BBQ Short Ribs February 12-13 2011

Time to bust out the Mak 2 Star General again. Last weekend would have been perfect but we got to busy. I hope it doesn't rain too much while they cook on Sunday.

So far I've cooked steak, baby back ribs, and St. Louis cut ribs on my MAK and my loaner last summer. On the pelletsmoking.com web forum I'm a member of there are lots of good recipes. Someone did some beef ribs a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't really considered doing beef ribs until I saw Cowgirl's entry. That was the inspiration, but these will be a bit different

• She coated hers with bacon drippings before putting on the rub. I didn't have bacon drippings so I used good ol' vegetable oil
• She used big beef rib racks. I've wanted to do something with short ribs for a long time, so I went that direction.
• No sauce for me

It's a 2 day process; one day for the rub and one day for the cooking. I picked up 4 1/2 lbs of  ribs at New Season's; they look fantastic just as they are

Made a rub based on Craig "Meathead"Goldwyn's Big Bad Beef Rub at amazingribs.com. This rub is light on sugar and is heavy on salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder. To get a nice fine rub I pushed it through a fine wire mesh strainer. I applied the rub, wrapped 'em up and put them in the garage refrigerator overnight.

Tomorrow after church I'll fire up the smoker. Here's the plan

• 2 1/2 hours at 250 degrees
• 60 minutes on "smoke"
• Back to 250 until they hit 180 internal temp