Barbecue While You Shop: Slow Cooker BBQ Ribs

I don't mean you can make ribs in the oven or grill while you shop online. You can, but this is better. The weather is great for a minute! Go outside!

These ribs cook while you're gone at work, while you're asleep, while you're hanging out with your kids, or while you're wandering Soho, checking out the sales at the art supply store and Sur la Table. I highly recommend the latter. (Though I think I managed to buy the only thing in there that wasn't discounted.)

I really think slow cookers are worth the counter space, especially for busy folks. And I have precious little counter space. A lot of people have visions of mushy stews and everything tasting the same when it comes out of the crockpot, but really, anything that you braise can be slow-cooked, especially if you're willing to do a little prep work.


They may not be for the purists among you, but for the rest of us, these ribs are tasty, and cheap, and easy. Isn't that a worthy trifecta?

Slow Cooker BBQ Ribs
Serves two

1 full rack pork spare ribs, trimmed and cut in half
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
2 oranges
1 lemon
2 bottles of beer
1 dried chipotle pepper
1 18-oz (or so) bottle barbecue sauce (I recommend Stubb's)
hot sauce for serving

Rub ribs with paprika, garlic powder, and chili powder. If you have time, refrigerate after rubbing for 1-3 hours. Zest oranges and lemon. Juice oranges and lemon, adding juice to the slow cooker. Crumble chipotle and add to slow cooker. Bring ribs to room temperature if you refrigerated them. Brown each half of the rack of ribs on both sides in a heavy skillet. Add first half to slow cooker, pour a little barbecue sauce on top, then add second half. Add beers, then top off with more barbecue sauce. Add about 3/4 of the bottle of barbecue sauce total. Ideally ribs will be just submerged in liquid. If you have time, cook ribs for 10-12 hours on low. This way they will be most tender. If not, cook for five hours on high. Remove ribs from liquid (discard liquid), serve with the rest of the barbecue sauce and hot sauce.

If you're preparing these overnight, refrigerate ribs submerged in the cooking liquid (in a casserole, not your slow cooker insert) during the day. Before heating, remove fat from surface. Reheat in the oven, finishing with a quick broil to crisp them up if you want.

If You Can't Have an Island Vacation, Have an Island Salad

Anyone else need a vacation to recover from their vacation?

If you're not quite ready to face work yet, maybe you and I should take off for somewhere sunny. Aruba, anyone? Maybe the Dominican Republic?

In college, my a cappella singing group was hired to perform for a week at a Club Med in the D.R. I had never been to a tropical resort before, and pushed the group to do something more adventurous/cultural with our January break. Of course, I was wrong, and singing for our all-you-can-eat suppers (and a flipbook's worth of pina coladas) was the perfect way to spend a winter week after exams. It was heavenly, in the way that only long days on the beach with great friends, trashy novels, and unhealthy beverages can be.

If you can't make it there, maybe this salad will help ease the pain.


My mom saved the recipe from an old Gourmet magazine, and though it's a little dated, it's kind of fun. She added some toasted cashews, and subbed romaine for the cabbage. The touch of curry powder makes the dressing bold and warm, if not exactly tropical.

Pina coladas may not be part of your New Year's resolutions, but if you have one, I won't tell...


Island Pork Tenderloin Salad
from Gourmet (May 2003)

For pork
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 pork tenderloins (2 1/4 to 2 1/2 pounds total) See note below.
2 tablespoons olive oil

For glaze
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons finely chopped garlic
1 tablespoon Tabasco

For vinaigrette
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon fresh orange juice
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon curry powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 cup olive oil

For salad
3 navel oranges
5 ounces baby spinach, trimmed (6 cups leaves)
4 cups romaine lettuce
1 red bell pepper, cut lengthwise into thin strips
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup cashews, toasted
2 ripe California avocados

Prepare pork:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Stir together salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder, and cinnamon, then coat pork with spice rub.Heat oil in an ovenproof 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately high heat until just beginning to smoke, then brown pork, turning, about 4 minutes total. Leave pork in skillet.

