The Fifth Smoking - Rib Smoke Off on the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker 18.5"

Today I smoked up three full racks of ribs to see which recipe for ribs was best for my family.

I used the 18.5" Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker smoker with Kingston Original charcoal (blue bag) for fuel and Pecan wood chunks for the smoke.  The ribs were cooked for 3 hours and then removed and wrapped in aluminum foil and returned to the smoker for another 2 hours.  While other people recommend an additional hour on the smoker unwrapped, my family and I decided that the ribs were cooked long enough, so we skipped the last step of the "3-2-1 ribs" technique.

One rack of ribs had the secret recipe that was given to me by my fishing buddy Jim.  Another rack of ribs had Pork Barrel BBQ's All American Seasoning & Rub sprinkled on it with yellow mustard as a binder for the rub with Sweet Baby Ray's Sweet & Spicy barbecue sauce added after the ribs were wrapped with foil.  Finally, the third rack of ribs had yellow mustard as a binder and Costco's Flavor Connection Rib Rub & Seasoning on it only.

The photo of the ribs have Jim's rib recipe on the bottom right, the Sweet Baby Ray's ribs on the left and the rub only ribs on the top of the plate.

We all agreed that Jim's Ribs were the best, followed by Sweet Baby Ray's and finally, the ribs with only the rub coming in last.  This is not to say that any of them were bad.  We just had to rank them in order of preference.  However, we did think some modification needed to be done to Jim's ribs.

Jim's ribs has flavor by itself and did not need smoking.  We believe that the smoke from the Pecan wood added its own flavoring that changed the ribs beyond what it should have been.  In the future, we believe the best way to do his ribs would be to use his sauce recipe on the smoker with charcoal, but NO SMOKE from wood.  Essentially, this would be like indirectly barbecuing!

The other two ribs benefitted from the smoke.  The smoke added the quality you'd want in a smoked rib.  Sweet Baby Ray's sauce added a lot to the quality of those ribs.  The rub only ribs while good, just did not compete as well as the other two versions that had sauce on them.  In our opinion for ribs, you need sauce!!

Next week... more brisket!