We headed to Maine this past weekend to visit my parents and my sisters. And while picking up a few things at their local butcher I noticed a few racks of big honkin' loin back ribs and figured I should make some barbecue for dinner. My folks are not exposed to a ton of barbecue, so I thought it'd be fun to serve up a few slabs of ribs on saturday night. I "smoked" these on my father's weber gas grill with a few foil packets of wood chips (a hickory, oak, and apple blend from Stubb's), and I was really suprised by how well they turned out. 

I have a weber gas grill circa 2004 which I love, but man have they made improvements in the past few years. My pop's grill had four burners running north-south, compared to mine which has three running east-west. The north-south configuration allowed me to have one burner on the far side lit with wood chips smoldering on top, and the ribs nicely lined up on the far end of the grill soaking up the smoke and cooking over indirect heat. I set that one burner on medium high, and it maintained a perfect 215 degree temp for hours and hours and hours. I've never been able to keep such a low temp setting on my gas... so now I have gas-grill-envy. 

Anyway, I started to thinking that this really isn't much different from some of the big boy professional pits out there that run on gas with larger logs of wood burning to create smoke. And if they can produce killer (KILLER!) ribs, than I think this backyard grill could as well. This time around the ribs weren't quite tender enough for a barbecue snob such as myself to totally rave about. When I took the ribs out they had come to temp, but could have gone another hour or even two... but I wasn't going to make mom and dad stay up til midnight to eat dinner! So we had some tasty ribs, but the larger ones tended toward more of a pork chop texture. Still though, my BBQB Shake made for a great rub, and I made up some of Mike Mills' "Apple City Barbecue" sauce which was a huge crowd pleaser at the dinner table. Sweet, vinegary, a tiny kick... huge hit! The ribs had a substantial smoke falvor, and the rub and souce combination was teriffic. 

That next morning my mom told me that as my dad was drifting off to sleep he says, "Those ribs were really great... wish i could buy some of those around here."

I might have just found my first customer.