March 5, 2013
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“Barbecued” Baby-Back Ribs
First of all, I learned from May that they are called “baby” back ribs because they come from the relatively smaller 300-lb hog rather than the normal 500-lb ones?
Anyway. It seems like every time someone comes to San Diego, they want to have Phil’s BBQ, which is fine because I understand that when you visit a city you want to visit the restaurants that are known to be good there or unique to the location. But I feel like all I’ve been having lately are these over-sauced ribs from Phil’s which, let’s be honest, aren’t /that/ good, are they?
Once, at Amy’s house-warming, we got one unsauced half rack for me, but they were still sauced. I think they sauce them while cooking and then “unsauced” just means they don’t add even more over the top before they serve it to you.
I used to avoid ordering baby-back ribs at restaurants because they couldn’t live up to my standard. Why did I say “used to” – I still do. But you know, we have visitors, they want to go out for something good in San Diego. We can’t really avoid Phil’s. And I’m not living at home anymore, so who knows when the next time I’ll have Dad’s BBQ will be?
So every time someone wants to go to Phil’s I trudge along reluctantly and get a mini craving for Dad’s ribs. And then Mike’s parents were here and we went to Phil’s and within a week or so May came down for a day trip and we had Phil’s and my mini craving became more gnawing. So I went to Costco and bought a ginormous 9lb bag of ribs. I regretted it immediately.
I cut four 6-rib sections (only used two in the first trial run), seasoned with salt, pepper, and garlic powder in preparation for a bbq experiment. (Half of the rest went to hongshao paigu – not as good as Mom’s, I think I need ginger – and the other half to meat soup with seaweed.)
Preheat the oven to 300F.
Line a 9″x13″ Pyrex pan with foil. Place the ribs meat side up in the pan. I was lucky that they happened to fit perfectly I guess, since I originally planned to make it in a different pan.
Stick it in the oven and let it cook for an hour. Then spread BBQ sauce on it. I only put BBQ sauce on one of them, since Mike likes sauce and I don’t. Cook for another hour. More sauce. One more hour. (That’s three hours total.)
Close-up of my yummy non-sauced one:
Cut one to make sure it was cooked:
Tasty! Mike said the sauced one was good too. I think it did need a bit of honey or lemon or something for a glaze. But not bad for a first try. Will definitely do this again. =) That feeling of regret went away as I was munching that first rib. =9
Comments (1)
I thought “baby” meant the smaller part of the ribs, instead of smaller pigs.
300F oven should not need 3 hours, in fact, 90 minutes should work just fine. There are people who use lower temperature and longer time. What you will miss is the smoky aroma/flavor, there is no good way to achieve that in an oven.
If you turn up the temperature at the end, to 450, and bake it for 10 minutes, it gives you a bit charred/browning on top. When I use Weber, I threw in a handful of charcoal at the end to achieve this (and sometime backfired on me.
There is no need to sauce an hour prior, or even twice. 15 minutes prior to done is sufficient of saucing.
Yes, even for our family “dry” version, I actually still do lemon juice, honey, and zest.