NEW: Curry BBQ Smoked Beef Ribs

Posted On 10 July 2022

So this is a meal I cooked *today*. Currently all the blog posts have been me going through historic photos back to 2020… but I figure, I’ve just done this, so it’s a good time to share.

Some time ago, somewhere, somehow… (in other words, I don’t remember) I saw a pic of someone BBQing some beef ribs, and they looked amazing.

I mentioned this to my butcher (Harrison, from Harrison’s Butchers – that website as I write this is “coming soon” but he’ll be launching sometime soon; and if you’re in the Southend area head to his shop on Leigh Broadway) and he ordered me in some beefy, beefy beef.

Phwoar. Now, this wasn’t an expensive cut (…err…I don’t think… it was bundled in with a lot of other meat) but I say that because, this cut is generally a cheap cut. It’s the flank where the short ribs come from. But the trade off with it being cheap(er) is that this needs cooking real low and slow.

I planned to cook this for around 12 hours, so it’d be melting in your mouth/falling apart.

Unfortunately, I was absolutely shattered due to doing a lot of physical work on the Saturday (I was finishing running network cable throughout my house, something I’d started 6 months ago when we first moved in; I’d got the cables upstairs but I needed to get into the loft and run the cables through the rest of the house). So I ended up sleeping late, and by the time I’d got around to starting cooking – it was 12pm.

In hindsight, maybe I should have abandoned, but, two days ago I did this:

That’s covered in a rub I’d bought from Harrison’s:

It had a really good aroma, and I was really excited about trying this. The idea being, a smoked BBQ beef curry.

Time was not on my side though, and it was exacerbated by the fact I was out for around 4 hours whilst it was cooking, meaning I didn’t actually get to cook up a good sauce for it.

Nevertheless, I’d fired up the BBQ, and got the beef on:

So I’ll talk very briefly about this setup, because I’ll do this properly in another post – as I’ve had this BBQ for a few months now and I’ve had many a smoke session on it.

What you’re looking at is a Kamado Joe Classic III, fitted with the SlōRoller – a unique thing specific to Kamado Joe. I’ve also got the cast iron grills, because as I’ll talk about another time, I got really annoyed with the traditional steel ones that come with the BBQ.

So, at 12pm, this badboy was smoking well. Inside were Applewood logs, and a bunch of whisky barrel chunks. It smelled really good, although I do feel slightly bad for my neighbours, but this was for an important cause.

That was about four and a bit hours in; as you can see it’s got a lovely looking crust, but (and I’ll chat this over with my butcher as I wasn’t sure if I should have trimmed it) that very thin top layer I assume was part of the skin – was an incredibly tough / mostly inedible part.

Nevertheless at this stage I was committed, so, I topped up the water in the tray below (which had gone completely dry) and, not having had time to make a sauce to start basting this with, I used an off-the-shelf Tikka Masala curry sauce.

I know; it doesn’t look too pretty but it smelled great and I knew it would taste great too. I covered it in foil at this stage and cranked up the BBQ a bit, as the internal temp was nowhere NEAR where it needed to be (duh, surprise surprise).

I ended up bringing it into the oven, tightly wrapped over a baking tray with a load more water in it, and ran it on 200c for as long as I could wait for. It was getting on for 6:30 and we were all hungry, so I decided, enough was enough.

Looking at the MEATER (again I’ll do another blog about that specifically another time, when I reach that part in my photo-recaps) it was going to be a long time before it hit the right temperature (which as I said, was no real surprise).

You can see the desperation hitting in at the end there, as the temperature it was being cooked at climbed, and climbed, and climbed.

But it was no real substitute for time. In the end, out of the oven it came:

Aw yeah! Looking good. I could tell it was well on the way to being done, but I could also tell, this wasn’t done. Pushing on, I took the bones out (which literally just pulled out with ease, a good sign) and gave it some resting time:

The whole house started to smell of smokey, beefy curry. It was going to be good!

After a good resting period (err… let’s say it was an hour or two… not about 20 minutes….!!) ruled by our stomachs, it was sliced and placed on top of some rice:

It was good. It was smokey, tender, succulent and most importantly, had a really good ‘curry’ kick to it. I still think it’d have been a lot better had it had another 5-6 hours, and if it had some time cooking in a sauce… but – it’s fair to say I was very pleased with this outcome.

I’ve got a load of this left over, and my plan is to dice it up, and then slow cook it in a home-made curry sauce – which I’ll of course, write about later!

Things I’ve taken from this:

1. Trimming is probably still necessary – that thin layer on the top, I need to ‘fix’ that. Whether that’s fixed by a good searing first, or whether it needs trimming off – I’ll chat to my butchers about and will definitely do that different next time.
   
2. I’ll tell myself now but I know I won’t listen: IT NEEDS LONGER! I should have set an alarm, got my lazy backside out of bed, and got it cooking at 7am. It would have made ALL the difference.

That’s about it really! Other than the fact this needed longer (and I KNEW it needed longer) and the fact that top layer was pretty inedible – this was a really good dinner and 10/10 would recommend. Just plan a long time for it!