The Pig Man Cometh

The nice thing about warm weather is that one can dine al fresco (read: grill up some delicious meat) every single night without feeling foolish in the slightest. For one thing, this scheme allows one to eat on the cheap and to minimize that most unpleasant of evening chores: doing the dishes.

Fourteen dollars, for example, recently bought me a 2.2-lb. side of spare ribs and one pound of ground buffalo. This would have been an ample meal for three, and was princely for two. Great care must be taken, however, in grilling the ribs, as Halfz and I learned (the hard way) on Sunday.

First off, you'll want to ensure that your grill has been emptied of ash and spent charcoal. This way, the vents on the bottom of the grill will be kept clear, allowing the fire to burn steadily and down to a very low heat without extinguishing itself. A large quantity of charcoal is not necessary, even to cook ribs for the requisite two hours.

It's a good idea to start the fire as early as possible, then, in order to avoid eating (as we did last night) after 10 pm. This task having been undertaken, the next step is the preparation of the pork itself. Season liberally with a dry rub consisting of any or all of the following:

Bay leaf (whole)
Celery Salt
Coarse black pepper
Cumin
Garlic (fresh cloves, either whole or minced)
Ground chili (or, in a pinch, chili powder)
Paprika
Sea salt

Once these spices have been rubbed gently into the meat on both sides (ideally there will be some meat even on the bone side), wrap the ribs tightly in two layers of aluminum foil, making sure none of the meat is exposed. This will keep the juices from escaping and producing flames.

When the fire has reached a heat that is slightly lower than what you would want for grilling hamburger or steak, place the wrapped meat directly on the grill, bone side down. If you are unsure of the temperature required for hamburger, a good rule of thumb is that one should be able to hold one's hand about three inches above the grill for several seconds without too much pain. For ribs, then, you'll want that distance to be closer to two inches.

For the first 30 minutes of the operation, keep the grill covered but the air vent fully open. Then remove the cover and continue grilling, without turning, for an additional half-hour. Finally, once the meat has been cooking for a full hour, carefully unwrap the package with a spatula or tongs (the foil will be too hot to touch) and apply the barbecue sauce of your choice with a brush or spoon. Re-wrap the meat and flip it over, and cook for 30 minutes with the meat side down.

Finally, one hour and thirty minutes into the cooking, unwrap the meat entirely. If you have used an appropriate amount of charcoal, the heat of the coals will be quite low but there will still be a great deal of heat retained in the meat itself. Reapply your sauce on both sides, turn bone side down again, and cook for a final half hour. If the coals seem to be dying, cover the ribs with a sheet of foil and put the grill cover back on.

If everything has transpired as it should, the meat will fall right off the bone at the end of this two-hour period. Cut into four-rib sections and serve, making sure to remove any stray bay leaves first.

This is more or less how Halfzie and I approached things last night, with reasonable success. Not so on Sunday, when an unfortunate miscalculation led to the meat actually catching fire just 15 minutes in. This was due to our clearing the lower vents after already having lit the charcoal (and far too much of it). The meat was insufficiently wrapped, the fire too hot, and the juices dripping down only made it hotter. We had to remove the ribs from the grill and heat up some hot dogs while the flames subsided. With such prodigious heat, each round of pre-cooked dogs was done in about 30 seconds.

Still, once the fire reached an appropriate temperature we were able to finish the ribs in about an hour, and found them suitably edible and delicious, if a little bit firm and dry.