I'm big on the pig

“Dear benevolent, caring, handsome Mr. Meat,

I love a good rack of BBQ Ribs however, I am a miserable failure and throw myself at your mercy. I always seem to either A) burn them or B) not cook them through and then have to finish them in the oven. I like to use a Brown Sugar Rub and a Molasses sauce for basting.

Most Respectfully,
The Urban Eater”

huh, she said rack...(OK enough of the infantile crap)

Ribs… too much pork for just one fork. I love me some.

Brown sugar and molasses – both forms of sugar. Sugar can be sweet, caramel nectar, but most often in grilling, it transforms into wasted carbon – a wholly indigestible and rather unpleasant tasting element.

aww shite, another freakin’ science lesson

Sugar burns at the rather low temperature of right around 350 degrees. So the answer to the burning problem is to keep both the ambient (air inside the grill) and direct (from the fire or the grates) temperature below 350 degrees; preferably about 100 degrees below. This means banking a slow fire in your grill. You don’t want happy, glowing orange coals 3 inches from the meat. If the temperature never comes close to 350, it really can’t burn, can it? You can cook the ribs so long that there’s no moisture left and you have pork jerky, but it’s physically impossible to turn the sugars to carbon.

Now for the undercooking issue; to achieve that tender, fall off the bone quality that good ribs have, you need to bring the internal temperature of the rib meat to 180-190 degrees (well done pork is about 170 degrees). If you keep the temperature of the grill at about 250 degrees to avoid the burning of the sugar, this means that it takes no short amount of time to bring the internal temperature of the meat to 180-190. Simply put, it just ain’t gonna happen in 45 minutes. More like 2-3 hours. Patience, something that I’m rather low on, is your best friend in cooking ribs. Oh yeah, so is planning.