New to BBQ!!! Looking for a little rib advice!!!

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that enjoys cooking.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

92hatchattack

Senior Cook
Joined
Jun 13, 2007
Messages
113
Location
new jersey
Hey all!!! First of all, totaly cool that there is a BBQ forum... This is going to help me out alot!

So, my name is Joe, and i have recently found an intrest in preparing better outdoors food. Lol, i am in no way a chef, nor do i want to be, but i am looking to step it up past the generic store bought hamburgers and hotdogs that 95% of people have at their backyard cookouts.

So far i have done a few basics. A top round(london broil) marinaded overnight is a whiskey marinade and grilled, and some strip steaks with a dry rub. The top round came out well, tons of flavor and the steaks were ok, allthough i think the cuts may have been to thin, so it suffered.

Now im looking to get into a basic baby back rib recipe. In the past, ive done nothing more than slap the rips on the grill, grill em up, and coat em with BBQ suace. This always tastes good, but i know it can be better.

Im not looking to get straight into making my own sauce, but im asking you guys for some preperation techniques, and some dry rubs that will work well with some comercial bbq sauces. Right now ive been using Bulls eye. Are there better commecial BBq's available???

So, yeah, just looking for some prep tips, and a good rub recipe that will work with a comercial sauce.

Thanks alot for taking the time to red all this, and hoping to hear from you soon...

---Joe
 
First what are you cooking on?
Second...wood selection...
Rub...most are a mix of Salt, Turbinado Sugar, Paprika, and other spices...
Sauce....commerical sauce can be doctored to what you like....thinned with vinegar, sweeted with honey or maple syrup...ects......

There are a lot of great Cook Books that will give you a starting point..From there just experiment to see what you like

Welcome to the Forum.
A few of the cookbooks to look at
Smoke and Spice by Jamison and Jamison
BBQ USA
Ray Lampkes DR BBQ Big time Cookbook
and Paul Kirk has a very good book about making sauces and rubs...
and just look around this site for ideas..
 
Unfortunatly i live in an aprtment and i dont have a stable cooking aparatus. I usualy cook on my sister in laws cheap gas grill, and often i go to the park and grill on their little standup pits with charcoal.
 
One basic concept, given your limited apparatus, would be to have a fire on half your grill, and the meat on the other half..indirect cooking...
 
Indirect cooking is a form of slow cooking, kinda of light a smoker idea right? Doesnt this require a hood? M y sisters gas grill has a hood, but the ones at the park do not. How long does the indirect cooking technique take to cook?

I know this is all pretty hard for you hardcore bbqers to understand. But i dont bbq at my apartment as grills are prohibited. So i go other places to cook.. but the problem there is that i dont get alot of cooking time. If i had my own house(sometime next year) id have no problems with the time dedication to smoking a few racks of ribs for 8 hours.... but as of now i am simply trying to make the most out of what i have accesible...

I mean, unless theres a decend, resonablypriced protable unit, small enough to hide inside my apartment, im pretty much out of luck as far as grills go.
 
Im sure Ill get all kinds of crap for this, but here goes....

Until you get some differant toys, try cutting the ribs in sections, wrapping them in foil with a little bbq sauce brushed lightly on or add a little apple juice, in the oven at 250 for about 2.5 hours. Just before your ready to serve, take them from the foil, brush them with your fav sauce and grill them till the sauce starts to brown (sort of carmalizing it, you'll see it on the tips, where it contacts the grill ect)...Just, please, in the name of all that is bbq, do not boil them first....
 
It seems you are pretty bent on the slow cooking idea. Does it really make that huge of a diffrence??? I mean, ill be honest, ive never had a competition style rib or anything so i really dont know.

Ive also heard a rumor that cooking with foil can transfer harmful toxins into the food... is there any truth to this???
 
Sorry you are not getting a lot of help on this. I think it is because you are very limited on what you can cook with.

My advice would be to ask around and eat some ribs from a joint that uses wood for smoke and smokes ribs start to finish no less that 5 hours.

Then you will have some idea of what they are supposed to taste like for comparison.
 
92hatchattack said:
It seems you are pretty bent on the slow cooking idea. Does it really make that huge of a diffrence??? I mean, ill be honest, ive never had a competition style rib or anything so i really dont know.

Ive also heard a rumor that cooking with foil can transfer harmful toxins into the food... is there any truth to this???

Cook them so they taste the way you like them, not the way other folks tell you they should taste !
 
Unless your sister lives close enough to you and would allow you to set up a smoker at her place, I'd buy a large portable Weber charcoal grill. Take it to the park and concentrate on BBQ'ing smaller cuts of meat like chicken and thin country style ribs with inderect heat. You can make very good BBQ within a three hour time window by raising the temp a little above the normal slow cooking temp range.

Just my suggestion. :(
 
john pen said:
Cook them so they taste the way you like them, not the way other folks tell you they should taste !

i hear ya ... just saying, theres a posiblility that ive never even eaten a really good rack of ribs...


the best i have had was from a place called "big ed's"

anyone heard of them?

and i understand totaly that im not getting a ton of help because i am so limited.... i knew there wasnt going to be a whole lot that i could do.... which was why i was just looking for a rub to enhance the ribs before the sauce a little bit....... allthough my cooking style is limited theres nothing wrong with getting a head start trying out a few difrent recipes..

if i were to purchse a protable grill, any specific models i should be looking at?
 
Joe, Look in the recipe section under BBQ Sauces, Sops, Dry Rubs and
Brines. Lots of rub recipes in there.
Your oven is pretty much a gas or electric pit without the smoke. Practice
cooking the baby backs in the oven at 225* to 250* for about 4 hours then take them to the park to reheat and finish with sauce.
I don't know about storing a grill in an apartment, not exactly an air freshener. :)
 
this seems to be the largest portable webber i can find. 12x21
goAnywhereCharcoal_hero.jpg


This would actualy be pretty good at my aprtment.. i could even store it right outside possibly. But it quickly becomes aparent that if you can only use half the are for the food, and the other half for the fuel, that im not going to get alot of cooking space out of it, so i wont be able to make ribs for a large amount of people. oh well... ill do what i can ...


cooking the ribs in the over sound like a decent idea to give a try here at home..... allthough, it kinda takes the fun out of it now doesnt it??? LOL
 
Back
Top Bottom