I made my first rack of pork ribs on the Pit Barrel last night for dinner. I've made country-style ribs many times with varying degrees of success, but I'd never tried "regular" ribs until last night.
As it turns out, they turned-out pretty good!
Using the basic recipe on the Pit Barrel site and the same rub I've put-together at home for the county-style ribs there's really not a lot to it. The process is much simpler than the one I've used for country-style ribs and amounts to little more than lighting the cooker, seasoning the meat and hanging it for a couple hours.
There's really only two things I plan to do differently next time:
1. Split the rack: the full rack was too long and was almost in the fire
2. Push the finish temp a little higher, maybe five degrees
I'm not sure why I waited so long to try making these. I think in my mind I had some idea that they were fancy or hard to make, probably based on having very few great experiences with them in restaurants. I've tried them many times but really can only remember having what I'd call "great" ribs twice, so I assumed it was difficult or expensive or both. I still have a long way to go to "great", but I thought for sure I'd have to work through some "terrible" before I'd have even "edible" results.
As it turns out, not only was it not hard to get good result it wasn't expensive either. I shouldn't have let my assumptions hold me back.
Next time, I won't wait so long to try something.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026