In the last few months we've made quite a few pork dishes using the grill, like the double pork rollup, the southwest pork salad, and several kinds of non-traditional pork and turkey burgers. Besides those mouth watering entrees, we've also been nailing down and perfecting our own personal techniques for barbecuing ribs, such as pork spareribs with store-bought sauce and rubs, as well as beef ribs with homemade smoky raspberry sauce.
Today we'll look at another pork rib creation, which ended up being one of our best yet with an incredibly unique combination of sweet and smoky flavors. This time around we wanted to make essentially everything on our own - starting with a root beer BBQ sauce for basting, a homemade dry rub, and a root beer injection.
If you haven't made your own BBQ sauce before, we definitely recommend you try it out. The process is actually fairly simple once you get it down, and we've been making different batches about once every 2 - 3 weeks. To start our sauce, we're using ketchup, liquid smoke, molasses, onion and garlic powder, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, orange juice concentrate, and root beer instead of water.
All of the ingredients are whisked together thoroughly in a mixing bowl before getting poured into a medium sauce pan for cooking.
While preparing the BBQ sauce, we also started putting together the dry rub to go on the ribs. Rubs are incredibly easy to make, as its essentially just your favorite seasonings ground up and mixed together. For this rub, we used brown sugar, paprika, garlic salt, garlic powder, Mrs. Dash southwest seasoning, dry mustard, and ghost pepper salt.
All the ingredients are ground together with a mortar and pestle so there aren't any large clumps of any one seasoning.
Here we've got the base of our sauce, before being cooked, and our prepared rub getting ready to be used. If you plan on grilling a lot of meat over a period of time, it's a simple matter to triple or quadruple your recipe and store the leftover rub in tupperware containers. We ended up doing this for a later grilling experience when we made a cherry rub (to be shared on this blog soon!)
Before rubbing or injecting our babyback ribs, we placed a layer of plastic wrap down and trimmed off the excess fat.
First on is the rub, as the meat tends to get a bit messy once we start injecting or basting. Both sides are coated in a layer of the rub.
After the rub is poured on, then it's massaged into the meat by hand. At this point the aroma of the seasonings really starts to come out!
After both sides are coated and rubbed down, the plastic wrap is pulled up from either side so the meat is tightly wrapped up.
For a size comparison, here is the trimmed rack of babyback ribs next to the 2 liter bottle of root beer.
While the ribs sit in the fridge soaking in all the flavor from the rub, we've got all the ingredients for the BBQ sauce boiling in a medium saucepan on the stove.
After coming to a rolling boil, the heat is reduced and it simmers for 45 minutes or so until reducing down to the proper BBQ sauce consistency.
The sauce itself is slightly too thick to inject into the ribs, so we've mixed up some of the sauce with extra root beer and melted butter.
Now that the sauce and injection are complete, it's time to unwrap the pork, which has become a beautiful color from the rub. Pulling back that plastic wrap also makes the whole kitchen smell amazing!
The root beer BBQ sauce mixture is then injected directly into the meat, which makes every single bite have flavor all the way through.
When the injection process is done, the leftover sauce mixture is lightly brushed over the top and bottom of the ribs, and the rack is finally ready for grilling.
As with our previous ribs, we're using an indirect heating method, which is very important for large cuts of meat like this that will be on the grill for a few hours. If you place the ribs directly over coals they will end up burning and you'll get way more char on the outer layer than you want. For indirect heat, simply move the coals onto two separate sides of the grill, leaving a strip in the center where the meat can sit.
If you thought the rub and injection was the end of the flavor enhancing, you were wrong! Several times during the cooking process we baste the ribs with extra root beer BBQ sauce.
After being flipped over the ribs are already starting to look amazing and pick up a little bit of that smoky char.
When the first hour of cooking is done, we lay down a strip of tin foil, which further protects the meat from overcooking or burning.
Two and a half hours of grilling go by to achieve these perfectly cooked and sauced ribs, which will be tender enough to pull away from the bone easily but firm enough to have a fantastic texture you can sink your teeth into.
Each rib is cut apart from its neighbor as we get ready to plate up after a cooking adventure that lasted all afternoon.
With our ribs we're having some traditional favorites: a baked potato and a side salad with all the fixings, including croutons, shredded cheese, tomato, red bell pepper, and green onion.
In the background here you can see some of my homemade Thousand Island dressing topping the finished salad next to those finger-licking-good ribs.
These were some truly stellar ribs, and cooking them in the backyard with our own homemade rubs and sauces turns dinner into an event that lets us spend time together doing something we both love. Since this cookout we've also made other kinds of barbecue sauces inspired by soda flavors, such as orange and black cherry. Coming up we're looking forward to experimenting with whiskey and bourbon, as well as some more unique flavors like coffee. Stay tuned for more on grilling, as well as a return to some savory breakfast creations and other dinner favorites like chicken fried steak!
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