After my fairly successful venture with smoking brisket, I decided that my next pursuit would be a few slabs of spare ribs. I started out by buying about 9.5-lbs of spare ribs. Click on over to my posting on dry rub prep to see how I got these delectable pieces of meat ready.
You can read about the rest of the cooking process after the jump.
I fired up my smoker around 1:30PM on a beautiful, sunny day that hit about 83oF at its warmest. The smoker quickly reached 150oF and the ribs were thrown on around 2:00PM. In addition to the ribs, I also added a skirt pieces which had also been dry rubbed and set overnight. During the next two hours, hickory smoke and the scent of ribs made for an intoxicating smell in my backyard. At the two hour mark, I opened the smoker and flipped the ribs and piece of skirt meat. Everything was left to smoke for about another hour and a half. At about 5:30PM, I removed everything from the smoking. It was all wrapped in tinfoil and set on the counter for about 30-minutes.
During this time, we had some corn on the cob boiling up and some baked beans being prepared. We sliced the slabs into 3-4 rib serving sizes and began to dig in. The ribs, for most part, peeled right off the bone and the homemade bbq sauce was a terrific addition. Add a couple of cold ones and we had a terrific meal.
All in all, this second adventure with my smoker can be classified as successful (I’m 2-for-2, but who’s counting). I will, however, do two things differently next time. First, I am going to tweak the dry rub recipe a bit. I believe the amount of cayenne I used was a bit too much for some people’s liking. It didn’t bother me, but a few folks mentioned that the ribs were quite spicy. Secondly, the ribs were a little dry in my opinion. I believe that using some mopping sauce during the last 30-60 minutes would help alleviate this problem. I’ll look into that as well next time. I also need to find a way to control my smoker temperature a little bit better – my temps got as hight 250oF. The piece of skirt meat was a bit dry and tough. I believe that this meat could have been pulled off at about the 2.5-hour mark. Live and learn, however.
Any comments? I’d love to hear them!
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