Monday, May 24, 2004
As long as we are discussing matters gustatory, I made the barbecued ribs with molasses bourbon sauce yesterday. Recipe calls for beef ribs, which I will do next time, but spareribs worked fine. I love my grill, which does many things well, but low temperatures are tricky. I raised the grilling surface from the heat source with some bricks, and wrapped some soaked wood chips in foil. Once they were smoking, I turned the heat as low as I could, and put the marinated ribs on. Every half hour or so I'd turn them, releasing some heat, so that for the most part I kept it somewhere between 250 and 300.
For reasons that now escape me, I made a double batch of the sauce: that's a pint of bourbon, folks. My kitchen smelled like Derby Day. I tweaked the recipe a bit-- I didn't have light molasses, so I substituted honey for the sugar; and I chopped up a couple of dried chilli peppers and added that to the sauce for a little lift.
It worked out well. The secret to any sort of barbecue really is slow, low heat, and I'm not really set up to do that, but within the limits of the available technology it was fine: ribs were done in two and a half hours, then I dredged them in the sauce, and finished them in the oven to allow the sauce to caramelize. I'll certainly make it again: in the meanwhile, anybody want some sauce?
For reasons that now escape me, I made a double batch of the sauce: that's a pint of bourbon, folks. My kitchen smelled like Derby Day. I tweaked the recipe a bit-- I didn't have light molasses, so I substituted honey for the sugar; and I chopped up a couple of dried chilli peppers and added that to the sauce for a little lift.
It worked out well. The secret to any sort of barbecue really is slow, low heat, and I'm not really set up to do that, but within the limits of the available technology it was fine: ribs were done in two and a half hours, then I dredged them in the sauce, and finished them in the oven to allow the sauce to caramelize. I'll certainly make it again: in the meanwhile, anybody want some sauce?
