Coffee BBQ Sauce And Rub With Pork Ribs

This summer has really upped our backyard BBQ game, and it was a logical next stop to start making our own sauces to go with such delectable smoky meat and veggies. Experimenting with sauces not only lets us try combinations you can't readily buy at the store, but the end result is almost always as good or better than pre-bottled sauces.

While "hickory" and "mesquite" may be the standard for BBQ sauces, there's a whole lot more room to try different flavors, like our root beer or smoky raspberry varieties. Checking around different recipes online we found one base ingredient we knew we had to try: coffee.

To have the right consistency and reduce down properly, BBQ sauce needs something with sugar in it. Our original sauce attempt used corn syrup, and then our next several batches ditched that because all the sugar was coming from a variety of sodas for interesting flavors like orange and cherry.  Now we're trying something completely different by basing it around honey.

Here's the base ingredients for this new coffee based sauce: apple cider vinegar, ketchup, soy sauce, dark coffee, garlic, olive oil, just under two cups of honey, and ghost pepper salt.

The garlic gets the slice and dice treatment and is briefly cooked in a layer of oil until it just starts to turn golden brown, releasing that amazing garlic fragrance.

The remainder of the ingredients are then poured in, along with a cup and a half of the brewed coffee (don't throw in just plain grounds!) which was brewed incredibly strong so the flavor would be prominent. You can really play with the flavor here by making the coffee stronger or weaker or by using a lighter roast.

Once everything is in the pot it all gets brought to a rolling boil so the ingredients start to heat through.

After boiling, the heat is lowered and in about a half hour the sauce begins reducing and the color becomes much darker.

The cooking time will vary depending on how much honey and coffee you use, and how thick you want the sauce. We ended up cooking for more than two hours to get to this color and consistency.

After cooling down for a bit on the stove, we spooned the finished sauce into a container to be refrigerated. At this point it's a dark brownish black and smells wonderful.

After refrigerating overnight the sauce has reached its final consistency - which in our case was incredibly thick. With less honey or a shorter cooking time you can have it closer to standard BBQ sauce thickness.  The taste is a lot different than a normal BBQ sauce, but still amazingly good, and we ended up using it on both ribs and chicken. The soy sauce flavor present makes this sauce particularly good with chicken stir fry.

For our first attempt at using this new sauce we decided to make ribs, which also need a complimentary rub. We decided to double up on the coffee action, using garlic powder, parsley, onion powder, dried garlic, and a medium roast coffee (this time using the grounds, not brewed coffee).

As with our previous rubs, everything is mashed together in the mortar and pestle until thoroughly combined.

After mixing in the coffee we ended up throwing in some brown sugar as well to put a hint of sweet in with the dark flavors of the coffee and garlic.

For this rib outing we went with "country style" instead of babyback or spare ribs, as they were on sale and we'd never tried them before.  This kind is much thicker and meatier than either babyback or spare and usually come pre-cut. Here we've got the ribs on plastic wrap waiting to be rubbed down.

Using the plastic wrap not only prevents a big mess, but makes it easier to wrap them up after they've been rubbed so they can soak in the flavor in the fridge.

These are the ribs after being given a good rub down with the coffee and garlic mixture.

The sauce was too thick to directly inject in the ribs, so we heated it back up a bit and mixed in some melted butter to make it work with our needle injector.

A few hours later, after sitting tightly wrapped in the fridge to maximize the flavor, we get the grill going by heating up our charcoal in the chimney starter.

For the first few minutes we cooked the ribs directly over the coals to blacken the outside and make those eye-catching grill marks. Once the outer layer is cooked through, the ribs are pulled over to the other side of the grill where there are no coals and the lid is then closed so they can cook through via indirect heat. This keeps the moisture and gives a better flavor with the "low and slow" cooking. We of course also mopped on some extra coffee BBQ sauce periodically throughout the cooking process.

With our ribs finished we're ready for an amazing dinner! On the side we've got rice and Cuban style black beans made as its own meal earlier that week. The beans ended up stretching across several dinners as either a base ingredient or a side, and we'll be covering a lot of fun different things to do with them in a later blog entry.

Our finished ribs are charred around the outside, but still tender and easily pulls off the bone on the inside. The coffee sauce was a totally different experience but well worth the effort and a great new way to try grilling ribs.