Russelnod.com

Some times you get it right. For dinner last Saturday, I wanted to do spare ribs. I started with a rub on Friday night–a mix of ancho and pasilla chilis, paprika, onion and garlic granules, brown sugar, and some cumin. I added some smoked paprika and smoked salt for a little smoke flavor.

By Saturday afternoon, the ribs were slightly wet and ready to go. I used a gas grill with a box of hickory chips, and cooked the three racks slightly offset on one another for about 3 hours at 300. By then, the tips were a little dry and the meat pulled away from the bone with some gentle pressure.

Meanwhile, I was making my usual sauce. The technique is to cook garlic cloves, cumin and coriander seed, and black and dried red pepper in molasses and honey for a half hour, then add tomatoes and vinegar and simmer for a couple of hours. It is a great sauce to make and I tinkered happily with it, adding a little scotch, some squab spice mix left over from a French Laundry recipe. My wife and her ex-sister-in-law ate the pineapple I was planning to add, so I used orange and lemon juice.

The punchline, of course, was that I hated the taste. There was a bitterness that I couldn’t get past. “It tastes like all your sauces,” my wife said, which did not improve my mood. So I made a quick sweet sauce with ketchup, brown sugar, ancho chili and dried mustard powder. No vinegar, no molasses, no tinkering. It was sweet and a little spicy and that’s what I served.

Time to research the traditional sweet sauces BBQ sauces again: the Molasses-Cumin-Coriander-Vinegar vs Ketchup-Chili-Mustard versions vs. the versions yet to be discovered.

Thanks to Nomi Leidner for the pictures.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Recipes, Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.