Smoking Ribs on Gut Feel

I decided to cook ribs without monitoring their temperature. Usually I follow the 3-2-1 method (three hours unwrapped, two hours wrapped in foil, one hour unwrapped) but cook them until they reach 190. But, I was cooking these on a workday, so I needed to be able to focus less on the cook, and decided to just throw ’em on and try not to be overly involved with the effort.

They may actually have been the best ribs I’ve made yet.

Food: Pork Ribs (Baby Back)
Temperature: 225-250°
Cooking time: 6:00
Wood used: Cherry
Notes: Cooked using minion method to start charcoal, then spritzed every 45 minutes with apple juice for two hours. Wrapped in tinfoil (with some apple sauce added) for two hours, then cooked for an hour with two layers of BBQ sauce.

There’s something beautiful in not having to micromanage a cook. This is not to say that planning is unnecessary. I still had a game plan, I just didn’t worry so much about internal meat temperature. In fact, I didn’t even record it. Basically, I knew I wanted to put the ribs on at 1:00 and remove them around 4:00 to wrap them in foil. Then around 6:00, I would remove them from the foil and sauce them, putting them back on the smoker to let the sauce set until they were ready.

This cook was unusual in that the smoker performed the way it should for the entire six hours. I only adjusted the vents three times: once when it came up to temp, a second time an hour or so later just to scale back the heat a bit, and a final time near the end when I wanted to increase the heat to char the sauce a little. I wish every cook were like this — basically no tweaking of the smoker, just easy cooking. My last time making brisket was a complete headache with no breeze at all to feed the smoker and constant spikes and dips.

Prep

I used my normal go-to solution for rubbing the ribs. I put salt and pepper on and then used Carolina Brewery BBQ Rub to give it some more flavorful bark. For the sauce, I tried a new product I found, Stubb’s Sticky Sweet BBQ Sauce. I used this twice, immediately after removing the ribs from the foil, and then again about 20 minutes later when the first layer had set. I turned the heat up for about 10 minutes after the second layer had set, which in retrospect probably could have been more like 15-18 minutes. It was still amazing — the sauce was sweet, tangy, and sticky.

Cooking Log