Aristogrub: September 2016

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Smoking our first batch of Saint Louis Style Spare Ribs on the Camp Chef SmokePro

In the last month we’ve cooked lots of chicken on the SmokePro DLX Pellet Grill & Smoker, but because of my schedule we haven’t had time for any long-smoke meals until today. We smoked three Saint Louis Style slabs of spare ribs using our own version of the venerable 3-2-1 method, meaning they spent three hours exposed to smoke at 225 degrees, followed by two hours wrapped in foil as 225 degrees, followed by 1 hour back out of the foil to finish and to set the glaze.

Now, because my dad didn’t raise a fool, after the first three hours on the smoker and once we wrapped them in foil there was no reason to continue burning expensive pellets, so we moved the the ribs to a 225 degree oven for the two hour portion of the cook. Some think this is eating but since those people were’t invited to the cook-out we ignored them.

One plan that I had that went awry was I was going to take those two hours to smoke the extra chicken thighs and wings that we marinated last night, but I got called away so they got cooked later that evening.

All that’s left to explain is how we prepped the ribs:

We removed the membrane from the back of the ribs and slathered them with a thin film of yellow mustard. I’ll never get used to this but it really works to hold on the the spices and rub and you don’t taste it after they are done. Next we added some garlic salt and fresh ground black pepper followed by a generous layer of "Killer Hogs” classic “BBQ Rub” found here https://h2qshop.com I purchased one shaker of this stuff and we’ve put it on everything! My next order will be for a 5lbs bag that we’ll separate into Mason jars.

After the 3 hours on the smoker we wrapped them in foil and added Parkay squeeze margarine and brown sugar. We were going to add some honey but forgot.

After the two hour sauna in the foil we transferred the ribs back to the smoker and made a glaze by adding the drippings from the foil wraps with about 1/2C of Sweet Baby Ray’s Honey Barbecue Sauce. We basted the ribs twice with this mixture and after a total of one hour back on the smoker at 225 degrees we were rewarded with some of the best ribs I’ve ever had.

What would I do differently next time? I think I need to look into a rib rack that will allow us to hold a few more racks. Not only to increase the capacity, but to keep the ribs from hanging over the edge and getting too hot on the edges.