How to make smoked, grilled, barbecued ribs

Ribs. Almost everybody loves them. Not everyone can make them. Not everyone can make good ribs anyway.

They are not the easiest thing to make. I’ve screwed up many a rib, trust me 🙂

So here is how to cook ribs, how I make them anyway. I think it is a pretty foolproof method.

First, you need to get yourself some ribs. There are several different rib cuts for pork ribs. The only two I ever really use are spare ribs and baby back. I like them both, but the fam prefers baby back so that is mostly what I make anymore. The spares are meatier, but they are a little porkier also, if that makes any sense. They have a little more fat, etc. on them. The baby backs are a little easier to work with as well. It really all depends what your personal preference is.

Here are my baby backs. We were having a party so I got two separate packs. Mine come packed like this, the ones you buy might be different. Seems like we have been having a lot of parties lately 🙂

Open them up.

I’m holding a whole slab. There were 3 or 4 in a pack. Like I said, it all depends on how you buy them.

The first thing you want to do is peel off the membrane. This is on the back of the slab. My wife isn’t a big fan of membrane removal, it kind of creeps her out. It doesn’t bother me much. I can tell you this much, you don’t want to leave it on. The membrane just gets nasty as you cook the ribs and I think it interferes with the smoking and cooking in general.

I think it’s easiest to start on one of the ends with a fork. Poke around until you catch the end of the membrane.

Then you slowly peel it off. Be careful and you are usually able to get the whole thing off in one shot.

After you are done removing the membrane from all the slabs, you want to cut the slabs up into sections. You don’t have to, but I do so I can fit them all on to my smoker. Put the knife in between the bones. They are pretty easy to cut. I believe I just cut all the slabs in half.

Here is a pic of them all cut up in a pile.

Next, I rinse them all off. You probably don’t have to if you don’t want to. I like to, I feel it gets off all the liquid they were packed in, etc.

Next you want to put them on the smoker. I use a rib rack. It works great for this, I am able to fit a ton of ribs on all at once instead of having to smoke them multiple times. I guess it all depends on how big a smoker you have, what kind you have, etc. This is what I do, you’ll have to adjust accordingly to fit for your situation.

Here are the first few on the rib rack.

Here is a pic of all of them.

Make sure you load your hardwood, wood chips or whatever you are using for smoke. Then put your probe into one of the deeper sections of meat and fire up your smoker.

I smoked these on low. Low and slow is definitely the way to go with ribs. They went for a good long time and I smoked them until the ribs were at 160 degrees.

Here they are after hitting 160.

The ribs are smoked and cooked now. I always feel like they are not really done until you put them on a hot grill with some BBQ sauce though.

So fire up a hot grill for the grilling. I use charcoal.

Put the ribs top side down.

You don’t need to grill them very long. I grill them for about 10 minutes top side down.

Here they are after I flipped them.

Now just sauce them up.

After they are all sauced up, cook them for another 10-15 minutes.

Time to eat!

Everyone is still telling me how good they were. They were delicious!

There is some work involved but I feel I definitely get the best results with what I described above. I get much better results smoking them first, because the meat is tender, and more importantly, it is cooked to the exact temperature you want it. You know they are done.

They never turned out as well for me when I tried making them on the grill only. Too many things can go wrong. Ribs aren’t cheap. There is nothing worse than tough, burnt ribs you paid good money for, if you ask me.

Give it a try this way, I hope you like them!