CAN YOU REALLY COOK WITHOUT A RECIPE?Life has it ruts, and when it comes to cooking ribs I'll admit I tend to live in the rut I've perfected over the years and, most of the time, I'll stay in that comfortable rut because I know my ribs will come out the way I want them or at least pretty close. The problem is, I get to thinking there's no other way and that I MUST cook ribs per my habit or they will be a dismal failure
For at least two weeks before this year's Super Bowl I knew I'd have to fix a huge batch of ribs and that I'd have minimum time available for both preparation and cooking. I lost sleep. I pondered several ways, even including pre-cooking and re-heating (not my favorite thing to do to ribs although it works okay on some other stuff). I agonized and sweated. Finally, I decided I had to crawl out of my rut and start thinking creatively. Duh
Fact of life: I had about four and a half hours of available time to include getting the smoker going, prepping the racks, cooking them and then delivering them to the recipients. My "rut" time takes about six and a half, all told. Yeah, I know. Your rut may be shorter or longer but you may still have one, so I'm gonna tell this story, anyway
I decided I had to develop, on the fly, without testing it, an approach for ribs that please the two parties I was "catering" and that it could be done. Imagine that
The first thing I did was skip the tedious trimming. If it wasn't a huge chunk of fat or gristle I just left it on.
The second thing I did was skip the skinning. The membrane stayed on the back. Heresy!
The third thing I did was leave the foil in the drawer and go the whole cook "naked" -- no time for wrapping and unwrapping.
The fourth thing I did was shake the rub on fast, not trying to get it perfectly even.
The fifth thing I did was cut the racks in half so I could move them around for even cooking.
The sixth thing I did was move the temp setting up so they'd finish faster. Heresy again.
The seventh thing I did was keep monitoring the between-bone temperature after about the 3rd hour.
The eighth thing I did was skip "glazing" on the sauce by returning the done ribs to the cooker following saucing.
You know what? It worked!
A few more details: I started out with moderately heavy smoke for the first hour of the cook then went for more rapid temperature gain in the meat. This is easy in a pellet cooker but can be done on some other types, too. My smoker chamber ran around 150 degrees (controller set to 180) the first hour and the ribs went from an internal temp of 41 to low double digits. At the start of hour two I cranked it up to 285. Somewhere around the start of hour three I cranked up to 325. My goal was to control the rise of the meat temperature so that I'd still get smokiness and tenderness and not get bark (I hate that on ribs). Yeah, I know I could have grilled them in under and hour, but that wouldn't have produced the flavor I wanted and it would have violated my "rut" so badly I would probably have passed out.
Somewhere during hour four my instant read digital thermometer began giving me reads of 199 to 205 on the thinner slabs. I tossed these in a pan, gave 'em a quick brush of some popular sauce, and parked them in the oven (170 "warm" degrees -- no more cooking) and concentrated on getting the thicker racks to that "zone". About ten minutes before "deliver time" I had two huge aluminum pans full of ribs that were juicy and tender, had no char, didn't fall off the bone into mush, smelled wonderful, didn't push up the price of Alcoa stock and didn't push up my blood pressure. Man, that rut was easy to crawl out of.
Now, these would not have won in competition. They weren't that pretty and they weren't that perfectly done for taste and bite. But, they certainly matched some of the best I've had in restaurants and the folks who ate them had nary a complaint. I made it to the party before the kick-off and I didn't embarrass myself by trying to do the impossible.
What I learned (and share here) is that you can squeeze the time/temperature conundrum and get away with it. Maybe even more than I did, but that'll be another experiment. Measuring rib temperature is tedious and inexact -- you've got to get right between the bones in the center of the rack and it often takes several tries and some mental approximations of what you see. But, I decided, the thermometer is smarter than I am.
Hub