I will try not to wax eloquent about my utter failure. I should, if anything, hide my light (of incompetence) beneath a bucket. Okay, so I'm doing the Maple Syrup Pig Candy Ribs. High Expectations, relatively high effort considering I had to search Manila for pure maple syrup. My bro-n-law buys the ribs and pulls the grey skin of the back. I make up the required rub, feeling all useful and innovative as I grind spices, mix this, add that. All very nice. But I have time. Too much time. And that is always a bad thing. So I wander over to the computer and bring up one of my hero's, Douglas Baldwin.
Nice guy, even has a video with doing sous vide spare ribs. Okay, I listen to the brine section. Instead of giving the ribs their rub and sending them off to snooze in the fridge, I decide to brine them, for moisture's sake. Juicy ribs under a glaze of exotic maple armor. Oh yeah, I'm in pig heaven. I've never actually slowed down to look at the ribs bro-n-law bought because we've made lots of ribs along the way. Mostly pressure cooked, but still all pork ribs. To make a really horrible meal, it takes a number of things to go wrong. Like a really "tight" trim on the ribs so there is little meat left. And maybe a brine that, although the numbers were followed, was better suited to making something on the order of ham.
Because that is what I had when we pulled them out of the brine in the morning. I didn't know it then, but I would later. Did the rub, let them relax in the fridge again. Then onto the smoker. Which was working pretty good. I've finally got most of the wrinkles in hitting smoking temperatures ironed out. Nice 200F to 250F without wild variations, mostly. Take the dome off and all bets are off.
Cook per the instructions and I notice these ribs look pretty dry. Almost mummified. Eek! I keep my fingers crossed the half an hour of being wrapped in foil with 1/2 cup of apple juice to moisten them will return some of their vigor. And in a word ... No. But the last step of glazing them made them look quite appealing. Shiny and sweet and not at all the tough shoe leather critters they actually were.
So a whacking good failure to be sure! Or part of the learning curve. Check the meat, careful with the brine (no more 7 percent), get more experience with rib done-ness. Other than that, it was good. The glaze is nice, but I recommend a stronger flavored Grade B maple syrup rather than the delicate grade A. The Memphis Dust rub was fine and not salty at all, I may up the salt, particularly if I don't brine. And the Weber/Smokenator setup is getting more interesting. I can see how to hit my temps and stay there, how to use it for other things. I will try smoking bacon in it next month. And ribs too. I won't give up. I actually tried another set of ribs the next day, cut very similar to the fiasco ones. No brine, much less time smoking, and they were much better. But not to say good. There was too little meat and a whole lotta bone. Big wide ones that seemed to suck moisture from the meat. I cooked for half the time at the same temps, did the apple foil wrap, and skipped the expensive glaze, using some bbq sauce we had in its place. Edible, not great. I will be inspecting the meat much closer in the future. I garh-ohn-tee!
