Hepcat decided that he wanted to BBQ spare ribs for Friday night's
dinner with his sister, bro-in-law, his mom, OSFO and me. It was a
lark, really. He'd never done it before and thought it might be fun.
Quick to the rescue, I emailed Mrs. Cleavage, my friend the southern gal blogger of Eat Drink Memory, who is currently residing in North Carolina and asked if she had a recipe.
Of course she had a recipe; she wrote this in her email.
a solid rib recipe that I love. A BBQ sounds like a lot of fun about
now. We are going to my Uncle's Labor Day Weekend for a pig-picking
and pool party. I plan to lounge in the water until I look like a
prune.
Luckily we took a look at the recipe, which is on Epicurious and originally from a cookbook called The Thrill of the Grill by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby (William Morrow and Company, 1990), early in the day because it required four hours of cooking time on the BBQ.
It's a dry rub recipe, which combines: 2
1/2 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons paprika, 2 tablespoons ground
cumin, 1 1/2 tablespoons black pepper, 1 tablespoon chili powder, 1
tablespoon salt.
Hepcat is usually violently opposed to
following recipes because he likes to improvise but he followed this
one to the letter because he doesn't know squat about southern BBQ.
He
did, however, substitute chipolte chili powder for regular chili powder
and that was a tasty idea. Mid-preparation, he had drive to the store
to get hickory chips and extra black pepper because he thought the rub
and the basting sauce called for a whole lot of pepper. I see now he
misread the word teaspoons in the basting sauce recipe for tablespoons.
Maybe that's why it was so spicy.
Here's the recipe for the basting sauce: 1 3/4 cups distilled white vinegar, 2 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon Tabasco, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 1/2 teaspoons black pepper.
Correction from Hepcat:
he says he did misread it initially but when he read it again he saw
that it said teaspoon not tablespoon. "Still, I think it was too
peppery and next time I'd do less pepper and more sugar."
Hepcat
started preparing the ribs around 5 pm which put the EST for eating
around 9 pm. While the ribs cooked we had a great time sitting around
and swimming in the pool, listening to music, talking and drinking
beer.
The ribs were spicy, savory and delicious and there were
absolutely no leftovers. We served them with BBQed homegrown zucchini
and eggplant and a salad. Even the veggies had a nice hickory smoked
taste.
Good job Hepcat and thanks to Mrs. Cleavage for the recipe. I see that today on Eat Drink Memory she's got a recipe for Eastern North Carolina Pit Cooked BBQ. She writes:
everything but the squeal. Cooking a whole pig over coals is a lengthy
process, with an average cooking time of between 10 and 12 hours. My
Dad and brother used to cook pigs in lined earth pits but later
fashioned cookers from metal drums.
Sounds great. But tonight, we're cooking leg of lamb here in California.