How to GRILL & SMOKE Pork Ribs for Delicious Flavor & Tenderness (Baby Backs, St Louis & Full Spare)

Man, that's a pretty rack of ribs. It's trying to fall apart on me, so I'm being real careful. But generally, I like to take this right here before I wrap. Beautiful pink smoke ring there. That's a good piece of meat right there. Today we're doing pork ribs. We're doing three styles of pork ribs. This is a St. Louis spare rib. This is a baby back. This is a full spare rib. Each of these cuts of pork ribs has their own unique characteristics, marbling, and once they're cooked, their own individual taste and flavor. And in this video, I'll be breaking it all down along the way. We're cooking on the Rectech X-Fire Pro 825. This is a really cool grill. It's designed to be a smoker and a grill. And so what we're gonna do today, start in the grill mode for each rack of ribs, and after we develop some color and char, we're gonna click into smoke mode to finish them off low and slow to perfection. Now, why would you wanna grill and then smoke your ribs? Well, Direct Grilled Pork Ribs packs some of the best flavor, and this is something that you don't get when you're smoking on a traditional offset smoker. And who doesn't love a good, smoky-flavored rib? With this technique on the X-Fire Pro, we're gonna get the best of both worlds. So let's get that Rectech fired up and start by trimming and seasoning these pork ribs. Vamanos! These two are the exact same rib. The difference is that this one has been trimmed. All this part here, this is part of the breast bone. This is gonna get cut off right here, and that's how you come up with the St. Louis rib, which is this one. This is a baby back. The baby back sits up higher, closer to the back of the rib. That's why they're called baby backs. They're also where the term eatin' high on the hog came from, or one of the reasons that they use that description. Eatin' high on the hog means the meat's a little bit better quality, in some people's opinion. Most people prefer the St. Louis or the spare rib, simply because it's a little fattier and it's a little meatier than the baby back rib. When I cook ribs, I do like to spritz, so I'm gonna mix up a spritz real quick before we get started, and that's gonna give the sugar that I'm gonna put in here a little bit of time to dissolve. The recipe for this is eight ounces of apple juice, one tablespoon of raw sugar, and a quarter cup of apple cider vinegar. Probably gonna spit two or three times during the whole cook, so that's all we need right now. If anything, I can add a little bit of water to that or more apple juice, but we're gonna let that ride just like that for now. Okay, first thing I'm gonna do is trim off the last rib off of here. You don't have to do that. I'm doing it because it fits better on here. This baby back, I'm gonna do the same thing, this little end piece here. These are great for beans. I like to smoke these. When we were in competition barbecue a lot, I would smoke those little tips and use them in our beans. We were very successful in the bean category, by the way. So I like to square them off a little bit, get some of this meat off right here. I'm gonna run inside real quick and get these rinsed off. I'll be right back. Today I'm not using any binder of any sort on these ribs, and I'll explain that here in just a second. And to start, I'm gonna season the bottom of the spare rib with my WOW seasoning and the St. Louis spare rib with my brisket rub. These are both all-purpose seasonings, but you can use whatever rub you like best. Flip these two racks over and then repeat the process. And I like to follow that up with a light coat of turbinado sugar for a little extra flavor. And for the baby backs, we're gonna use a good coat of WOW only on the top side, since we did not remove the membrane on the bottom. We didn't use a binder. I'm not really a big binder person. I would prefer to just give them a little spritz before they go onto the grill. We're just gonna give them a little spritz. Get them moist. That'll help dissolve the rub a little bit, and it'll help it stick to the meat. This is my third cook on the Raytek X-Fire Pro. So far, I'm really loving it. We made some amazing chicken wings on it yesterday. I'm gonna get these on here. I hear that sizzle. It sounds beautiful. I'm gonna get these on back here in the back. I'm just gonna put these baby backs right up here. I don't know if they fit lengthwise. Oh yeah, they do fit lengthwise. We're gonna let that ride for a little while. Then we're gonna come check them in about five or 10 minutes. I've mentioned this before. These are some cheap little gloves I got at Harbor Freight. You put these on, then put on your rubber gloves, put these on over them, and you can handle hot meats. When you're grilling, like I'm grilling right now, things move fast. All right, let's check the ribs, see what we're looking at. Woo, look at that stuff up here. This thing is hot on the bottom. We're gonna get this stuff off. Let's see what we're looking like. Bam. Woo, that thing's grilling fast. I'm gonna put these right up here in the front now. I'm gonna put these up here on top, a little further away. I'm gonna go get my basting brush because the heat is pushing up all of the impurities in the meat, pushing them right up. So we're gonna get our basting brush and get that done. I'm