I popped some ribs in the oven an hour ago. Two minutes ago, I realized I had forgotten something very important: I forgot to cover the baking dish with foil.
I pulled the ribs out and covered them. They are supposed to cook for another hour. I think they’re probably ruined: There’s no pool of delicious rib juices on the bottom of the pan, which I’m assuming means it all evaporated away and my ribs are going to be hopelessly dry.
But I don’t really have experience with this. So I pose it as a question: Might I as well just throw them out now, or is it worth waiting the second hour to see if they might turn out sort-of okay?
In half an hour, I’m supposed to slather them in BBQ sauce.
By the way, all of this is strictly low-class, low-quality food. Cheap ribs. Cheap store brand sauce. Which may actually be a good thing–its harder to tell the difference between “well prepared” and “poorly prepared” when dealing with bad ingredients!
Well, I would say, slather the sauce on now and tent the whole pan with foil. then take the foil off again in the last 15 mins. If you tent them with foil (or simply put the lid on the pan if you have one) any moisture or juices will sort of self baste.
Give it a try. If it works, great. If not, throw them out or feed them to the dog. Good luck!
Pour about a half cup of water in the pan and cover. The meat will stay moist if you don’t over cook it. You didn’t ruin it. Check it after 30 minutes or so. If the meat pulls off the bone easily, they’re done.
Ribs have to cook for a long time to break down the connective tissue so they are not tough. I cook ribs for between 4 and 5 hours on my grill. In BBQ contest some cooks may go longer than that. When done this way you can grab the end of a bone give it a twist and it will slide out of the meat.
I know of no method of cooking ribs that will consistantly result in tender ribs with just an hour or two cooking.
(And if anybody mentions boiling the ribs, all I can say is YEECH!)
Problem with ribs is that there’s a couple different kinds. I’ve never been able to do a thing with the big thick cheap ones. They might be pork or beef, but they always suck. What meat there is is always way too intertwined with the fat.
If you want to make ribs like chili’s or something, you want pork, baby-back ribs, and they’re going to be pricey.
Those are more well-defined rib to rib, thinner, and kind of rounded.
The giant slabs of rib (more often beef than pork) are really difficult to work with.
If you were buying your ribs for like $2.39 per pound, they’re probably the difficult ones, and they’ll never taste like chilis, and you’ll never be able to pull the bone out of the meat.
I sometimes have boiled the ribs in vinegar and water. Then, they get sauced up and thrown on the grill.
But, usually, I just wrap entirely in foil, use some vinegary sauce, and cook on the grill. They’re basically getting steam in the foil, not really grilled anyway.
Then again, there’s low, indirect heat for a long time and that’s good to, but you can dry your ribs out that way if you’re not careful.
I buy pork ribs by the side, in 10-to-15-pound cryovac packages. After removing them from the package, I brine them in a solution of salt, brown sugar, and pickling spices overnight.
The next day I hang them in a smoker and cook them for 4 to 5 hours over the smoke at about 230 - 250 F. They come out tender, juicy, and flavorful enough that most people don’t put sauce on them. And you *can *pull the bone out of them.
Trunk, are you talking about pork spare ribs? If so, I find I can cook them exactly like baby-back ribs, and I can tug the bones out just as easily. They become so tender that removing them from the pan can be difficult. I braise my ribs in a 50/50 mix of margarita mix and orange or pineapple juice (pure stuff, no vitamin or calcium additives), then reduce the liquid, now mixed with the rib juices, as a base for my glaze (thanks to Alton Brown for laying the groundwork, but I morphed his recipe into my own now).
Well, I’m not sure about all the names. It might be spare ribs. I know you can get them to come out all right. They’re more difficult than baby-backs, though.
It might be beef, might be pork. I just know what I look for and what I avoid.
Sometime, try braising them in a mixture of 2 parts commercial teriyaki glaze and 3 parts water, with loads of chopped onion. Also excellent. (I’ve never tried it with margarita mix, but that sounds good, think I’ll give it a shot.)
That’s strange. When I do it right, it just takes two hours and they are so loose its actually hard to keep them on the bone at all.
You can cut them apart with a butter knife with no effort at all, and the second you pick them up the meat starts sliding off the bone.
What I normally do is simply this: Cook at 275, covered with foil, for an hour and a half. Then pour in the sauce. Then cook another 30 mins covered with foil. Then eat.
They come out great this way, and when we serve them up for guests they inevitably go back for second and third helpings.
Some ribs are just bone, connective tissue, fat, and a little bit of meat. You slice ‘em and the cross section is mostly white. They’re kind of a pain in the ass to eat. The baby backs have more pure eatin’ but like I said, they’re considerably more expensive.
That was kind of a weirdly defensive way to respond to a perfectly innoccuous question.
Um, okay, then “What’s wrong with being intertwined with fat past whatever unspecified degree of intertwinedness you are referring to?” Which is exactly what my question in its original wording was a shorter way to ask. Its pretty clear you understood that, since you went on to answer that question in its longer form in the rest of your post.
It’s as if I said, “there’s way too much frosting on this cake” and you replied “what’s wrong with frosting on cake?”
Some chunks of meat can just have too much fat in them. Some ribs are like that. They’re the ones where the lower half of your face feels like you’ve coated it with vaseline after you’ve eaten.
