Dry Rub Pork Spare Ribs – Prep Time

My second adventure in smoking will be two slabs of pork spare ribs.  Once I again, I am deferring to the knowledge of the good folks over at Smoker Cooking.com for recipes and smoking suggestions.  It’s been so far, so good with these folks and they haven’t steered me wrong yet.  Unlike brisket, I have actually cooked pork spare ribs before.  However, the last time I cooked them, I used a slow cooker recipe that basically had me put a lot of BBQ sauce and some dark beer into a crock pot, dump the ribs in, let em cook for a hell of a long time, and then finish them on the grill.  They turned out quite well, but I now know that I could have increased the quality of my final product significantly just by preparing the ribs correctly.

Image courtesy of Smoker Cooking.com

Click on through to see how I went about getting the ribs ready for smoking.

We Have Takeoff!

Ever since I bought my smoker – and, truth be told, for a long time before that – I’ve wanted to make restaurant quality brisket. Brisket, to me, epitomizes what true BBQ food is all about. It’s just a tasty, hearty, succulent meat that, when prepared correctly, just makes your mouth water. So, I decided to jump in the deep end and see if I can swim. With my first run on my new smoker, I decided to give a 4.5-lbs piece of brisket a shot. Results after the jump.

Brisket Prep

I’m going to prep my first brisket tonight.  I’ve got a 4.5lbs slab o’ meet and I can’t wait to get this train moving.  I’m still up in the air over dry rub vs. marinade.  Any suggestion?

The New Vehicle For Our Journey

Every journey requires a mode of transportation and this one is no exception. In order to smoke you need – surprise, surprise – a smoker!

There’s many different routes you can take here but you’re basically looking at making two decisions – size/shape and fuel source. As far as size and shape goes, you can pick an offset firebox, a cabinet-style smoker, a pellet-style smoker, or your traditional grill (with some modifications to your grilling approach). You’re fuel sources are traditionally charcoal, wood, propane, or electric. Most fuel sources can be matched with most shapes, with the exception being the offset firebox. This option tends to be wood or charcoal only.

The good folks at HomeBBQ.com do a great job of explaining the differences between all the different types of smokers in their article What is the Best “1st” Smoker. I’ll leave it to you to read up on it – no sense is me reinventing the wheel with regards to that article.

Now that we’ve laid a little groundwork on the different types of smokers, it’s time to talk about the smoker I selected. At the end of the day, I had a decision to make – do I want to be forced into learning fire management or do I want to have a better chance of scoring some early victories with my smoker? Obviously, I want to make this more than a fling and, as such, I decided to go the propane or electric route. I decided on this route because all the research I did tended to suggest that folks who aren’t familiar with the art of smoking will be overcome by learning both the fire management and the cooking part of smoking. After a lot of research and review reading, I decided on the Brinkman Gourmet Electric Smoker.

I’m really looking forward to using this smoker. I’d love to hear any experiences that anyone has had with it.