Eden Cooks - Ribs and a Whiskey Sour - Mon. May 20 at 8pm EST

Time zones are always a struggle... I'm sure they were nice back when everybody rode trains, but with the internet, going back to a standard might be easier!



The next step is to make the 'sour.' Bars use a crappy, sugar-loaded, not-even-real-citrus sour mix. If you're at a place that doesn't have real citrus, just get straight whiskey, because that stuff will hurt your stomach (if you're like me). So, to make it good:
Juice the whole lemon and the whole lime into a water glass. Be sure to wring all the pulp into the sour too, scraping it up against the edge of the glass.
This will work your fingers if you're not used to it---but that's just good training, right?



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Use your martini strainer to prevent seeds from gettin' all up in your cocktail.



Top off your whiskey with your sour.




(You'll notice these aren't my hands doing the pouring... but I was standing right next to her, teaching and taking pictures.)
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Timing-wise, again, I'm traveling so I don't know this grill at all (not to mention I don't know grills in general!). So I did my meat prep, and then I spent a good long while with the grill on and no food in it, learning how to keep the temperature consistent. So let's get the meat prep underway, and then let's talk about grills!

Unwrap your ribs. Slide a butterknife under the membrane on the back, then pry your fingers under it to remove it. It would get all leathery and trap moisture if you left it on.



Here's my rack of ribs, bone-side up, with the membrane removed.


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The first one isn't at trick, it's more of a mandate---put your thermometer probe right down where the meat goes. If you don't have a reliable way of measuring temperature, you won't be able to have confidence that your ribs are cooked correctly to be safe to eat. Plus you will be throwing away the only way to get feedback as you cook---and who wants to throw away an opportunity for a delicious meal?

The part that's actually a technique is to use indirect heat. As I was grilling, I kept thinking of how maintaining temperature on a grill is like piloting a boat. You can't ever go backwards---you can correct gently, but if you overcorrect you're going to be stuck in a loop. When you're cooking directly over the flame, the response can be really dramatic, and so can any fluctuation in general. But when you have a grill with one burner on, and the other burner off, you are cooking more with convection than with direct radiation. Convection can be a lot more stable, so your gentle corrections can go a long way in the long run.

Making your grilling environment even more stable can be done with a trick from bread baking. Putting a cheap pan full of water directly over the heat source does two things: it adds thermal mass, so more energy is needed for each change in degree in the grill environment (so everythign stays more stable); and it also produces steam as the environment heats up, so it keeps your ribs' from forming a tougher crust than necessary. It still will form the delicious and appropriate bark---but it won't get overcharred.
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Enjoy yourself while you maintain the temperature between 210 and 240F. Here you can see me enjoying myself by checking out my dry rub. (I also added a few shakes of the dry rub to my v8, and I will never go back to plain v8 again.)



Baby back ribs will take 3-4 hours. St. Louis cut ribs will take 4-5. My baby backs were done right at the four hour mark... but only use time to judge what kind of cut you can buy based on when you can start grilling. When you're actually cooking, check the actual meat to see if it is ready.
Here I'm showing the result of the 'crack test'---when I lift up the rib rack with my tongs, you can see the bark crack. When I lifted this up at 2 hours, the bark was not developed enough to crack. It just flexed.



Then I sampled one rib just to make sure. It was ready.




It was also amazing.

(That last photo, even though the photo quality isn't too good, shows off the pink 'smoke ring'.
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