Ribs

Ribs are the reason I started cooking BBQ in the first place. But man have my preparation of them evolved over the years.

I am embarrassed to admit that when I first started cooking "ribs" on my own, I boiled them. And they weren't even ribs! I would take those "country style ribs" and boil them with spices. Then, I would finish them on the grill or in the oven with KC Masterpiece. Real BBQ'ers are probably cringing at this, but they were actually pretty good.

I always wanted to cook real ribs the way I had remembered them from eating out as a kid, and from my years at the University of Alabama.

Once I started learning about real BBQ on the Internet years later I started cooking loin back ribs regularly. And they were usually pretty good. These are our first place ribs from our second ever contest, the New Hampshire Rock-n-Ribfest in June of 2006.

Here's some extra porn...

Once I started competing, I learned that a lot of the teams that score consistently high in ribs use spare ribs instead of back ribs. This year I started practicing spares, and turned them in for the first time at Harpoon. They took 12th place, not bad at all for a first time out at a tough competition. My second shot at competing with spares was at New Paltz, and those came in 3rd out of more than 50 teams.

Will I stick with spares when competing in the future? I'm not sure. Only the judges will really know :-)