gonna flip these over, see what these look like. These are the baby backs. They're looking pretty quick. They're getting a little sear, not quite as much as the others, so we're gonna put them back over here. Thank you, Terri. She went and brought my basting brush. We're gonna get this stuff off right here. All right, we're gonna get this stuff off here, these impurities. Woo, look at that smoke. You can see the impurities running off of these baby backs too, so I'm gonna brush that off. We don't really want that stuff on our meat, so I'm gonna leave that right there like that. I'm gonna flip these over for a couple of minutes. I'm gonna leave these right up here. Actually, I think I'll move these over here next to the baby backs. I'm gonna go ahead and close the lid for about five more minutes, maybe seven, eight. We'll be back again in a little bit. Let's take another look at these ribs. This is cooking hot and fast. Woo, look at that sizzle. Man, you see how it's pushing up all the moisture? I'm gonna use my tongs this time and flip them over one more time. We're getting a nice, quick little char on those. We're grilling hot and fast. We can still see the impurities getting pushed up here. I'm gonna brush those off. You can see the rub pretty much stuck pretty good, so we're okay there. I'm gonna give them one more spritz. That spritz does a couple of things. It moistens the rib and it creates steam. We're gonna close the lid and let them steam a little bit too. The next time that I open this REC TEC TEC FIRE PRO, I'm gonna go ahead and switch to smoke, and we're gonna continue cooking on the smoke setting. We're gonna take it up to about 275 and just kinda rock it from there. We're gonna take another peek in here. It's been another seven, eight minutes. All right, I'm gonna move the big rib over. It's gotten plenty of char on the bottom here. You can see that. Look how that's sizzling. Woo, baby. I'm gonna move that over and put this one on this side now. This seems to be the hotter side of the grill here. We're gonna brush all this stuff off. I'm gonna flip these over, give them a little char. Baby backs. Getting a little flippity-flip. Ooh, man, there's a lot of juice in there. I can see it under the skin there. I'm gonna push these back, close it up. We're gonna give that five minutes. Then we're gonna switch to smoke like I kinda had planned to do on this turn, but I'm gonna give them a little more grill flavor. I love that grill flavor. I also need to swap the baby backs over in that direction to give them a little more grill flavor too. All right, so we'll be back in about five more minutes. All right, French, I got a question for y'all. Like I said earlier, in competition, I would always grill my rib first, then smoke them, and then wrap them. What is your technique? What is your preference? Do you like grilled ribs, or do you like smoked, smoked, smoked? Let me know in the comments below. And do you like to grill your ribs, or do you strictly just smoke them? Let's take a peek at the other spare ribs that are upside down over here. Let's flippity-flip them. Ooh, baby. Look at that. Look at that beautiful color we're getting on here. We're gonna turn them around. We're gonna flip our baby backs back the other way. We're gonna move these over back. Now we're gonna switch to smoke mode here. We've been on the grill side. Even on low, we can see that this grill, it's designed as a racehorse for grilling, man. Anything you wanna grill, this is gonna grill. Even on low, you're gonna get a really great grill and a char, as y'all can see. It's only been about 20 minutes that we've been cooking. We already got a nice little char on our ribs. So we're switching to smoke mode right now. One, two clicks. We're set at 225. I'm gonna come over here, and I'm gonna move this to 275. We'll come back in about 10 minutes and take a peek in here and see what we got. It's been 20 more minutes. We're gonna take another look real quick. Everything's looking really nice. I put it on smoke mode, and everything just kind of calmed down. I'm gonna flip these over. I'm gonna move these over, but I'm gonna put them over here on the smoky side. And we're just gonna flip them all. Let them sit there a few more minutes. You can see that beautiful color we got with the grill mode on. We're gonna keep them flipped over a little bit longer. Don't worry about some of the rub. You're gonna lose a little bit of that rub falling off, but remember, we're gonna wrap them with some other ingredients and a little bit of liquid, but they're still gonna be fantastic. I'll show you guys in a little bit. These are looking nice, too. It's been one hour altogether. There we go. Just gonna let those smoke there at 275. And at that point, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap them. Y'all remember we have the little trimmings from the ends. I talked about these earlier. These are all the little trimmings. Now that we're in smoke slash cruise control mode, I'm gonna get these in there. I'm gonna smoke them. We used to use these in our competitions for beans. You smoke up all this pork, it's delicious. You chop it up real fine, throw it in your beans. It is amazing. I'm gonna put these right up here on top. They're just gonna kind of hang out there and smoke slow. I'm gonna put this one right back here in the corner. We're just gonna forget about