Vicki v. St. Louis Ribs

After assembly and test firing the smoker, I was ready to purchase some raw materials.  Namely I wanted a brisket.

Here’s a tip about brisket: it’s a bitch to master.  So of course I had to try it first.

But wait! The title of this post says RIBS.  Yes.. I chickened out.  After reading an estimate of 1 hour per pound of brisket, I realized that unless I wanted to be smoking meat at midnight on Sunday / Monday.. I’d best scale back and try something a little more manageable.  I still have my custom-cut 9 pound brisket in the fridge, waiting for what will certainly be magic.. but alas.. our story does not have a happy ending (I didn’t pay extra).

I had read on some random interweb site that St. Louis style ribs were the choicest, meatiest, most delightful rib you could smoke.

So I bought three racks.  I mean, if something’s good, three times that something has to be 300% good, right?

I assembled custom rubs as follows:

  1. Mustard base, “Memphis Dust” rub
  2. Oil base, “Memphis Dust” rub
  3. Oil base (I was out of mustard), Costco Impulse Buy Rib Rub

I started my smoker, waited until white smoke happened, threw those bad boys on and took the dog for a walk.

I noticed an hour later that the smoker has lost 80 degrees and falling.. and stepping outside the auger was running nonstop.  This, my friends, is a problem.  So of course I take everything out and proceed to fuck with it.

Well, needless to say somewhere in my random attempts to figure out what the hell was going on, I hear a “click” .. maybe a “pop”.. but whatever it is, the damn thing dies.  Done.  Finito.  Kaput.

I take my ribs and decide I can salvage them in the oven.  A little foil, a little sugary liquid (root beer), 225 degrees, and a few hours should solve anything, right?

Yeah.. right.

I’ll cut to my lessons learned so we can just move right on:

  1. Don’t smoke meat when you’re hungry like the wolf.  I got impatient.  Really impatient.
  2. I HATE St. Louis style ribs.  Too much dark meat.  These are NOT the makings of what will dethrone Chili’s Baby Back Ribs.
  3. Cooked in oven with only minimal smoking time made them greasy.
  4. Even when the pork was cooked.. it just wasn’t.. good.  In fact it was all sorts of bad.  31 flavors of bad, to be precise.

So now I’m left with a non-functional smoker that I didn’t have time to troubleshoot today.  I have a 9 pound brisket waiting for something to happen that won’t keep forever.  And I have piles of work that preclude me from diving into this project with reckless abandon.

This isn’t over.  I will not be defeated.  I will master some ‘Que.

-JJ/V-

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