Alright peeps, here's the deal. My sister in law's boyfriend (prof chef, CIA trained, but very cool, not snobby guy at all) has told me we are doing a pork baby back rib cookoff in a couple of weeks when we go down to NC to visit. I know he'll smoke me, but since it's all in good fun, I've decided to go Asian since I know he'll probably be doing bbq.
I've been trying to formulate some ideas, and I think I want to include Hoisin, maybe a citrus (orange juice?), maybe some sort of vinegar (rice vinegar?). Trying to think of some ideas, if anyone wants to offer any suggestions I'd be grateful. I'm assuming I'll still be doing the 260 degree slow indirect method. Fire away!
Remember the Four S's:
For example, I make a sauce (for stir-fry or as a dipping sauce) that is:
For BBQ ribs, you'll need something a little thicker that can stick to the ribs (no pun intended) better, but maybe something like this can be a starting point.
Other good additions could include ginger, scallions, lemon grass, fish sauce, oyster sauce or sesame oil and, of course, hoisin (though not necessarily all of them together).
Good luck.
Pork ribs need a lot of smoke flavor but the right smoke flavor. Your smoke should not be seen as a thick white smoke but rather a light thin blueish smoke. So adding hot coals is better that adding unlit coals. Dried wood onto hot coals is fine.
Not Orange juice for pork that would be great with poultry but for pork ribs you need a spray bottle filled with apple juice to spay your ribs every hour.
You can start mopping with your sauce in the last 2 hours of the cook.
If your competitor is going for traditional BBQ Pork Baby Back Ribs he will more than likely be using a sweet cherry dry rub and spay with apple juice.
You will want to set your taste apart from his as Labradors points out use spicy with a sweet sour sauce. Let the spicy heat be in your dry rub.
To prep pull off the membrane and dry rub all over every side.
Pit temp should be 225 degrees F
1. So I would start with Spicy heat, Salt, sugar dry rub.
2. Spray with apple juice every hour.
Not knowing what type of smoker you have if you need to add wood or coals to it and it starts to put off a white smoke pull the ribs off and wait for the smoke to clear up.
3. At 3 hours in they need wrapped in foil so sauce them up real good and foil wrap them and back into the smoker
4. Then 2 hours later unwrap them and put them back in the smoker mop them with your sauce and smoke them an additional hour.
Done!
Thanks Labs.
Mark, in Asian recipes I've found that they cook more with fire than with smoke. A lot of the asian bbq recipes i've been checking out aren't big on smoke. Thanks for the pointer about the OJ though. I'm going to read through these two posts a little more in depth tomorrow, thanks for weighing in.
@ strikingtwice
Don't leave us hanging without an update, how did it go?
If you don't have pics explain how they looked and tasted and who Won
Sorry, this weekend coming up. Will definitely post results. Also, the answer is we all won, because we're going to get to eat two fantastic racks of ribs!
Alright, so here's the update.
First off, the only winners were the four of us that got to eat this insane meal.
My boy Jon is a professional chef, CIA-sonoma trained. I am a hobbyist (admittedly on the more daring side, sometimes to a fault), so it was all in good fun. He's from the Carolinas, so I knew he'd be doing a traditional Carolina rub then vinegar baste, so instead of competing with that, I wanted to do the Asian thing. Mine was a Southeast asian influenced wet marinade. Thai chiles, lemongrass, fish sauce, some rice vinegar, etc. Jon did a dry rub. We covered them and hit then in the oven on 250 for a few hours because we were going to be doing a bunch of running around in the afternoon.
At night, we finished them on the grill to get the final caramelize and to do our baste. I basted with the same marinade. He used a vinegar based-baste. Because my ribs were wetter to begin with, the steamed a little more in the oven and were insanely tender, falling off the bone. I crushed up some peanuts as a final garnish. Jon just had the nice char.
He did grilled sweet corn on the cob, and I did asparagus and eggplant. The eggplant i just hit with the same marinade, but the asparagus i did a rice vinegar/sesame oil/garlic mix. The pics below are My ribs after the oven, jon's ribs after the oven, and the final serve. Mine are in the back left with the crushed peanuts. Thanks for the suggestions everyone!