back of the ribs so i'm going to show you how i do one of these and then you can recreate that at home so first i do some cross cuts like this it helps to have a very sharp knife then i make down strokes usually between the bones themselves but it doesn't necessarily have to be between the bones you can do it on the bone whatever just small squares so that any one bite is only going to be pulling off a square of membrane rather than a whole huge chunk of membrane and once you've done that you're ready to start seasoning and getting this thing on the smoker what we're going to use to season today couldn't be any simpler it's 50 salt 50 pepper and the reason i'm using this is twofold number one is because it doesn't distract from the flavor of the pork number two because it allows smoke to penetrate the meat now you might think well if you're gonna put it on a smoker of course the smoke is going to penetrate the meat that's what you would think but in my experience using tons of different rubs basically the rubs that taste the best often have a lot of fine grain powders in there and when you put it on the ribs themselves somehow it covers up all the surface area of the ribs and you don't get very much smoke flavor no matter how long you put it on the smoker i don't know if the reason behind it is just simply covering up the surface i don't know if there are some other things involved maybe it masks the flavor of the smoke i don't know what it is but basically when you use those fine-grained rubs you just don't get as much smoke flavor it just never happens i've tried tons of different rubs i've made my own i bought a ton and for some reason the best smoke flavor always comes with just salt and pepper i think that's because there's not that much pepper and then the salt dissolves and penetrates the meat and so you have a lot of exposed surface to absorb smoke and if you're smoking meat you want to taste that smoke flavor now if you're dead set on using rib rubs i have a video where i compared a ton of different rubs and some are great some are okay my preference of course i'll tell you right now is salt and pepper but you get to see what those are like i did it at the barbecue hq i'm going to link that video in the description below so you guys can go check it out if you're interested in trying those it's totally worth trying but i always come back to salt and pepper and that's why i'm recommending it right now [Music] now to me these are perfectly rubbed ribs a couple notes use coarse ground black pepper and use kosher salt kosher salt because you can see it and there are large grains you're less likely to over salt the meat and coarse ground black pepper because it's about the same size and mix as well and when you put it in a shaker it comes out pretty evenly now one word of warning with ribs because they're a thin piece of meat it's very easy to oversalt them you don't ever want to go nuts with the salt you want to make sure you get an even coating and when the pepper which is what you can really see very well looks about like this i find that it's just perfect for my taste and for most of the people who come to my pop-ups and and the people eating my catering events i found this is kind of the winning combination right there at this point we're ready to put it on the smoker we're going to start these ribs at 200 to 225 degrees so pretty darn cool and the reason is i want these things to absorb a ton of smoke flavor before they're actually finished cooking now you've heard of the three two one method probably for ribs where you go unwrapped for three hours you wrap them for two hours and then unwrapped again for an hour in my experience doing that a ton of times when i was first starting out in barbecue i found the ribs to be overdone a lot of times and didn't have you know a clean good smoke flavor and so i just eventually abandoned that method and i just don't think it's ideal what we're going to be using basically is something more like a four one half something like that it's it's variable you have to judge it based on how the meat looks but the first part of the process is we're going to go probably four maybe even four and a half hours unwrapped so that we get great smoke flavor and great fat render but that initial part unwrapped has two portions the first one is cool part of the smoker 200 to 225 degrees just absorbing smoke flavor and then what we want to do is we want to move it to the hot part of the smoker because then it's going to cause the meat to contract and really plump up on the bones and get a better look and get better fat render when you do that at that point we're just looking for tenderness because we've got plenty of smoke flavor we've got good fat render we have nice plumped up ribs it's pulling back from the bone it's going to look very appetizing at that point we wrapped them in aluminum foil for maybe just an hour because they're already going to be 190 maybe even 200 degrees and so in the foil we're just gonna steam them basically get everything nice and tender we don't want it to be mush we want it to be really really tender so it's bite through we don't want it to you know fall apart but that's one of the reasons i don't do the three two one method i do it this way because wrapping is like hyperdrive for cooking ribs after they get to the right level of tenderness we're going to pull them out of the wrap and they start to cool down rapidly because they're going to be covered in moisture just think about when you're sweating and you're outside and there's wind moving you cool down quickly well there's going to be wind moving in the smoker essentially so it's going to drop the temperature of the ribs so at that point that's when we're going to glaze with a sauce and it's not going to keep making the ribs hyper tender going to turn them into mush because they're actually going to be dropping in temperature at that point so we glaze it with sauce we get the smoker nice and hot to make the sauce thicken up and set and at that point we remove them slice them and eat them that's the game plan for how we're going to treat these ribs so for the first four hours or so all we have to do is maintain temperature and burn a clean fire and the reason we want to burn a clean fire is because the quality of smoke that we want to accumulate on these ribs is very important we want it to be delicious and clean fire is the reason why people love barbecue and if you want more information on that i'll link a couple videos that i've done on that in the description as well now with all that said i know it's long-waited but there's a lot of time and effort that i put into this all that said we're going to check back in probably two or two and a half hours at that point we might start spraying just depending on how they look but because this is in the cool part of the cooker we probably won't have to spray it all okay so at this point we have to check on the ribs it's been about three hours and we need to see if we need to make any adjustments so do we need to spray do we not need to spray and we can only answer that question by opening up the door and taking a look at these ribs go ahead okay all right this is what we've got now we're starting to get great color on the outside here it's looking really good i might give them 30 more minutes or so and just turn them around we're starting to actually render this fat pretty well but you see here the meat is starting to crinkle up a little bit starting to crinkle up there which means it's starting to dry out so that means i'm going to start spraying about every 15 or 20 minutes at this point so let it go