Bad Cooks Spread Bad Recipes

Yesterday Mike and I celebrated Memorial Day by eating something we would have eaten anyway. It’s not really true that we celebrated the holiday. Monday was coming up, we hadn’t bought anything to fix for dinner, and we had frozen spare ribs, so we smoked them.

I decided to try something Internet gurus rave about. It’s called the 321 method, for spare ribs. You smoke them for three hours. Then you wrap them and bake them for two hours. Then you unwrap them and bake them for one more hour.

I thought it might be a surefire formula that would eliminate guesswork in the future, so what the heck.

After three hours, the small pieces of our full rack were completely done, and the big pieces were not all that far behind. I realized I had once again been fooled by bad cooks with big platforms.

I set the small bits aside, covered the big ones, and smoked the big ones for around 45 minutes. Then I cooked everything, unwrapped, for about 45 more minutes.

The little bits were more done than they needed to be, although they were very good. The unneeded cooking time took some of the moisture out, so they weren’t what they could have been. The bigger ones were perfect.

I went to a BBQ forum and asked about the method, and I got negative responses. It is not popular with people who actually know how to barbecue. Still, for reasons unknown to me, sites like The Spruce Eats promote it like it cures cancer.

That website says nearly all of the smoke is absorbed in the first three hours. Right away, that tells you the person who wrote the article is a barbecue duffer. If you use so much wood it’s still smoking after three hours, you are overdoing it. My smoker uses about 2.5 ounces of wood, and that much wood will not burn all day.

It’s always amazing to see the disparity between people’s willingness to publish cooking information and their ability to cook or even recognize good food.

If I had let my ribs go 6 hours, the meat would have been dried-out mush. No question about it. How can the Internet gurus not know this? Answer: twofold. Some have never tried it, but they are willing to copy it from other people and republish it because they need content to put in front of the public. This is dishonest but very typical in the food-information industry. Some have tried it and simply can’t tell good food from bad.

These are my guesses.

I guarantee you, many rib recipe articles are written by paid writers who have never made ribs. I promise you, this is true. I know how publishing works. Outlets hire kids fresh out of college to do the actual work. A friend of mine who knew nearly nothing wrote authoritative articles for one of the biggest women’s magazines. There are probably vegans writing rib recipes for food websites.

I have a new method I’m going to use next time. It’s the 2-2-.75 method. I’m going to smoke for two hours. If you use the right amount of wood, your smoke will poop out after about 90 minutes, so there is no real point in pretending you’re smoking them after that. Two hours of smoking will make sure I got all the benefit from the wood, but it will conserve the water in the meat. After that, I’ll wrap and bake for two hours to ensure tenderness. Then I’ll cook the ribs, uncovered, for maybe 45 minutes. I’ll check occasionally to make sure they’re okay.

This will definitely work. Big ribs need at least 4 hours of cooking, so the first two-hour stretches will be guaranteed not to do any harm. After that, I’ll be able to monitor them and make sure I don’t overcook them.

People will say nearly anything about food, just to hear their heads rattle. They’ll tell you Peter Luger’s is a great restaurant, which is, objectively and obviously, wrong. They’ll tell you soy burgers are just as good as beef. They’ll claim cottage cheese is great in lasagna. They say baby backs, which are small, dry, and expensive, are better than big, juicy spare ribs. They fill the world with bad recipes and deprive other people of the quality food experiences they should be having.

Avoid the 321 method. You have been warned. And if you see a food “authority” pushing it, don’t ever trust that person in the future, because it’s not possible to be that wrong about ribs and be reliable concerning anything else.

Here is a vinegar sauce I made up, in case you, like me, are interested in light sauces for pork. It’s very, very good. Scale it up as desired.

INGREDIENTS

4 oz cider vinegar
2 oz ketchup
1 clove garlic, crushed
several generous squirts Frank’s
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. hot prepared mustard
maple syrup, sorghum syrup, or molasses to taste
water to taste

Sorry I don’t have precise measurements for the sweet stuff and water. Next time I make the sauce, I’ll record things better.