Beginnings of Something Wonderful

Warning to the vegetarians - the next three days will be a meatstravaganza. The next 12 pictures are all of raw porky slabs in varying stages of disassembly! Proceed at your own risk.

This is how I make ribs. It takes 3 days, but it could take 5. I'm sure there are faster ways to do it, but this is working out for me so far.

My pork deconstruction station. Comfy chair? Check. Many paper towels? Check. Garbage and good-but-not-ribs bowls? Check. Makeshift brine bucket, lined with makeshift washed plastic brining bags? Check. Son to play video games to amuse me between cuts? Check. (I'm currently watching him play My Life as King on the Wii.)


Frighteningly sharp knife, freshly honed? Check. Spoon for scraping the fat off? Check. Loins girded for 5 cryovac-ed pork spare rib slabs? Check! Bring on the piggy!


Briney goodness in my makeshift brining tub. It's a new office wastebasket, lined with two new kitchen trashbags that I washed out to remove any chemical residues. I think that if I'm going to do this more often, I'm going to get a Home Depot tub, and some of those giant ziploc bags and use those instead. These have worked well so far, though.

I can't tell you entirely where I'm getting my rib lore and instructions from, because honestly, I can't remember. I've watched Alton Brown's Pork Fiction, read Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman, the forums at the Char Grill website, the BBQ forums, a pdf by the Chatham Artillery BBQ Team, the smoking section in On Food and Cooking, and the smoking/barbecuing/grilling section of every damn cookbook I have. Why am I telling you this? Because somewhere I read that if you brine the ribs, you should not use a lot if any salt in the rub, as it will begin to taste like ham. The ribs the last time I made them had a touch of that telltale flavor, so I used what was left of my Charcuterie-based rub with a little more salt and brown sugar as the brine spices. When I make the new rub tomorrow, I'll quarter the salt in the recipe.


Here's my first slab. Part of the reason I get the cryovac-ed packages is 1) they're usually less expensive 2) I could use the butchery practice 3) there's a lot of meat that isn't part of the ribs that I take off and grind up for all kinds of stuff. The thing on the bottom left is half of the piggy's sternum.


And here's the sternum off! I never understood what the tv chefs meant when they said, "you just let the knife slide along the bone, and the meat will peel away" until now. It was really neat! I'd grab the big hunk of bone, and gently slide the frighteningly sharp knife along it, and the meat would slip back like magic. I still had some trouble finding the joints in the cartelige, and ended up cutting through one or two of them.


The slab divided into the top (skirt?) part with no bones, the ribs themselves, and the little wee tail end that didn't have any bones in it.


There's two membranes on the concave side of the ribs. You only need one. Find an edge, and gently start to peel up.


When you've got a little handle-able bit, grab it and peel the membrane off, hopefully in one piece. I grabbed it with paper towels, as it was slippery as hell.


After you get that off, there are chunks of fat that can come off. I scrape them off with a spoon. I also tend to trim off all the big chunks of fat I can see, because there's plenty in there to keep it lovely and moist without too much on the outside.


Here's what was left of the good stuff after I trimmed the ribs and put them in the brine. I'll grind that up tomorrow and use it for potstickers, I think.


Here's what's left of the not-good stuff. If I were making stock, I'd keep the bones, but I'm not any time soon, so nyah.


By the time I made it through all the slabs and cleaned up, it was pretty late. Here's the bag full of brine and ribby goodness heading off to Meme's fridge. He was kind enough to let me use it while he's away for a couple of days.

That's phase one of the ribtacular meatstravaganza. I'm totally beat, and I'm going to bed!