Grandpa knows best

After my well documented attempts to obtain a decent cooking temperature, this weekend I decided to go the other way and set my sights on true moist heat, a nice low and slow smoky cooking experience (set it and forget it, if you will!). Surely this wouldn’t be too hard after my previous attempts. We stayed with ribs, but went for beef short rather than spare and a recipe from Steven Raichlen’s ribs book: Grandpa’s pastramied beef ribs.

The wet rub was made up Saturday morning, applied, the ribs wrapped in cling film and refrigerated before we headed to Chicago to watch English football’s finest (Chelsea) lose to the major league soccer all-stars. On Sunday the ribs were brought up to room temperature and the grill it around 1pm (aiming for a five hour smoke). I used 50:50 briquettes and lump in the chimney and about an equal unlit amount in the grill, the coal pan was moved to its lowest level and air vents opened at the top and almost closed at the bottom. With the temperature hovering just over the ideal 250 and smoke from some red wine barrel staves filling the air with a delightfully sweet aroma, the ribs were put on the grill. Regular checks of the temperature indicated that the ribs were cooking somewhere nearer 350 than 250, and short of opening the lid and losing all the smoke I wasn’t sure how to get the temperature down. I know, some people are never happy: winge moan...can’t get the temperature high enough, more moaning....can’t get the temperature low enough... The ribs were mopped with a ginger ale/cider vinegar mop sauce every hour, and after 2 hours above 300 were wrapped in foil for another hour before taking off the grill and resting. Retrospectively we decided to smoke roast the ribs rather than just smoke them, though this left us facing the prospect of a very early dinner. So, we left the ribs to rest for over an hour still wrapped and then ate them when hungry later.

The meat was tender with some bite, and full of flavours. I even managed to convince myself I’d got a smoke ring without the aid of modern computing! For future attempts at smoking I’ll probably try it without the briquettes and go for 100% lump for my fire, any other suggestions are welcome.