for another 30 or 45 minutes bring the total time to three and a half 345 and yeah we're just going to spray and try to keep these guys moist and add just a little bit more color and smoke flavor the spray that we're using is half water half apple cider vinegar and i found that i get the best results when i use the vinegar and i just use half water because it makes the vinegar last longer and i use that on pork i use it on beef use it on basically everything that needs to get sprayed i would suggest that you try it and hopefully it works as well for you all right it's been another 30 minutes so we're three and a half hours in and i'm going to guess that we have the color that we want and therefore the smoke flavor we want so we're going to take these ribs put them to a hotter part of the cooker and cook them at 275 to try to get them to pull back from the bone but let's take a look yeah perfect this is exactly what i'm looking for nice and juicy that's starting to render so when i put them on the top rack up there it's 275 all right so we're gonna let those guys go at 275 for about 30 minutes probably and i'm going to spray them now and then 15 minutes in and then again at 30 minutes but let me spray them now with some of this vinegar spray and we're going to let them start to plump up and hopefully pull back from the bones now one side note is this doesn't always happen but usually it does all right after an hour on the smoke we're at 275 we've gotten the pullback on the bones that we wanted to on these ribs now this is partially for an aesthetic reason because it looks nicer when you see pull back on the bones but it's also for a different reason because it plumps up the meat and then makes each bite meatier and you get more meat it's a thicker chunk on every single bone so it looks better and then ultimately it eats better so those are the two reasons why i want to get that pull back on the bone it's totally not necessary i just like it and i think it improves the overall experience so we're taking it out we're wrapping it in aluminum foil and this is what you do you take it you put it meat side down on the aluminum foil and i add some of the vinegar spray to the wrap itself because that's going to make sure the whole environment stays moist but there is one thing to note here adding the liquid will cause some of the color to kind of fade away a little bit it washes away a little bit of the color but if you already have a nice dark color to begin with that's no problem at all it should still be great at the end [Music] all right now back on the smoker still at 275 but only wrapped for about 30 minutes or so so we'll check on it after maybe 20 just depending on feel after you've done enough of them you can pick it up and say oh this is done or it's not but probably check after 20 minutes it'll probably be done by about 30. okay it's been about 30 minutes so let's check on these ribs all right so i'm going to pick it up first because when i pick it up i want it to feel like it just gives this one feels done this one feels almost done all right so i picked these up and they felt good so i unwrapped them and one kind of easy test that you can do to see if your ribs are about ready is if you pick them up and it starts to break on these you can see we still have great color on the exterior but where i tried to pick them up they started to want to break that tells me these are the right level of tenderness at this point all we have to do is glaze them we've gotten the smoke flavor on the exterior we have really good color we've got pullback from the bones we've got tenderness that we wanted now and now all that's left is glaze on the outside so by just using a simple rub like salt and pepper at first you get the smoke to penetrate the meat and now with the sauce whatever sauce is your favorite we get that kind of symphony of all those different flavors together so that way you don't have to cover up the rib with stuff that's going to prevent smoke from penetrating the meat to me this is the best of both worlds you get the sweet and all the spices you want in your sauce to cover the exterior surface of the meat but you don't sacrifice that smoke flavor one other thing if you're not sure if the ribs are done you can take a digital instant read thermometer i love the thermapens i spent way more money on cheap thermometers that kept breaking than i would have spent on a thermapen in the beginning it's 100 worth your investment i'll put a link below uh i love these things but what you can do is just on the back side of the ribs if you just poke through we're not looking at temperatures here we're just looking for feel if it feels nice and soft going through it's done it's ready to go and these feel great if you actually read the temperature on this it'd probably be right around 200 degrees but that's just a quick and easy way to see if you have the tenderness that you want [Music] so at this point just paint sauce over the top any kind you like i like sweet baby raise so that's what i'm using today there's some sauces that i like to make to use that are a little bit uh we'll call it different i like spicy so i like to make a nice and spicy sauce but whatever sauce you enjoy use that so we're going to paint some of this on the top and then we're going to go probably 20 30 minutes back on the smoke just to let this thicken up and really set on top of the ribs [Music] all right we're going to check back in about 20 minutes to see how this glaze looks [Music] after 30 minutes glazing on the smoker these ribs are now done pull them out put them on the cutting board let them rest for 20 minutes and as you can see you don't need paprika in your rub to get great color on ribs and finally the reason we need to let them rest is because if you cut into them when they're still super super hot the edges of where you cut will dry out really fast so it's important to let them rest a little bit let juices kind of redistribute and then also it kind of allows the temperature to be low enough that you can first of all eat it right away but then also the outside doesn't evaporate all the water so all we have left to do now is cut one of these off and eat it as you can see we still have juicy ribs here we have the glaze on this side and we have a little bit of smoke ring on the top and the bottom and hopefully these are going to be delicious ribs all right so here we have a rib and my mouth is watering getting ready to eat this but you see the glaze on the top looks beautiful it's a very attractive rib and now we've got to taste it that's good as you can see we have a clean bite here so we have uh the ribs not falling completely apart because you don't want them to be mush but then also underneath you see clean bone which means that the meat is not sticking to the bone it should be a perfectly tender rib and the bite that i had was and then finally when you're done with your ribs the bone should look like this nice and clean there's not a bunch of meat still sticking on it that means that you've cooked it to proper tenderness now i hope you guys all get out there and try to make your ribs this way and then let me know what you think in the comments down below and if you enjoyed the video hit the like button and don't forget to subscribe to the channel to find more fun and informative barbecue content you can also follow me on twitter and instagram at mad scientist barbecue i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 248,339

Rating: 4.9105883 out of 5

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Id: YktNZW-bgBc

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020