The 3-2-1 method of cooking pork spare ribs is wrong. The best way to cook them is how Chuck Blount does it - San Antonio Express-News
A third of the Texas trinity is pork ribs, but they don't get near the glory brisket does. These fun, flavorful meat lollipops should get more attention — especially in your backyard smoker.
Baby back ribs have that catchy Chili's jingle working for them, but larger spare ribs are easier to cook well because their added size and meat means they have a wider zone of being done but not dry.
Best way to cook
The internet has popularized the 3-2-1 method of cooking spare ribs: three hours of unwrapped cooking at a much lower temperature (about 200 degrees), followed by two hours wrapped in aluminum foil, followed by one hour uncovered after applying barbecue sauce.
I have tried this multiple times, and it always results in really dry ribs. It's just too much time in the foil, and they are typically done well before that last hour of cooking.
Instead, I cook them at 275 degrees uncovered for about three hours. Then I create a kind of foil tent for the ribs, adding about 6 ounces of apple juice or apple cider to the foil pack before sealing the edges, and cook for another hour.
Then I take the ribs out of the foil and brush on a coat of room-temperature sauce, placing the ribs back in the smoker for 10 minutes to get the sauce hot. If you put the sauce on early, or continue to baste the ribs with it for hours, it will blacken and char the meat.
What type to buy
Spare ribs are sold in two ways. There is the full slab, which contains a bonus flap of meat called the skirt, and there is the St. Louis style that is trimmed into a rectangular shape for even-size ribs. St. Louis-style ribs cost about 75 cents more per pound due to the extra work involved in the preparation process, but it's worth the cost.
Because the full, untrimmed slab has ribs of various sizes, it tends to come out unevenly cooked, with the smaller ones getting dry before the larger ones are done. The skirt is good meat that you could cook like a pork loin, but it's less than a pound and doesn't seem worth the effort of trimming it off.
The St. Louis trim makes life easier and cooks more evenly.
"The St. Louis cut is perfect — it's thick and about 3½ pounds per rack, and they don't require as much prep," said Jake Gandolfo, owner and pitmaster at Black Board Bar B Q in Sisterdale.
I concur with that assessment, but that doesn't mean there is no prep. Ribs have a thick membrane along the bone side of the ribs called the silverskin that should be removed. Without that barrier, the smoke can more fully penetrate the meat, and the ribs will be easier to eat without extensive teeth flossing.
Removing the membrane can be a little tricky, but practice makes pork perfection. The key is to gently insert a butter knife into the center of the ribs. Adjust the knife to slide it horizontally under the membrane toward the edge of the rack to a point where you can grab a corner of the membrane with a paper towel and peel it away. It sounds like removing tape from an item. That should get most, if not all, of it of, but you may have to do it again to remove the smaller areas. The paper towel is key, because it keeps your grip dry and clean.
Spare ribs are one of my favorite things to cook for multiple reasons: They are just fun to cook, don't require a full night of monitoring the pit, and people love to eat them.
So go on and get your rib on with those spares.
cblount@express-news.net | Twitter: @chuck_blount | Instagram: @bbqdiver
FROM CHUCK'S FOOD SHACK
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