Talking Food with Cory Bahr: BBQ Ribs

Hey y'all. I'm Chef Cory Bahr and today we're talking BBQ. And by BBQ, I mean ribs, and we're going to teach you how to smoke them, how to season them, and most importantly, our molasses bourbon barbecue sauce. The rub we make here is more like a Carolina rub, if you will. It has a brown sugar base that we add smoked paprika to, onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, chili powder, fresh cumin seed that we toast and grind here. And then kosher salt. We just mix these together really well. It looks nice.

Here we have our St. Louis cut pork ribs. Water bottle. Get yourself a water bottle and before you season, you just want to mist your ribs. What that does is just really allows that sugar and the spices in your rub to adhere immediately to your rib. So I'm going to go ahead and season these up. You really want to get the seasoning on there. But don't cake it. You can see the benefit of that misting right away. The color is changing on the rub. It's getting darker, that means that the moisture it's really pulling it to or gluing it to these ribs. Tap it again. Roll it over, repeat. And now we're ready to go on our smoker.

So here we are at the smoker. If you don't have one of these smokers at your house, these work well in the oven. 350 degrees for about three and a half hours. 'Til tender. Perfect. We're going to go into the smoker for about four, four and a half hours. Y'all join me back in the kitchen.

We're going to make up our molasses bourbon barbecue sauce. But this is our super easy barbecue sauce. Anybody can make it. It's eight ingredients. What we're going to start off with is our bourbon. Right now, just into our skillet. Be careful we want to burn off that alcohol or use one of our favorite kitchen instruments.

We're going to add brown sugar, apple cider vinegar. Little bit of Worcestershire sauce, or molasses. Right here we're using a black strap molasses, then more of our cumin that's been toasted and freshly ground and then mustard powder. What you want to do with this is bring it up to a boil and then let it simmer until it's reduced by half. It takes about 20 to 25 minutes.

So here are our ribs, four hours in the smoker. Want to show you something. Here's a little test we do. Give it a wiggle and a pull. That's... That's pretty awesome right there. The other thing you look for in barbecue is a great pink smoke ring. You can see these are fully smoked all the way through. If you were here in the kitchen right now you could smell like the porkiness, the smoke, you know all these flavors that we've got going on right now.

So what I'm going to do is just cut some like I'd serve at my house. Again, you can see why I like that St. Louis cut. Nice, thick, meaty, lots of flavor. What I like to do is stack them up in a dish like this... little cross-hatch kind of motion. Let's add one more to that. Get our barbecue sauce. This is our molasses bourbon barbecue sauce. Beautiful glaze, as you can see, you take a look at that.

Smoked St. Louis ribs with molasses bourbon barbecue sauce. What better way to celebrate the summer than getting in your backyard, cooking up this recipe with your family? Put a lot of smiles on people's faces.

.