Same as it ever was
So here’s where we are after some preliminary sauce tasting: sweet and simple is beating sweet and complicated, and I’m getting tired of ribs. Neither of those is good news, because that’s more or less where we left off last year.
A couple of weeks ago, I thawed three racks of ribs that I cooked and shrink-wrapped last fall, sometime before this latest ice age set in and apparently killed everything good and right in the world, or at least everything good and right in downtown Kansas City (it’s not so bad here around the lake). Anyhoo, I heated the separate racks and we tried them each with a different sauce concoction. All the sauces were sweet; one was an interesting idea, one was a convoluted idea, and one was an idea someone else had long ago. Guess which idea is which:
• The Slabs’ Kyle Style and apple pie filling (2 to 1 ratio, the apple whirled with a hand mixer)
• Fat Boys sauce and a reduction of cherry/apple juice concentrate (finished with a 3 to 1 ratio, but I glazed some with the reduction straight-up before adding the sauce)
• The Slabs’ Kyle Style straight up, then topped with a drizzle of honey
Did you figure it out? Yes, the honey drizzle is an old idea, it’s done all the time, It works. In fact, it tasted pretty much as I expected: good. A little gooey for my taste, and I like gooey. Lately, I’ve been supplementing my weekly jar of Jif Extra Crunchy eaten with a spoon by squirting a gooey blob of honey in the jar. Back to the ribs: the sauce and honey overpowered the meat a little bit. It was good, though. And this has been one of the dirtiest paragraphs I’ve ever written.
The idea I proclaimed “interesting” was the cherry/apple juice reduction. I’ve been using it (not reduced) to baste meat on the smoker for a while now. It wasn’t bad in the sauce – in fact, it was damn close to good. But something was missing. Some spice was missing. The flavor was layered OK from meat to rub to smoke to sauce and glaze, but it needed something. It needed some love. Or ancho powder.
The apple pie filling was just a ridiculous idea by a stupid bastard who oughta know better than to go searching for a secret zinger ingredient. That’d be me. The idea started with a fantastic recipe for beans (no, I don’t have the bean recipe – we’ve established that I’m an idiot. Try to keep up), but it just didn’t work, and no amount of love or ancho powder would have saved them ribs.
Ok, you know the suspects, now guess what was the crowd favorite? Not the apple pie debacle. Don’t be stupid. We had one vote for the juice reduction glaze, three votes for the honey, and a few random votes for “oh, were we supposed to keep track?”
So where are we? We’re where we left off at the end of ’06. We need to practice.