Does anyone brine ribs

Massage the rub in with your hands. Use wood chunks in grill for extra flavor. Drain wood chunks and sprinkle a few over the hot coals. Add ribs to the smoker, overlapping slightly. Smoke ribs for 3 to 4 hours, adding additional wood chunks after each hour and spritzing hourly with some of the apple juice.

Brush with barbecue sauce, if desired, during the last 15 minutes of cooking. Where to buy 0 CART. New Account. Returning Member. The flavor was like ham or bacon only Brining is the key to this process. Brining basically super-moisturizes the meat. The salt and sugar in the solution denatures the protein, allowing it to hold moisture during the cooking process.

The pink salt is there to kill any nasty bacteria that may have snuck in to the party. If you want to learn more about brining, check the good old interwebs. Brine ingredients. A rack of pork ribs - I purchased an untrimmed full rack of pork ribs on sale recently and stuck them in the freezer until I had some free time.

It weighs about 4 lbs. Rub ingredients. Curing salts were created centuries ago, before refrigeration, as a method of preserving meats such as bacon, hams, and corned beef. They all contain salt and nitrite, and some contain both nitrite and nitrate. Both these preservatives are very effective against the botulism bug. Most curing salts are colored pink with a small amount of red dye so you don't confuse them with table salt.

The small quantities used in curing meats is harmless, but in large quantities can be lethal. Pink salts are not the same as pink Himalayan rock salt, which is pure salt with trace elements that give it the pink color! Clean up the ribs by pulling off the silver skin and trimming off the huge chunks of fat. I also cut the rack in half because I did not have a large enough container to hold the entire rack during brining.

The smoker temp should be around Fahrenheit. Place the rack in your smoker and cook until the internal temp is above Fahrenheit, periodically spritzing the ribs with water. This took about 4 hours. Alternately, you could bake them in the oven for about 4 hours at but you would miss out on that delicious smokiness. Remove from the smoker or oven and allow to rest for about 30 minutes before cutting the ribs apart.

As I said, these are awesome. The smoky, porkiness was delicious on its own, but I added a sweet and tangy sauce for dipping that really brought it all together. Food writers without a science background tend to speak of salt getting into the meat through osmosis, and food writers with a science background like to explain why that's wrong. The bottom line is that the science of why it works doesn't really matter.

The only thing that matters to most people is that they get a tasty meal, and brining can certainly deliver on that. Brined meats — and fish, poultry or vegetables, for that matter — are usually juicier and more flavorful than their non-brined equivalents. Before you run out and buy a box of salt, take a moment to look at the ribs in your local store. Pork and chicken are sometimes already brined when you buy them. The label might say "seasoned" or something like that, but the seasoning is typically salt.

Brined meats soak up a bit of their brine, so when you buy pre-brined meats, you're paying pork prices for salt water. That works in the packer's favor, but it's not all bad. That practice brings the benefits of brined meats to cooks who would never think of brining on their own, or might not have the option. The downside of course is that if you brine pork that's preseasoned, it will be very salty.

In practice, because there's relatively little meat on the bones, ribs aren't often sold that way. If you want to be sure, slice off a small sliver of meat from the rack and fry or microwave it until it's cooked. If it tastes seasoned at all, it's pre-brined. If all you taste is unseasoned pork, you're good to go. The most common approach to brining meats calls for a wet brine, which is a solution of salt and water. Brines are measured by their concentration, or the percentage of salt dissolved in the water.

For quick-brining a few ribs or chickens at home, that concentration is usually about 5 or 6 percent by weight. It's easy math for cooks who use the metric system, because you'd use 60 grams per liter of water. A gallon of water weighs 8. If you multiply ounces by 6 percent, you'll get just over 8 ounces.

Your ratio, then, would be a half-pound of salt for every gallon of water. Some brines call for sugar as well, which mellows the sometimes-harsh flavor of the salt. The standard technique is to dissolve your salt, along with the sugar and any other flavoring ingredients, in hot water.

Then you cool and refrigerate the resulting brine before adding your meat.