The weather in Chicago was amazing this past week.  We were hit by several 80 degree plus days and people started swarming outside to eat and play.  The first thing that came to my mind was barbecue.  We’ve already used the Weber a few times this season to cook steaks, but I wanted to go all out and smoke a few racks of baby back ribs, and it was finally warm enough to set up the charcoal grill for it.  Katrina loves ribs (I sometimes make fun of her rib cravings) and it gave her the opportunity to make a batch of homemade barbecue sauce.  The ribs were already fantastic after being smoked with a dry rub, but the messy barbecue sauce brought them up to perfection.

I bought about 3 pounds of beautiful ribs from Whole Foods.  It was fairly expensive, about $30 total, but well worth it because you could recognize the freshness and quality after smoking them.  I feared that something from Jewel Osco (local grocery chain) wouldn’t have tasted as good.  I used a simple dry rub from a concoction of spices that I pulled from the cabinet, and let it sit on the meat at room temperature while I set the grill up for smoking.  You never want to cook cold ribs!  The charcoal grill I use is a Weber 22.5-Inch One-Touch Gold Kettle Grill (in green).  I really love this grill and my Weber Rapidfire Chimney Starter, and feel like a charcoal elitist because everybody else in my building complex uses gas.  Their loss!  There are lots of different ways you can set up an ordinary grill for smoking.  My setup uses two aluminum roasting pans filled with water.  I wish I would have taken some pictures of the cooking process to illustrate it better.  But in a nutshell, the bottom grate of the grill has a roasting pan with water on one half and charcoal on the other half.  The top cooking grate has the other roasting pan above the hot charcoals and the meat to be smoked goes above the bottom roasting pan.  The purpose of the water pans is to control the temperature of the smoke and to catch the drippings from the meat to prevent flareups.  The steam created will draw the smokey flavor and spices up into the meat, and keep it moist during the 4 to 6 hour cooking process.  The top grate of my grill is hinged, so this made it easy to add additional charcoal and wood throughout the smoking process.  I used Alder planks, and they made a nice sweet smoke that complimented the pork ribs well.  Don’t use cedar or any other type of evergreen to smoke pork.  They have lots of resin in them that will give your meat a chemical-like flavor.  The barbecue sauce that Katrina slow-simmered inside was adapted from Neely’s BBQ Sauce.  They seem like a couple that knows their barbecue.  We added some honey and paprika to their recipe to enhance the flavor for the ribs.  It was so good that Katrina and I fought over who got to lick the spatula after stirring the sauce.  As a side to this meal, we topped some fresh in-season asparagus with cheddar cheese!  Apparently Katrina’s entire family cooks asparagus this way, and it was really good.

These ribs were so amazing!  I can’t wait to gnaw on the leftovers.  The homemade barbecue sauce was a nice touch.  We washed everything down with an ice cold lavender lemonade.

If you enjoyed this recipe, try these!

Pulled Pork Tacos	Crab Cakes