[Gurdur]

Bought some spare ribs today, so I want to do them in a plum sauce. First time for me, all part of my self-educational experimentation. IMvHO spare ribs should be food that you know you're eating while you're eating it, since you should do a plum sauce / glaze with the ribs, which means you need to scrub down yourself with megagallons of water & detergent after eating.

Anyway, went looking in The Guardian for recipes, found this:

Sticky-glazed spare ribs

Roasted until the sauce reduces to a sticky, caramelised coating, these ribs are addictive. Plum jelly gives a lovely depth of flavour to the glaze, but you could use any tasty fruit jelly - redcurrant, crabapple, etc. Serves four.

1.5kg free-range or organic pork ribs

For the marinade/glaze

6 tbsp redcurrant, plum, crabapple or other fruit jelly

2 tbsp runny honey

2 garlic cloves, crushed to a paste with a good pinch of salt

1 tbsp finely grated root ginger

½-1 medium-hot red chilli, with seeds, finely chopped (or ½ tsp chilli flakes)

2 tbsp soy sauce

Combine all the marinade ingredients, whisking them well. Put the ribs in a large ovenproof dish, spoon the marinade over them, and use your hands or a brush to get them well-coated. Cover and marinate for an hour - several hours, if possible.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/ gas mark 4. Turn the ribs in their marinade, cover the dish with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil, turn the ribs again, basting them with the sauce, and return to the oven, uncovered, for about 20 minutes, or until the sauce is reducing nicely.

......

Will experiment tonight or so, and post about it later.

[janedoe]

spareribs are the best. if this works out i think i'll tell my brother. he's the grillmaster around here.


eta- hey, i got a penguin! cool.

[verte]

I'm going to try them this coming weekend. Can't wait!

eta - spareribs, not penguins.

[atheist of peace]

who has tryed em? Whats the say?

[Gurdur]

OK, these are some of the results of my experimentation.

Now:

When I did these, I was worried about the lack of liquid to effectively marinate the meat, so I added liquid to the mix as described in the recipe above, and what I added was a bit of unsweetened pear juice (it was there) and Coca Cola (coca cola is always good for helping with glazes and so on). But I added too much and out of proportion, even though as well as the honey I added a dash of maple syrup, so what you should do is:

keep in mind the proportions as they are described of liquid to honey to jam. The proportions are roughly in total:

liquid	honey	jam
		6 tablespoons
	2 tablespoons
2 tablespoons

So in the end the proportions are: liquid/honey/jam = 6:2:2 (=3:1:1)

You can safely increase the amount of liquid, but it means extra time for reducing the mixture, or in other words boiling off liquid.

Now I would heavily recommend that:

you do in fact marinate the ribs well a couple of hours at least,

Then put some of the liquid mixture and meat in a hot nonstick frying-pan on a high heat and cook quickly till the ribs are quite brown on the outside (should be ten minutes at the very most, and make sure to turn the ribs well in the glazing liquid mixture many times during that at-most-10-minutes), then remove, and put them in the oven or in another skillet on a low heat for around 20 minutes or much less (maybe only 10 minutes, experiment).

Using the rest of the liquid mixture, baste the ribs well (i.e. get that liquid mixture all over them, again and again) while they are cooking slowly on the low heat.

That high heat should be at the very least above 140° Celsius (285° Fahrenheit) but below 210° Celsius (410° Fahrenheit). The reason for this is something called the Maillard reactions, which is basically a temperature range at which certain chemical reactions take place and certain new molecules get formed. Or in other words, meat tastes best when it's browned on the outside.

So how can you tell the right temperatures when you have no thermometer?

What you want to do is brown the outside of the meat well without cooking the hell out of the inside, and without carbonising the meat, i.e. having burnt black bits all over it. Those burnt black bits of meat are bad for you, and taste bad too.

More in my next post.

[Gurdur]

Next:

I added a fair few things to the marinating mixture, which was afterwards (after marinating the meat a few hours, the time which I used to go to a cinema in twon and watch Crank: High Voltage) used for cooking/basting/glazing the ribs, and after that (since I had made the liquid mixture too liquidy, so there was a fair mount of it) used the next few days as an overall mixture to throw beef pieces (beef goulash, i.e. just smallish chunks of beelk) and potato slices into. Oh, and I used too for doing my own version of Honey-Glazed Carrots with Lemon and Thyme, which went along with the spare ribs. More on that later in this thread in later posts.

To the marinating mixture I added a flat tablespoonful of fruit tea based on some blackberry (brambleberry) mixture. Good, organically grown/harvested & nonchemical fruit-teas are very common and cheap here in Germany, and they are for great herbal usage in cooking too; simply shake out some of the dry fruit-tea mixture into whatever you're cooking.

I also used 6 small hot red chilis, instead of the ½ to 1 recommended in the original recipe. Plus I added a large dash of cayenne pepper, and also some ground-up dried chilis and chocolate (it's a kind of mixture you can get easily here, a kind of cheapo plastic peppermill containing dried chili and dark unsweetened chocolate, which makes a great flavouring for much).

I would not necessarily recommend what I did; while it all in the end tasted great to me and to the two Germans whom, I used for experimental tasting/eating purposes, I would say you should use a maximum of 3 red chilis, since they do go a long way, a very long way. And if you reduce cooking time to what I recommended above (I cooked far too long), then the crumbled chilis will not disappear into the heated thin air, but will remain around and make their presence very much felt indeed.

So no more than 3 crumbled red chilis.

One very interesting effect of my variation of the spare-ribs recipe was that you (that is, me + two Germans I roped in to act as experimental subjects) could not taste the chilis/cayenne in the cooking on your tongue, but you did taste them in the back of your throat. In other words, there was a very mild heat sensation at the back of the throat, but not in the forward parts of the mouth or on the tongue.

My theory on why that happened is I guess that the sugar in the cooking mixture (from the honey, maple syrup and various flavouring mixtures I threw in) actually blocked the effect of the capsaicin (the active ingredient in chilis that gives the burning feeling) in the forward mouth and tongue, but not in the back of the throat, since it's a bit difficult for the sugar to stay around long there.

Capsaicin is actually very very good for you, loads of reputed anticancer, analgesic stuff about it, yada yada yada, but it can make your life pure hell if you eat, snort or breathe (peppersprays, riot control mixutures) the stuff. Sugar and milk are the two antidotes for capsaicin burning; drinking water alone for a burning throat won't do a thing for you at all. But sugar and milk are the actual antidotes that work (they do things to the pain receptors and the channels that "feel" the burning), which is why Indian cooking often includes a dish of mint and yoghurt to go with a curry (yoghurt works well too, same reason, large milk protein molecules gumming up the pain receptor channels, so the pain receptors don't get the full effect of the capsaicin).

This was a very interesting effect -- no burning initial taste, but some capsaicin aftertaste -- and worked well; I would suggest it is an integral part of the recipe and makes it all that far more interesting to eat. The two Germans I used as experimental subjects are both North Germans and thus phobic about curry and capsaicin, but even they agreed it all worked fine and tasted fine.

More in my next post.

[Gurdur]

I still have a good deal to say on all this, but I'm crashing out for the evening. Will add further posts on this all tomorrow.

[atheist of peace]

good night