ONE HOUR RIBS?
Now, I’m a rib purist. A rib snob. When I do ribs for competition I’m totally focused on beauty, perfect bite and balanced flavor. Even when I do them “friends and family” style I’m still aiming at the same goals, just not quite as precisely or with the same intensity. Not including prep time, my ribs need at least four hours and on up to five depending on size – I cook to temperature. Hard work. Tiring. Stressful. Expensive – costly rubs, sauces, supplies, and equipment specialized to the task.
Watching one of those silly rigged-up cooking shows where the cooks can trick each other with handicaps and buy advantage by decreasing their prize money, I had an idea the other day. What if all I had was just the very, very basics and not much time? Could I still do a rib that would be edible? I don’t mean just “hot and fast” I mean the fastest way possible with no sophisticated ingredients or expensive cookers or complex methodologies. Could I make something I wouldn’t wind up donating to the dog bowl? Here’s the challenge I gave myself:
1. Grocery store ribs. Aged in brine in Cryovac. Probably butchered and frozen a year ago.
2. No rub. Just salt and pepper.
3. Commercial sauce – no custom blend or hard work home-made.
4. Gas grill only. No smoker. No smoke chips or chunks. Simplicity.
5. One hour maximum cook time.
There are lots of recipes and approaches on the Internet for “Hot and Fast Ribs” and some of them sound plausible but none of them are really fast, taking two to three hours, usually. I’m thinking “spur of the moment” ribs, cooked while gabbing with a buddy over a beer. Not much work. Edible, tasty and satisfying but with no unrealistic expectations. Possible? Here goes . . .
Skinning ribs is a pain, so I didn’t do it. In fact, I hardly trimmed anything at all. I cut off some dangling bits and pieces and left it at that. I didn’t use a lot of the salt and pepper, either. Just a light sprinkling of kosher salt and a few easy grinds from my pepper mill. The “finished” rack looks like, well, ribs. Nothing fancy. There was one major problem I couldn't see though . . . more about that later.
While I was prepping I fired up the little Weber gasser to full blast, timing getting the ribs on the racks with some sizzle to them. The hood ornament thermometer read about 550 degrees when I first loaded up. After the ribs went on I turned the gas down to half, seeking sort of a first “sear” but planning to cook for the full hour to maximize tenderness. I watched the temperature pretty closely, taking the full hour but cooking way down on low for the last 25 minutes of it so I wouldn’t get any char or too much dryness. When the ribs were “done” by my self-imposed time method I pulled them off and sauced them very moderately, letting the residual heat set the sauce. This worked well for eliminating char and added some needed color. The rack shrunk a bit as you can see, but it looked appetizing enough.
Results: I’ve had lots worse. These had no smoke, of course, but they did have the inherent pork meaty flavor, a little sizzle flavor (I know the Grill Grates helped with that) and I could taste a little effect from the salt and pepper “rub” before the cook. My saucing was a little heavy – but still not too much to overpower everything else. The texture? Sort of “toughish” but not a bad chew considering I did nothing to promote tenderness.
The biggest problem turned out to be the ribs themselves. Although they were a name brand, they were cut "funny" and had a hard ridge running laterally about halfway through the rack. My guess is the machine that trimmed them wasn't set properly and cut the rack as half St. Louis and half baby backs, leaving the transition cartilage in place (hard work to cut through it).
Afterthoughts . . . I have a few. Mainly, I want to try this cook again with pretty much the same limitations but with better ribs. While they certainly didn't have competition "bite" they were tender enough not to insult one's molars. When I figure out what I'm going to do next, I'll post it as an add on to this.
Hub