Smoking ribs with Aaron Franklin

We don’t generally sauce our ribs, but Aaron Franklin’s barbecue sauce recipe made it worth doing.

UPDATE: we tried Franklin’s method with some St. Louis style ribs and were very happy with the result. Photo at the bottom of this post.

Spare ribs were on sale over Father’s Day, so I decided to give them a try. I have smoked many a brisket, a few turkeys, an occasional chicken and a slab or two of salmon but for some reason never pork ribs. I decided to rely on Aaron Franklin’s guidance, which is generously available on the web and in his Meat-Smoking Manifesto cookbook (affiliate link).

Franklin starts by trimming the store bought rack of ribs, something the home cook might skip because the rack looks pretty good as it comes out of the cryovac. But there’s a big sideways sternum bone and cartilage network at the wide end of the rack; it’s easy to slice out and will make for much easier slicing of the individual ribs after smoking.

He also looks for little bits of meat or bone that might protrude from the surface of the rack. These will burn and won’t be edible, so off they go. I dumped the pork scraps into the beans I was making as a side dish, so no waste. But I failed to remove the skirt meat on the bone side per Aaron’s instructions, which was a big mistake: the meat would turn out charred and inedible.

Because the rib rack is a thin piece of meat, you need to be careful to give it a long smoke without overcooking it. Aaron Franklin wants you to keep the smoker temperature at 270 maximum, which was easy to do in my Weber Bullet: that’s actually close to the interior temp when I have a good charcoal/soaked wood fire and the vents opened up about halfway.

The master wants you to prep the meat before it goes on the fire with a slather of yellow mustard or other agent (I used mustard and the taste did indeed disappear when the ribs were done) and 2:1 pepper:salt rub. I had a problem with the upright Weber because you can’t fit two full pork racks on one Weber rack so the second went on the top shelf usually reserved for side dish smoking like cheese or beans.

After they shrunk, I was able to fit both on the lower rack. This was also when I moistened each rack with a 50/50 mix of Franklin’s barbecue sauce* and cider vinegar. (Start on the bone side, give it 10 minutes, then sauce the presentation side and leave it facing up when you wrap.) I foolishly lost track of which was which but I think the top rack-ribs came out better than the ones below, which got charred in a couple of places.

After three hours of smoking, Aaron advises you to wrap the meat and put it back on the fire for another 2-3 hours. (He is obsessive about doing a good wrap and shows multiple photos of a pretty self-explanatory process on his Masterclass page. The main thing is to use a wide roll of heavy duty aluminum foil and be generous with it.) My fire was dying so I decided to do the final cook in the oven in my oven, like I do my brisket. I set the heat to 300 which was too high; should have kept it at 270. All this meant that a good amount of outside meat was charred and unappealing, but maybe 80% of it was great.

Looking to repeat the good parts of this experience and avoid the mistakes, I picked up a couple more rib racks to smoke on the 4^th of July. This time I chose St. Louis style ribs, a cut Franklin does not approve of because he feels they are over trimmed, but that also means you’re not paying for meat that’s trimmed off. And best of all for my purposes, two racks will fit one one rack of my Weber.

*Franklin’s sauce is quite similar in flavor to our own Texas-style sauce, recipe here.

We did follow up using the same method with some St. Louis style ribs and got the above result. The tenderness was 5/5 on the KCBBQ scale: still on the bone yet ready to fall off as soon as you bite into the meat.