it for about an hour. Oh, I hear it sizzling. May not be an hour. We're just about ready to wrap the rib. They've been smoking for another hour, so we have a total time of two hours right now. Before we wrap, I'm gonna make a little barbecue sauce. This is a Guajillo Puya Arbol sauce that I made yesterday for some wings for another video. So I'm pouring that in here. Add a little bit of turbinado sugar. I'm gonna add about four ounces of this apple juice, more or less, just to give it a little bit more runny consistency. And we're gonna add a little bit of honey in here. This is not a measurement. I'm just trying to sweeten it up even more. It was not a real sweet sauce yesterday. I do feel like Guajillo and like Puya and some of the other peppers that we use, Mexican chiles, are very underrated because people don't know. They've never actually experimented or tried with them. I've done a lot of experimenting with these chiles, and man, they're flavor bomb. They're amazing. But yesterday afternoon, when I made this sauce for the wings, it wasn't real sweet. It was just savory. Had a little bit of that turbinado sugar, those two chiles. Smoked, cooked, and blended down a little bit. A little bit of garlic in there. Man, it's just like so good. So today we're sweetening it up a little bit more with the honey and the apple juice. I'm gonna shake it all up so it'll be ready to go when we wrap the spare ribs. We're only gonna add this to the spare ribs that are already trimmed because that's kind of like the show rib. That's the one that we use forever in competition. It's still used primarily as the main rib in competition barbecue. So we're gonna try to make those look really, really pretty for y'all. I have some butter. I have some honey. Little bit of apple juice. And this little homemade barbecue sauce. I'm gonna start with a baby back first. And I like to double wrap everything. Sometimes when you have the foil in there for an extended period of time, it tends to get a little bit brittle. It might tear a little bit easier when you're moving it around. So I like to double wrap just in case. Try to make sure we keep all that juice in there. Man, look at that color, man. They are so pretty. I say we're gonna wrap baby backs first. So that's where we're going. Look at that. It's been two and a half hours. They're pretty much done. That is partly because we grill them hot and fast first. When you put that hot and fast, it starts to cook really quick. I always like to take off this end bone here. Sometimes it tends to poke a hole on the foil. So I'll take this out. I'm gonna wrap meat side down because the meat's gonna release some natural juices. And I want these ribs to finish in their natural juice. We're just gonna wrap this up nice and tight. Because of the curvature on the baby back, you want this foil tight on the bottom. You don't wanna tear it tight, but you want it tight so that all that juice, the natural juice, cooks right into the meat. So let's wrap these up. And we're gonna get them over here on this side for now. I have the spare ribs next. Look how gorgeous they look. They're absolutely stunning already. And we're not even done yet. These are also pretty much done. Generally, when they start to fold like that, they're just almost ready. Today, they're not gonna be quite ready yet. We're gonna put them right in here in the foil. We're gonna throw a little bit of apple juice in here. Not too much. Now we have our barbecue sauce. But we also have some butter. Butter and pork goes really good together. So I'm gonna lay some of that in here. Just a couple of dabs. All right, three dabs. Let's do three. Three's good. We're also gonna pour a little bit of this guajillo barbecue sauce on here. We already have our grill flavor on there. We have our smoke flavor on there. We got a little char flavor on there. These are gonna be amazing, friend. I like to pick them up sideways from both sides. That way I get a little bit of that sauce underneath. And I've got it on top as well. We have double foil for these. We're gonna wrap them nice and tight. Nice and tight. All right, let's get these over here on the grill again. We got one more rack to go. We've got these beautiful, big, fat spare ribs here. These are gonna take longer. You can see they're not bending quite as much as we have a much bigger piece of meat here. But look at the color. I love that color. It's gorgeous. They're looking really, really nice. They're really thick over on this side. They're gonna take a little bit longer to cook. Same process. We're gonna flip them over. Take out this bone here that's falling out anyway. And on these, I am gonna put a little bit of apple juice. Just a little bit. A little bit of butter. We're putting the butter on the top of the ribs right now because it's gonna melt anyway and it's gonna all go down there. Again, the ribs are gonna release a lot of natural juice. They're gonna be super, super delicious. I'll put just a little bit more in here. And I'm gonna put a little bit more juice down here on the bottom. And these are so wide, you see the foil won't quite fit. That's why I brought an extra piece of foil right here so we can wrap them. So we're gonna wrap both sides just like this. I'm gonna turn this around. Wrap it nice and tight. Again, you want them to be tight, but don't stretch it too hard. Because remember, I