Free Bonus #2
How to Make Better Ribs and Brisket
As an extra bonus for purchasing Low and Slow Barbecue with Ray Lampe I want to give you two extra tips for better barbecue.
Tip #1: Sweet Heat Ribs
I absolutely LOVED Ray’s tip for foiling your ribs with Habanero Peach jelly for a Sweet Heat punch. I have a buddy who always says my ribs have great flavor but not enough heat. I knew this would be the trick to shut him up. But there is a problem….I went to seven different grocery stores in my town and nobody sells Habanero Peach jelly!
I came up with a solution to this problem and I believe it is actually an improvement on Ray’s idea!
After the ribs have smoked for two hours I paint them with a thin layer of habanero hot sauce. This takes about a tablespoon of hot sauce per slab of ribs. The aroma of the habanero sauce hitting the ribs is pretty intense. You will think that it is a stupid idea while you are doing it! I then coat the ribs in honey (about two tablespoons) and foil them with a quarter cup of apple juice (a little more than Ray uses).
Put the foiled ribs back in the smoker for 1 hour if you want some tug to the meat. My family wants ribs that are crazy tender so I let them cook in the foil for two hours.
When it is time to take the ribs out of the foil I put them back on the kettle and paint them with a heavy layer of melted peach preserves. I close the lid and let the glaze set for 15 minutes and then glaze them with another layer of melted peach preserves.
Then I eat .
Pork and Peach is a combination made in heaven. The flavor profile of peaches and habanero is incredible. Combine them all and you have something really special!
It is easy to find habanero hot sauce and it is easy to find peach preserves. By applying the two flavors in different layers you can control exactly how much heat or how much sweet you want.
The ribs I made using this technique are pictured on the next page. They were the best slab of ribs that has EVER come off my kettle.
Slow Smoked Habanero and Peaches Baby Back Ribs
Tip #2: Better Brisket
I came across a Ray Lampe video on YouTube a while back that hasn’t gotten much attention. The video is from a National Barbecue Association “Meet the Masters” session in 2011 where Ray is doing a barbecue Q&A session. The video is of poor quality; you can’t hear what questions are being asked and the camera is wiggling all over the place. Despite these flaws the video is a gold mine. I am just going to talk about one concept Ray discusses in the video. There are several other ideas worth a listen in the entire video (linked here).
In Ray’s Craftsy video lesson on brisket he mentions that you COULD store a foiled brisket in a cooler for a few hours and it won’t hurt anything.
What Ray explained in the Meet the Masters Q&A session was that you really SHOULD store a foiled brisket in a cooler for a few hours and plan for those hours in your cooking timeline!!
In general, the theory is that the brisket is becoming tender when the internal temperature is in the 165-175F range. The brisket begins loosing moisture when the internal temperature is in the 180-190F range.
This leads to a conflict.
To get the brisket REALLY tender you want to cook it for a long period of time. However, the longer you cook it the more the internal temperature is going to rise and the drier the meat will become.
The solution is to take the brisket to about 170F in the smoke and then wrap it in foil to minimize moisture loss. Once the brisket hits 195-200 you take it out of the cooker and into a cooler.
Once the brisket is in the cooler the internal temperature of the brisket will rise a little initially.
However, as the brisket sits in the cooler the internal temperature will soon drop back down into that sweet spot of 170-180F for several hours where it will continue to become MORE tender while NOT losing moisture.
I can’t swear that this works as I have not tried this myself. However the idea looks pretty solid and I have read quite a few forum threads on the benefits of hot holding briskets. If you want to up your brisket game then this tip from Ray looks like something worth trying!
I really hope you enjoyed Ray’s Low and Slow Barbecue at Home course!
Thanks,
David