Pork Belly Ribs, BBQ’d and basted…

Posted On 22 July 2022

I tell you what. Getting the right mix of seasoning, smoking/BBQ’ing time, and then getting the right sauce to baste over pork belly, is something I have – by far spent way too much time practicing. I mean I’ve probably single-handedly gone through 300 pigs. (OK OK… maybe not quite that many).

But seriously… I take it seriously.

I treat every bit of meat I cook with respect, for obvious reasons, and it’s why it’s so frustrating/difficult when things don’t go your way. When recipes fail, it’s such a huge disappointment. The waste not just of the meat, but the ingredients that went into making whatever disgusting meal you just made – plus the time.

Still… sometimes, just sometimes, it works out awesome.

This was one of those times.

Here, we have a lovely looking bit of pork belly on the bone. Skin removed, because we’re going for ‘uber meaty ribs’ rather than pork belly slices, and we’re going to do this low ‘n slow on the BBQ.

I’ll be super truthful, I don’t think that’s lit enough. I mean it’s not a fair comparison by today’s standards as with the Kamado Joe, it’s just a different league… and the coals would be mostly white hot. Anyway, you can see I’ve done my best to shove this to one side, and then chucked on what I think are whisky barrel chunks.

The trouble with a normal sized BBQ, and a huge piece of meat, is that it makes indirect cooking very tricky. Indirect cooking, if you’re unfamiliar, is simply the process of cooking without the coals being underneath – i.e. you’re not cooking directly from below. There’s lots of pretty diagrams and explanations out on the web if you’re really interested in understanding it more. Getting the coals right is quite an art; but the way I do it now on the Kamado Joe is simple – it has something called a SlōRoller. It’s some marvellous contraption which helps keep the temperature ultra consistent at the low n slow temperatures.

Anyway… this cooked for around 3 hours – which is waaaay to short a time for a piece that big. I can only conclude I couldn’t get it started earlier because I was busy, and it was getting late (7pm) when I took it off, which meant we were hungry.

It looks good thought right?

I’ve obviously basted it in a sauce, probably after removing but I would usually baste once or twice whilst cooking (and at 3 hours it may have only had one).

There was no chance this was overdone, anyway, put it that way. I undoubtedly would have been led by my thermapen here. I should do a separate write up on the thermapen alone – it’s a magical handy thermometer.

Anyway, I gave it a little resting time (around half an hour going by the timestamps) and:

Looks good! I don’t think I had a dish to hand where I could ‘present’ all the slices in one go. But I then dished it up, and actually, one rib was enough. It’s deceptively filling, pork. Tasty tasty.