Make glaze and roast pork:
Stir together brown sugar, garlic, and Tabasco and pat onto top of each tenderloin. Roast in middle of oven until thermometer inserted diagonally in center of each tenderloin registers 140°F, about 20 minutes. Let pork stand in skillet at room temperature 10 minutes. (Temperature will rise to about 155°F while standing.)

Make vinaigrette while pork roasts:
Whisk together juices, mustard, curry powder, salt, and pepper, then add oil in a stream, whisking until emulsified.

Prepare salad ingredients while pork stands:
Cut peel, including white pith, from oranges with a sharp knife, then cut oranges crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick slices. Toss spinach, cabbage, bell pepper, cashews and raisins in a large bowl with about 1/4 cup vinaigrette. Halve, pit, and peel avocados, then cut diagonally into 1/4-inch-thick slices.

Assemble salad:
Cut pork at a 45-degree angle into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Line a large platter with dressed salad and arrange sliced pork, oranges, and avocados in rows on top. Drizzle some vinaigrette over avocados and oranges. Pour any juices from skillet over pork.

NOTE: Be careful to buy pork tenderloins that don't have too much saline injected in them. My mom likes the ones from Trader Joe's, and there are probably others, but many supermarket brands are quite waterlogged. Then be careful not to overcook.

Maiden Voyage of the Slow Cooker: Hoisin Garlic Ribs

Picture from Crate and Barrel

My fiancé Matt is quite good with presents. When we first started dating, he gave me a weekend subscription to the New York Times, which saved me a painful pre-coffee trip to the newsstand and suggested to me that he might be interested in sticking around for a few more weekends. My parents were totally impressed (perhaps that was the real goal.)

Since I've gotten more interested (obsessed) with recipes that involve lowww and slow cooking, I may have mentioned once or twice that a slow cooker would be a worthy addition to our kitchen. Also, my friends Laura and Adam made an AMAZING brisket in their slow cooker that I just might have praised a few times. Matt knows how to take a hint, and since my birthday we've had a slow cooker on our counter just waiting to be tested.

While I love my dutch oven and will continue to use it frequently, I don't love leaving the oven on for eight or twelve hours at a time. And I don't love being stuck in the house for that time, either. I've noticed that slow-cooker recipes online are somewhat limited to Sandra Lee-style easy recipes, but I think the electric slow cooker absolutely has a place in the serious gourmet kitchen.

For her maiden voyage, I rubbed St. Louis style ribs (sawed in half by the butcher at Whole Foods) with garlic, ginger, and ground sichuan peppercorns. After a bit of marinating (but no browning), I threw them in the slow cooker with three sliced onions and about two cups of liquid (sake, beer, hoisin, sriracha, fresh orange juice, honey, soy sauce.) The ribs cooked for about 12 hours on low while I slept. It was a little weird waking up to the smell of garlicky chinese food, but amazing to literally have dinner cook on its own. No stirring, no worrying. I refrigerated the ribs in a baking pan with the liquid and skimmed the fat when I got home. After a bit of covered reheating in the oven, I brushed the ribs with a mixture of hoisin, sriracha, honey, and orange juice to sweeten them up a bit. After glazing, we crisped each side in a hotter oven for about 10 minutes.

And they were pretty incredible. The meat fell from the bones into our mouths—you couldn't really nibble. The meat was falling apart, the bones were falling apart, and the taste was rich and intense, balanced with the sweet and spicy glaze. We had planned to finish watching a movie while we ate, but these ribs were so good we couldn't concentrate on anything else. Plus, it's hard to read subtitles while you're licking your plate.

The big reveal: Porkstravaganza!

Before I begin, let me be sure to emphasize this: pulled pork is for neither the faint of heart nor the impatient. You cannot rush it, you cannot push it, and you cannot expect it to stop and wait for you while you run around trying to get bleach out of your eye (long story). However, if you are made of the appropriately stern stuff, this melting, luscious chunk of meat is well worth the wait and the effort.



