The French Connection 3

To make up for the lack of finesse in the French grilling style we visited our local French butcher, Monsieur Maurice Hervy, to buy some ribs and cook them in Moist Heat Style. We found that ribs translate as travers de porc and Monsieur had some to die for – thick with meat these were going to take a very long cook. I used a basic rub of salt, pepper, brown sugar, mustard and garlic granules. For the mop sauce I modified that for maple glazed ribs (I couldn’t get any maple syrup in the local supermarket) using double the quantity of brown sugar instead. Smoke came from grape vine cuttings, the choice at the local shop was between that and corn stalks, I had some apple wood from last year but that has gone into our neighbour’s firepit. Since last summer I have modified the kettle grill be cutting 4 one inch air holes in the base. This grill is a cheap copy of the Weber made for B&Q (that’s Home Depot to some or Castorama in France) I didn’t realise it was cheap because it didn’t have air holes!

So the grill was setup for indirect cooking and after last years problems of the grill going out, my initial problem was to keep the temperature down to around 240. After mopping every half hour for 4 hours the ribs were wrapped in foil to finish for another hour and then rested. Mrs Bob agreed that our ribs surpassed the local offerings.