How we made it…
Last week (7/20/2024), we attended Country Fest in Washington Depot, CT as we were invited to serve our BBQ there. I learned they had several vendors back out so I stuffed the Lang 108″ Deluxe barrel smoker with all sorts of BBQ meats, as I knew we would have great business that night. I purchased 8 Briskets, 3 dozen St Louis rib racks, 2 dozen Boston Butts for pulled pork, pork belly, and many sides. The wife and I killed ourselves trying to get everything bought, prepped, smoked and cooked the day before and day of. 20 LBS of potato salad, 25 lbs of bacon mac n cheese, 25 lbs of our signature cowboy beans, cole slaw and 5 gallons of our award winning chili. The only thing we had not sold was 1 pork butt , 4 racks of ribs, 2 lbs of potato salad and about 8 nice slices of Brisket. Everything else sold in 3 hours.. Man was that a very long and hot 3 hours! We completely forgot to prep and make the Beef Short Plates so, this weekend we decided to make 2 plates just to see if they were quality cuts.. OMG, Brisket move over!! The ribs were most likely the best eef I have ever eaten! Possibly one of the tastiest things we and a bunch of our customers ever ate!
How we made them:
It was very simple, the hard part as a pitmaster is the kind of pit you use, type of wood per recipe, spices and believe it or not, the prep work done, cutting, trimming of fat and silver skin, etc. The cuts I bought were 15% off and had not one bit of trimming necessary. Each plate weighed 8 lbs raw.
We started by rinsing them and painting them with our very unique fermented pepper glaze, then we spiced them only with salt , pepper, Garlic Flakes & Onion Flakes. Easy, simple, and only took 5 minutes to coat them and pat the spices in. We let them sit for 1 hour in a cooler wrapped up to start and sweat from the sea salt before placing them into our smoker.
We added white oak to the firebox and heated it up. Once up to temp, we topped the coals with 6 pieces of sugar maple. The temp remained at 235 for the next 8 hours. We took them out, probed them and they were 180 degrees. We then placed them in a full sized deep catering tray and added some brisket Aus Jus to get it steaming. I removed them 2 hours later cooking them at 225F.
I removed them from the smoker, allowed the steam to escape and let them rest for 30 minutes. As the day went on, I covered them in the tray u ntil serving with a sheet of plastic wrap to keep the meat moist while keeping the meat in our 150F hotbox food warmer. Each rib I cut off was like the pictured slab above. Enough to feed 2 people . Our platter with the Dino Ribs and 2 sides sold for $30 each, and were gone very quickly. They are expensive, but I assure you, if you are a beef lover, you’d come back every weekend until you get tired of them, that is how damn good they are!
Thanks for viewing, Marc!