So I've been thinking: I love chili. I love pork barbecue. I should love pork barbecued chili! As it turns out, I totally do. With Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Flood Watch/Tornado Warning/East Coast Terror Alert/Irene on it's way, it seemed like a good idea to use up any frozen fixin's we had in our freezers. After discarding pounds of year old freezer-burned breads and veggies, I found a nice brick of frozen leftover barbecued pork rib meat from my last bbq competition. Then came the realization that the storm might also wreak havoc on the vegtable garden... so in came a nice basket of fresh poblanos, tomatoes, jalapenos, and serranos. I also found half a bag of dried great northern beans which meant we were fully stocked for chili making. Curious about the results? Read on for the lowdown. 

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Pork shoulder was our best score of the weekend, coming in at 20th of 40 competitors in the pork category. A few KCBS reps were really enthusastic about this score for our first KCBS competition, and not knowing that much about it all I'll take their enthusiasm as good news! I completely planned to hand-pull this shoulder like I've done dozens of times for backyard barebcues, but as I started to separate the pieces, we noticed there were a few gorgeous sections of juicy meat with a rich bark on them.... after a little debate we decided it was best to slice them into large-ish chucks instead. We squirted them with a few drops of my carolina red vinegar sauce, and it turns out we're onto something here! The shoulder went on the WSM at 1am, and came off at about 10:30a. Temp readings were from 180-190, and the WSM18 stayed at 210-230 the whole time. I've never carved a shoulder like this, and clearly I need to work on my tecnique a bit.... but I'm super excited we scored as well as we did in pork. Go Pork! 

I'm getting closer to my goal of BBQ Billy's worthy competition ribs on the weber smokey mountain. Last weekend I fired up the smoker and barbecued two slabs of spares and one baby back with slight modifications to rubs and a new sauce variation. Full analysis follows! 

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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. 

I've been a long-time enthusiast of the "St Louis" cut sparerib, and only more recently have I started preparing baby backs. In my mind, if I was going to fire up the smoker I should get some ribs in there that would benefit from a long smoke. And spare ribs, being larger and served up at so many great barbecue joints around the country, seemed like the best choice. But now that I've been grilling baby backs for the past few years, I thought I'd smoke a few racks for the first time and have a smoked comparison of the spare v the baby...

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I've been bbq'ing and smoking for maybe 10 years now, and anytime I pulled out the smoker its always been for a traditional "bbq." Meaning spicy/sweet rubs with vinegar/tomato sauces all for ribs, shoulders, briskets, wings, etc... we're talkin' B. B. Q. But after making some korean bbq earlier this summer, I figured it was time to venture out of the american south, and into a new territory of soy marinaded ribs.

I started with a similar marinade as i used on that beef, but this time substituted "Bragg's" for the soy sauce, and I actually found Mirin at Hawthorne Valley this time. Recipe follows, but i made the marinade, and the tossed it in a ziploock with a rack of ribs. They sat for about 6 hours in the fridge before I got the coals going the smoker. Here are a few shots of the marinade: 

I fired up the smoker, and opted out of any additional wood flavor for this one. Just kept it a straight hardwood charcoal event. I tossed the ribs on (meat side down), and smoked for about 2.5 hours before opening up to flip the ribs to bone side down. I then continued smoking for another hour, and took 'em inside. No mopping for these guys, and no finishing sauce. I simply cut 'em up, and tossed on a few scallions for garnish. I served them with soba noodles and some steamed peas with a light bragg's/mirin/scallion sauce. Here are a few shots of the meal: 

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup Bragg's 3 Tablespoons sugar 
• 1 Tablespoon canola oil 
• 1 Tablespoon Mirin 
• 4 garlic cloves, minced 
• 3 scallions, minced, plus 1 tablespoon sliced for garnish
• 1 slab pork spare ribs

Process:

• Mix everything but the ribs in a bowl until the sugar dissolves entirely. 
• Pour it into a zip lock bag, and toss in the ribs (I had to cut my slab in half to fit in my zip lock)
• Shake it all up, then squeeze out as much air as possible and reseal. 
• Marinate these for at least 4 hrs, or overnight. 
• Get your smoker or kettle grill going for a low and slow 220-250 degree smoke-fest
• Smoke the ribs for 2.5 hrs meat side down, flip, and smoke for an hour more. 
• Slice into individual ribs and garnish with sliced scallions. 
• Devour.