Jonah/Alton Brown's Ribs: Not for the Vegetarians...

Hello. It's me, Jonah. Erica's carnivorous, cilantro-loving, capsaicin-addicted partner in crime and cuisine, and I'm here to talk about ribs. Ribs are wonderful. Ribs are a primal joy to sink your teeth into and tear flesh right off the bone much like, as Erica described it with disgust, a lion taking down an antelope on the discovery channel. And if you think ribs are fun to eat, there are sheer bliss to prepare. Living in New England and having no access to a backyard of any sort, you might think it would be difficult for me to prepare ribs ala any respectable barbecue joint. Generally ribs are smoked or slo-cooked to perfection by trained professionals; I am not a trained professional, nor do I have any desire to set up a smoker in my kitchen - well, alright I do, and have by accident on several occasions, but practically speaking it's a bad idea. Enter Alton Brown and his wonderful book, Just Here For The Food. Page 174 (yes, I've committed it to memory) contains a recipe for "No Backyard Babyback Ribs" which are braised as opposed to smoked, grilled, or anything else involving dry heat. As the illustrious Mr. Brown points out, braising ribs dissolves connective tissue, and the result is ribs with meat that literally falls off the bone. Out of respect, I don't want to reproduce his recipe, however a far less respectful person has already saved you the trouble of buying the book.

As I was saying, the ribs are a delight to prepare. Sometimes I think we're too far removed from all of our processed foods, even good old hamburger bears little resemblance to a cow. Not ribs. Ribs are a large chunk of an animal, several pounds of flesh and bone designed to protect the heart, lungs, and other vital organs (a fat lot of good they did, enjoy your hot dogs). The recipe calls for a spice rub, which involves slathering the meat with several coats of kosher salt and Altons signature spice mixture (which, you'll note, is 50% brown sugar). Under other circumstances this would be a pleasant massage as one really has to work their fingers into all the crevices in the rack of ribs to insure complete coating. Then you seal it up in a tin foil pouch (the recipe tells you to perform the spice rub right on the tin foil, but I've found that the rib bones tend to poke holes in the foil and later we'll learn why you don't want those holes. I work on some wax paper and then move them over to the foil only when I'm ready to close the pouch up). The next step: Patience. You put them in the fridge and let them sit for hours. After about six your entire refrigerator smells of this delightful blend of spices and pork fat, and it only gets better from there. Then you actually get to cook them.
If you followed the directions, you should have at least one rack of ribs wrapped closely in tin foil (not too close, though, we don't want any holes because...). Then you fill the pouch with a mixture of orange juice and margarita mix. If you have any left over, just add tequila. And then it's into the oven for three hours. The liquids boil away and the meat cooks, and softens, and softens. It's so soft it's like really good pulled pork shoulder, on a stick. A pulled porksicle, if you will. But even after you've waited patiently for the full three hours, you're still not done yet, now we get to make barbecue sauce.
You very carefully open the pouch and pour out the liquid, it will not look anything like orange juice and margarita mix anymore. It's now brown and pungent with dissolved spices and fat and if that weren't good enough in the next step you reduce it. And you add some more spices, and this is where I make a slight detour from Alton Browns recipe. He calls for an additional 1/8 of a teaspoon of cayenne. I was preparing four racks of ribs so I was trying to multiply by four and should have got 1/2 teaspoon. Somewhere I lost track of something and wound up putting in a tablespoon. This is six times what the recipe calls for, but I'd just like to say for the record that I regret nothing.
Just slathering this sauce onto the ribs would be good enough, but no! You brush it on and then broil it, causing the sugar to caramelize and giving it a satisfying crispiness like it was straight from the grill. There, now you can eat it.
...
Unless, of course, you're me, and you're never satisfied with anything you cook. Inspired by the East Coast Grill's Hell Night I threw together an approximation of Inner Beauty Hot Sauce, at one time the hottest sauce available commercially but now sadly dethroned by chemical extracts and the fiendish naga jolokia pepper. I used this recipe, which calls for a mere 12 habanero peppers. For those of you who don't know the habanero was once considered the worlds hottest pepper and now ranks number two. For reference, a jalapeno pepper measures around 3000 scoville units (a system for measuring spiciness) while a habanero comes in around 300000. The worlds spiciest chilli, the naga jolokia tips the scales at over a million and can be smeared on a wall to repel elephants. Anyway, I don't think the peppers I used were fully ripe because, contrary to all expectations the sauce was pleasant and palatable. So, naturally, I added a handful more of brightest, reddest, ripest habaneros I could find. I was inspired by the East Coast Grills “Hell Bone” – a lone rib slathered in their signature hot sauce. I tried. It was not the burn of true Inner Beauty, but it was good all the same. It went great on the ribs and I suspect would be phenomenal on shrimp. I'll let you know.