Baby Back Ribs

It's beginning to get nice - you can feel it - The days are getting a little longer, the sun on occasion is beginning to show itself. Heck, baseball begins next week! With all of this, you think summer can't be too far off - Along those lines, I was getting a hankering for some summer food. We hadn't done ribs all winter. Unbelievable when you think about -  so the time was right. Ribs were on sale, I took a Friday off - Everything was in proper alignment.  You can click on the images to increase their size so you can see whats going on.

We will be making a rub and sauce - We're doing nothing out of the ordinary - Just the standard house, go-to recipe. Old school, baby! It's like 1974. We listen to the same music, we eat the same food, so something good must be going on.

Let's get busy on the rub first. My biggest gripe with store bought rubs is that  they are too dang salty. They are like 50% salt - Yuck.  I prefer a spicy and lightly salty rub. There is no real recipe for these things, you sort of look at what you got and go for it. I like to use dried Guajillo, New Mexican, and chile arbol for the heat. Also dried garlic, onion, corridor seed, ground pepper and salt - 

Grind it all up, mix it up, and we have something that looks like the above.

After removing the membrane off the back of the slabs, we hit them with a little extra virgin olive oil and the rub.

 

We're doing these on the Weber smoker at 235 degrees. We added a couple chucks of peach wood- The above is after about 3 hours. Got a little bark going on at this point. We begin to spritz them with apple juice every so often to keep them moist.

While the meat is doing its thing , we get busy on the sauce. I guess this is what they call a Kansas City type sauce. It's tomato based with sugar. I like to use palm sugar for the sauce. 

After about 5 hours, they get sauced, and flipped a couple of times for about 30 minutes.

 

Served there with some 'tater wedges - Summer really is coming - You can taste it!