The HMS Pork Shoulder was set to sail on Sunday evening, so I started the project on Friday, stripping the skin from the 10-lb shoulder (a harrowing process i hope to repeat as little as possible) and docking it in a heavily salted and seasoned brine. I left it mostly unattended in the refrigerator for the next 24 hours, after which I drained it, patted it dry, gave it a nice massage with lots of spice rub, and put it in my preheated 225 degree oven. And there it stayed for the next 16 hours or so in the company of a shallow pan of water one rack below.

The REAL fun began about 10 hours later, though, when the sweet, spicy smell of the roasting meat began to drift lazily through the apartment, coaxing us gently into the waking world with its savory fingers.

I am hard-pressed to find another reason that I would so cheerfully wake at 6:30 on a Sunday morning.

But, wake I did, and from then on the great chunk of meat required a bit more of my attention--though I'd covered it in foil, it needed basting (with bourbon and pan drippings) every couple of hours and a near-constant monitoring of its internal temperature. When it hit 200, I turned off the oven and let the meat cool down in tandem with it. This is key--the slow cooling helps keep the moisture in.



Once it was cool enough to touch, i went after it with a pair of forks (though not before i rather stupidly tried to remove it from the roasting pan using the bone as a handle--if your pork is cooked properly, the bone will just fall right out), shredding it into a savory filigree that went gorgeously with the Cross-Bronx barbecue sauce (so named because the flavors are a riff on the famous Manhattan cocktail, made ghetto fabulous by the use of black cherry soda), sticky onion relish, and copious quantities of liquor and good company.

So what did I learn? Pulled pork is awesome. Slow and low is key. There is something viscerally delightful about being able to subdue a cut of meat using a spoon. And bourbon makes everything better.

(but I already knew that.)





PULLED PORK

1 8-10 lb, bone-in pork shoulder, skin removed

DRY RUB:
equal parts:
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Cumin
Paprika
½ part kosher salt
½ c brown sugar

BRINE:
2 quarts cold water
½ c spice rub
½ c brown sugar
½ kosher salt

36 hours before serving:

1. prepare the brine.
2. Place the pork shoulder inside a 2-gallon, zip-top bag
3. Pour the brine over the pork, ensuring that it’s completely submerged.
4. Refrigerate for at least 8 hours, ideally for up to 24.

15-24 hours before serving:

1. Preheat oven to 225 degrees Fahrenheit. Place a shallow roasting dish filled with water on the bottom rack of the oven.
2. Remove the pork from the brine and place in a roasting dish. Pat surface dry.
3. Cover entire surface with remaining spice rub mixture—really massage it in, and be sure to get it inside/under any flaps you might encounter.
4. Place in oven until the meat hits 200 degrees at the thickest part—approximately 1.5-2 hours per pound. Check on it every few hours to ensure that there is liquid in the bottom of the roasting dish; baste with this liquid (or, if you’re feeling feisty, add a little bourbon to the mix) every four hours or so. Remove the water pan from step one after it’s run dry.
5. When the meat hits the target temperature, Turn off the oven. Loosely cover the pork, and allow to rest for two hours.
6. Tear that sucker apart with forks. Serve it with the Cross-Bronx barbecue sauce.

CROSS BRONX BARBECUE SAUCE

1 c onions, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 20 oz bottle of ketchup
½ c bourbon
½ jar cherry preserves
10 oz black cherry soda
¼ c orange juice
¼ c dry vermouth
¼ c balsamic vinegar
½ c brown sugar
kosher salt
black pepper

1. In a deep saucepan, sauté the onions in a few tablespoons of olive oil or butter over medium heat, until just translucent (about 6 min).
2. Add the garlic; sauté for another minute
3. Add ketchup, bourbon, preserves, soda, juice, vermouth, vinegar and sugar. Bring to a slow boil, then reduce heat to a simmer.
4. Simmer until reduced by half, so it’s nice and thick.

As with every recipe I write, amounts are approximate—tinker and test until it tastes right and delicious to you.