No Smoker? No Problem!

Tonight we fired up the charcoal grill to cook ribs, the first time in a long while. Ribs is the journeyman dish of barbecue; just enough challenge to be rewarding, but not so difficult that you need professional training to get it right. It's also time-consuming, but well worth it.

Some day (after we make our first million, I routinely joke to Karla), I'll get a dedicated meat smoker. These wonderful devices make ribs, pork loin, and many other smoked meats a cinch. For now, though, we use our Swiss Army Knife of grilldom, the 20" Weber Charcoal Grill. What's so great about the Weber? For starters, it's round, which I believe facilitates convection; it's cheap, simple, has few moving parts, and is weather-resistant. It's also almost always possible to squeeze "just one more" piece of meat on the round grill when you're grilling direct over the coals. For ribs, though, we use indirect grilling and let the convection carry the smoke through the meat. It's a bit of a juggling act to do this with the Weber, but it's not too hard if you have an extra set of hands.

We've found the best approach is to heap a bunch of coals on one side, almost to grill level, and place a disposable foil pie tin with about 3/4" of water on the opposite side. Once the coals are good and hot, we place 2-3 aluminum foil packets filled with soaked mesquite chips on the coals, give them 5 minutes or so to start producing smoke, and then place the ribs on the opposite side over the pie tin.

The trickiest part is controlling the temperature, which should be around 250 degrees if you want to be done in 3-4 hours. Our grill actually runs hot (275-300) for the first hour or so, but we've found that if we let it do this, we still have enough heat left during the third hour to finish the ribs without replenishing the coals. The trick comes if you find yourself below 200-215 degrees, or if your smoke packets run out (as they usually do during the second hour). You need a second person to lift the rack out with oven mitts while you replenish the smoking packets and/or the coals. The easiest way I've found to monitor the temperature is to drop an instant-read meat thermometer down through one of the vent holes. I like to micromanage all my grill adventures, but with ribs I have to content myself with checking the temperature every once in a while, since opening the lid too often (more than 3-4 times overall) to check on the meat can cause problems.

We mop our ribs with a vinegar-Worcestershire-spice blend every hour or so to help them stay moist. Then a quick brush with barbecue sauce once they hit 180 internally, and they're ready to serve.

Karla and I put away a full rack this evening (Spencer, as yet lacking molars, isn't really a big fan of meat in general at this point), along with some homemade fries. Certainly worth the effort!