said the foil gets a little bit brittle and you might tear it, particularly if you have a bone on the end. So I'm just kind of wrapping carefully. I don't wanna tear the edges. I just want it to be kind of hugging the meat all the way around. And I'm gonna press down right here in the middle. That'll force the juices to go down under the meat. All right, we're done with these. We're gonna put these over on this side here where I know now this is the hottest part of the smoker. So I'm gonna lay these right in here like that. We'll take a bite of this. Oh baby, that's good. All right, it's been two hours. We've got them wrapped now. We also have these little snackies, snackitizers. And so I'm gonna put these over here too, way over here on the end so they can cook a little closer to the fire. And normally I throw those in early at the beginning and let them cook. And then we just kind of snack on those. So we've got all of our ribs wrapped. We've got them in the Rec-Tec X-Fire Pro. I'm gonna close the lid. And we're still running at 275. I'm just gonna let it ride. It's been two hours. I'm expecting to cook about hour more on the baby backs, about an hour more on the spare ribs, and about maybe hour and a half or two more on the big ribs. We'll be back in a little while. It's been another hour. We're sitting right at three hours in about 10 minutes. And so I'm gonna check in on my ribs right here, see how they feel. These are the spare ribs and I can feel they're super soft. They're done. I'm pretty sure. If those are done, I know the, oh yeah, these babies are done. I'm gonna leave them out. I'm gonna leave these out right here. And I'm positive these are done. These might need a little more time. I'm gonna rotate them. They feel really soft too. So I'm only gonna give them a couple more minutes. Meantime, I am gonna wrap up all these other little goodies, the little snackatizers. I'm just gonna throw them in a piece of foil here. I'm gonna save one of them for a snack. That's what they're for, right? That's what a snackatizer is. All right, I'm gonna leave these up here and just let them just kind of hang out. I'm gonna take out these spare ribs too. I am positive they are done. We're gonna look at them here in just a minute. I'm gonna leave these here a little bit longer. Meantime, we're gonna get a snack. I'll be right back. There, huh? All right, I ran inside really quick and grabbed one of my meat thermometers. We're gonna check the temperature on this thing here. This one right here feels like it's the baby back. Ooh, yeah, baby. We're at 192, 190, 195. On the baby back, that's plenty. I'm gonna let them sit there and rest for a little bit. I know the spare ribs are done too. Let's take a quick peek at these. Ooh, 202. I don't know if that camera's picking that up over there, but 195, 197, 209. Whoa. All right, we're gonna let those rest a little bit too. We'll be back in a little bit. We're done cooking three and a half hours for three racks of ribs. Y'all saw how big that other rib was. Big, old, giant, full-size spare. You can cook ribs in three to four hours. No problem. They're gonna be super juicy and delicious. I'll show you guys that in just a moment. I'm gonna go ahead and take the other rib out because it is done done. Also, this one is totally finished cooking too, so I'm gonna set it over here on the side. Meantime, I'm gonna open up these spare ribs. We're gonna try to make them look purdy. Look at that pretty color. Man, look at that, friends. Man, that's a purdy rack of ribs. It's trying to fall apart on me, so I'm being real careful. I'm gonna get some of this au jus here, some of this natural au jus from the rib. I'm gonna get some more up here on top, just like so. And we're in smoke mode over here, so I'm just gonna put these back up here. And one of the techniques I like to use is to roll the foil paper inwards like this. We're gonna make a little foil boat. I'm not worried about the bottom of the rib. Remember, we had the butter and the sauce, everything on top. It's got plenty of flavor. We did remove the membrane, so all that flavor's already there. And remember I told you why we were going to cook with the meat side down? Because all of that au jus cooked into the meat itself, the sauce, the sugar, everything that went into this recipe cooked into the top of the meat and all the way through the meat. We had it on both sides. I'm gonna put it up here on top. I want it to get a little bit more smoke before we take a big old taste test. All right. While we're waiting for that sauce to set over there, we're gonna open up these baby backs. Look at that. Look how pretty these look, too. Gorgeous. Aren't they nice? Yee-haw! No sauce, no sugar, no nothing. Just a nice, delicious baby back rib. Now I'm gonna take these and I'm gonna start slicing some of these down. Oh, baby. That looks so nice. They're soft, super soft. Look at that. Look at this membrane. It peels right off here at the end. Comes right off. That's why I don't worry about it, you know, when I'm gonna cook the ribs because that just comes right off. And because we cook them with the meat side down, all that flavor's in there. Look at that beautiful smoke ring. Got a nice pink smoke ring. Nice little brown on the center. And they're not falling apart, but it's almost there. Look, you can almost get it off the bone. This is a perfect bite through rib. