Gregory’s Triple-Cooked Ribs

If I ever write a cookbook it’s going to be the “start with a pound of bacon” cookbook.

In this case it’s only half a pound, fried to render bacon fat that will soften vidalia onions. 

I can see cardiologists wincing. lol 

Anyway, these pork spareribs take some effort but I know no other way to get that meltingly soft and glistening pork captured inside a crunchy, smoky, blackened crust. Three cookings.

Start a huge pot of boiling water for about 10 pounds of ribs. These ribs are from the WesternBeef, they were $1.88 a pound and were superb. Now add three one-cup bottles of good chile sauce to the onions. Chile sauce is not in the south Bronx, by the way, I looked. I brought this up from the UES.

Add ½ cup water to each of the chile sauce jars, then shake them to get all the sauce and then add the water (1 ½ cups total) on top of the sauce and stir it around.

Now 3 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce, 5 tablespoons brown sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, lots of fresh ground black pepper, a smidgen or three of Indian Red Hot pepper, three tablespoons of ground cumin or for a taste of clove, garam masala. Either one works great. Squeeze in the juice from two limes and two lemons. Six tablespoons of vinegar, I use balsamic but anything works. Turn it down and let it bubble.

Now cut up your ribs, carving off as much of the fat as you can and add them to the water to boil. This is our first cooking; it melts the fat and leaves them almost fat free.

Really let it boil until they are cooked completely through.

It’ll look like this for awhile.

When the ribs are well cooked pour off the water and rinse them in clear cold water and then set them on toweling to dry. They should be rubbery at this point.

Pack them like a suitcase into a baking dish, cover them with every drop of that sauce and then an enclosing layer of foil.

Got it? Now comes the second cooking; bake them for 2 hours covered at 325F. 

At this point they are carvable with a spoon in an onion-spicy, Indian tomato. Chill overnight if you have the time, sauces always seem to improve in the fridge.

And then just before serving, third cooking, crisp ‘em really hot on a charcoal grill until they start to blacken and get crusty. Cold beer.

Insanely good.