[Music playing]
[Tuffy Stone] One of the signatures (of BBQ)... it's not only the rub, it's not only the sauce,
but it's the wood they cook with.
The wood I can get all the time was hickory. People talk about hickory being a really
strong-flavored wood. I think the way I use it, I minimize that. I offset it by a really clean fire.
Hickory can be strong, so I would move the wood around. I would try and keep it over a bed of coals.
A clear, light blue smoke is really good. A heavy dark black colored smoke is not so good.
I recommend typically to everybody cooking barbecue, run the smallest fire that you can get away with
because a fire that'll breathe and gets plenty of oxygen will produce a better flavored smoke
than than a fire that's too big and smoldering.
By doing log cabin-style, where we just place two
pieces of wood, as needed, probably every 15 minutes or so, and allowing the gaps there, it'll breathe.
I like to treat smoke as a seasoning, as a flavor, and and I want that smoke to be pleasant smoke.
You've been to places where they burn wood down to coals and then they add those coals to the whole hog.
That's such a mild smoke, and.... and it's so nice.
So you see the smoke starting to kick out of that end piece right now. But back before I did
smaller pieces of wood, and it was inevitable that these larger logs would always have a piece.....
where the the end wasn't over the coals and it would just put out a lot of smoke.
I didn't invent this! This is called the "minion method" after a fellow named Jim Minion
came up with it. The idea behind the minion method is to get a long cook.....
.....not have it get too hot on you. You can see what I've done is I've just kind of made like a
a run of charcoal. You could come in at this point with a chimney full of charcoal,
and....and just light a few of the briquettes and once those briquettes are going, we just pour those
to one end of the run of the charcoal, and the idea behind it is it just kind of weeps along.
It doesn't get too hot, and you get a longer burn.
The idea with this would be.. in this case I'm just going to take.....
some coals and I'm going to put them right here,
and I'm just cheating with the fire that I have in the fire pit.
But we'll just kind of let that cruise and get going and then do a slow burn all the way around.
Depending on how much fuel we put over here to start.....
We could probably have this pit up at our operational temperature, you know, our desired temperature, in 30 to 45 minutes.
Let's find out! They're looking pretty good. I gotta say, yours looks really good [laughing]!
[Chef Einav:] Um, are you surprised? [laughing]
[Tuffy Stone:] No I'm not! [laughing] You're running this show for a reason! So anyways, we're gonna go and wrap them now. We start with the meat side up, and you can just tell by that bend
that they're they're just not quite cooked all the way, so this is up to you: it's chef's choice!
As I was saying, this is an opportunity or a place where we can add in a little bit more flavor.
For me, I'm just going to reinforce my rub a little bit more and just come in with a light sprinkle.
[Tuffy Stone:] Man, yours smells good! Doesn't that smell good? Smell it! [Chef Einav:] It took a shower [laughing]
I just hit it with a little moisture, then I'm going to flip it meat side down, and do it again. Just add water.
[Chef Einav:] Tuffy didn't approve of the apple juice that he had. [Tuffy Stone:] No, it was a little cloudy.
So when I wrap, there's a couple things that I do. I wrap it in a way so that I can unwrap it and check it later.
The other thing when wrapping ribs is, I don't want to puncture the aluminum foil with the bone, so I always fold this way first...
and I fold this way...
I'm gonna fold this way... this looks about like the way I wrap a present... not very good! [laughs]
So now I'm gonna put this back on the grill on the cool side, meat side down, and when I go
to check it when I'm ready, I can just unwrap it that way with ease, versus if I just crinkled it all up!
We're going back to the cool side, meat side down. It's had about two hours of smoke on them,
and they're looking kind of tender. If we start to bend it back and the meat starts to tear like
that, they're done. Okay, we could take a toothpick, we could go right through the meat, we could take
a thermometer, and they'd probably be about 205 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit. So you sauce and I'll flip.
Some of the things that I think people make a mistake with
when it comes to sauce, is especially when it comes to grilled and smoked meats, is we don't
cook the meat until it's tender before we sauce it. I think sometimes we get in this rush: we think, man
I got to get this dinner ready so I'm going to add a little sauce to it, even though the
meat's not done! This sauce and many barbecue sauces have sugar in them and if that
sauce gets too hot, it burns as you well know, so I always recommend that saucing be a finishing
step that'd be something you cook the meat until it's tender and then at the end we apply the sauce
and we don't add too much. I think that
your best barbecue doesn't need any sauce at all! I think your ribs that we're gonna be getting to
after we get these on the grill, will probably reinforce that idea, so we'll just take this
one back over here to the grill and let it just heat up so this is the savory rib.
Oh my goodness, it's perfect! All right! So this is something that I personally recommend.
It's so much easier to cut a rack of ribs with the bone side up because we can come in with our knife.
That's right! I think you did a good job! This smells great,
and if this was overcooked they'd be falling apart even trying to cut them right now.
[Chef Einav]: It's a very fine line between tag and just right... either over or under.
[Tuffy Stone]: That's right, just a little spritz. And if you wanted to, just a little sprinkle.
There you go ma'am!