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, baby. I'm gonna do a bite through just for you guys. Look at that. That's what you call a KCBS rib. Perfect bite through. You can see the perfect shape of where I bit through. It's not falling off the bone, but it's super soft, super tender. And I'm really not sure if the camera's picking that up, but it's super juicy, super moist. Look at that. Just incredible. I'm gonna finish eating this rib because I already got it cut anyway. I already bit into it. I'm not gonna save it. Huh? All right. They look so pretty. Look at that. Wowzer, gazowser. Okay, here we go, friends. Look at that. These are some really good looking ribs. You notice they got a very light sheen on them. They're not super shiny. We didn't spritz them or spray them with anything after we did the sauce. In competition, we would put some kind of a glaze on there, make them super shiny, super pretty, spray some duck fat on there or whatever just to kind of make them look extra, extra pretty for the judges. Because you know, you eat with your eyes first, right? These are just a good old backyard rib. Let's get them sliced up. We're gonna start right over here at the end. I'm feeling for the bone. And sometimes spare ribs have a bone that'll run crooked, you know, one way or the other. Kind of hard to guess where it's gonna be. You know, the good thing is that the pork bones are usually fairly soft. You can power right through it with a knife. That one went pretty good, pretty straight. These are super soft. They're softer than the baby backs were. We're going right in between the bone here. One more, and then we gotta take a bite, man. Hoo-wee! Look how pretty they are. See, I went right through the edge of the bone there. They sure do look pretty. They're gorgeous. Mm. Oh, wow. That's amazing flavor. That guajillo sauce goes really good with the pork. Put that little extra sweet, the honey, all together, that stuff just makes an amazing rib. I'm gonna eat all this stuff, too, honey. It's good! He's pretty much trying to fall off the bone there, you see? I had to eat the whole thing, sorry, guys. Here's the big kahuna. That is the full spare rib with a big old breast bone, all the knuckles, everything attached. Cooked in three and a half hours, too. I mean, y'all saw the temperature on the meat probe. It was 208 degrees. I bet they're gonna be fall off the bone or pretty darn close to that. All right, what do we have here? We have some beautiful, fall off the bone, almost, rib. Oh, gosh, they look so good. Look at that. Man, friends, look how good that looks. Look how purty, purty that looks. Now, generally, when I cook these, I wouldn't doing it today because we're recording a video for y'all, but generally, I like to take this right here before I wrap. Beautiful pink smoke ring there. That's a good piece of meat right there. Mm-mm-mm. Here you go, hon. Terry don't believe me, so he wants to see for himself. Sometimes you gotta slice the meat and feel for the bone on both sides because, like I said, these spare ribs, they tend to have a little curvature. This one looks like it's fairly crooked. Slice right through there. Pretty natural right there, just a little bit of apple juice and the rub. A little bit butter. Take a bite of this. This one looks like it's about ready to fall off one too. Mm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Oh, baby. The chili powder, the extra pepper kick, little bit of hint of sweet from the apple juice, the savory from that butter. I mean, this is just a really good rib. I love to cook ribs like this with the meat side down. Y'all saw me wrap them. Didn't put a whole lot in here, just a little bit of apple juice. You want a little bit of moisture in there to kind of steam the meat and then let the natural juice do the magic. Let the pork juice do the magic. Cook through that meat, soak in there, and just kind of simmer. Awesome flavor, friend. Trust me, do what I'm telling you right now. You can thank me later. Let me know in the comments, do you cook ribs meat side up or meat side down? I'm just curious how you're used to doing it. Have you ever done them like this with the meat side down, nice and tight with foil? Just a good natural rib with a little bit of rub. Man, look at that. Just so good. Oh, oh, oh, oh. All right, my barbecue-loving friends, we are finished cooking. We assembled a beautiful tray for you guys just to show y'all the different ribs. They all turned out beautiful and amazing, delicious and juicy. It's always preference. I didn't use a Thorbott barbecue sauce today. Now, if you like a real sweet sauce on your ribs, by all means, go for it. Tell me in the comments below, do you prefer a saucy sweet rib or a good, just bite-through, delicious pork rib? I know there's guys that say that good barbecue don't need no sauce. I will disagree with that. Sauce is a condiment, just like salsa in our tacos, just like salad dressing on our salads. You know, it's a condiment. So if you like it, use it, man. I like it a lot. I use it often here at home. Friends, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you do, please hit that like button. Please subscribe. We appreciate each and every one of you guys. Keep the smoke light and make it work. Bow! See you in the next video. Om, om, om, om, om. These are good ribs. I'm ready to eat.