Rib Tip Cooking

This is a story about the best ribs I ever had…they are not Spare Ribs or Baby Backs, they are Rib Tips, that section attached to the whole rack of spare ribs. I’ve always cooked them and always liked them, but now I know when they are cooked and served the right way, they will be better than Spares or Baby Backs. What you do is this: you can cook them in whole pieces, rubbing them (I use Slabs Birds n Bones Rub) and cooking them just like you would full racks. I cook ribs at 225 with minimum smoke wood and I can’t taste smoke myself, so I don’t pay a lot of attention to the kind of wood I use. The standard cook time would be 3 hrs before foiling them for another 2 hrs but for Rib Tips, I cook them 5 hrs before continuing with the foil. The next step before continuing to that 2 hrs in the foil I believe is the KEY to the best ribs I ever tasted and that is to cut them into individual bone size strips. "That’s it in a nutshell"! Once they are cut into strips you can use pans to cook them in for the final 2 hrs with about ½ cup of apple juice poured over them. I like sauce on them, but not a lot of sauce so what I do is spread them out on a large foil lined sheet pan and lightly brush with BBQ sauce and into a 350-degree oven for another 30 min. The meat is always better closest to the bone and all that cartilage still provides plenty of that excellent rib meat in between. The breastbone at the bottom is the exception, you can separate it from the rest and cook it too, but you won’t be able to cut it in sections like the rest. You most likely will have a good bit of small thin boneless pieces like the flap meat that you just do not want to take up all that grill space to cook and I suggest just putting all that in an open pan and cook it right along with the rest and they will wind up cooking in their own fat so no juice is need in this pan. All I can tell you now is to never take those rib tips for granted again and try them this way the next time you have some available, or better yet try to find a source to buy just the tips and if you can find them they should be 2/3 cheaper than the whole spares.