My photo
Ontario, Canada
I am a wife, mother and grandma who enjoys the many aspects of homemaking. A variety of interests and hobbies combined with travel keep me active. They reflect the importance of family, friends, home and good food.
Cook ingredients that you are used to cooking by other techniques, such as fish, chicken, or hamburgers. In other words be comfortable with the ingredients you are using.
--Bobby Flay

For Your Information

Please watch this area for important information like updates, food recalls, polls, contests, coupons, and freebies.
  • [March 19, 2020] - Effective Mar 17, this blog will no longer accept advertising. The reason is very simple. If I like a product, I will promote it without compensation. If I don't like a product, I will have no problem saying so.
  • [March 17, 2020] - A return to blogging! Stay tuned for new tips, resources and all things food related.
  • [February 1, 2016] - An interesting report on why you should always choose organic tea verses non-organic: Toxic Tea (pdf format)
  • Sticky Post - Warning: 4ever Recap reusable canning lids. The reports are growing daily of these lids losing their seal during storage. Some have lost their entire season's worth of canning to these seal failures! [Update: 4ever Recap appears to be out of business.]

Popular Posts

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Oven Braised Sweet Baby Ray Ribs

I recently wrote about some of the frugal deals we found during our last trip to Sam's Club. While warehouse shopping is not for everyone, a considerable amount of money can be saved, more than enough to recoup the cost of membership even if you don't buy any food.  I am very picky about what foods I do buy there because some foods (eg. fresh fruits) can be a problem trying to bring them back into Canada and some purchases like dairy, meat and poultry have restrictions as to how many pounds can enter when returning to Canada.  Compounding the problem is US prices have come closer and in some cases exceed the Canadian price.  In general (for us), commercially canned foods (which we buy very little of), most bread  cannot be bought cheaper at Sam's Club and dried cereals are getting rather close to Canadian prices.

A couple of days ago, I was watching FoodNetwork Canada, when three of the programs showed ways to cook ribs.  There was no denying it, the craving for ribs was sparked.  I pulled out a large rack of ribs from the freezer, grabbed a bottle of Sweet Bayb Ray's Barbecue Sauce (2 - 40 oz bottles $5.98 at Sam's Club) from the pantry and the stainless steel roaster.  Dinner was in the makings!

Sweet Baby Ray's Barbecue Sauce is an award winning sauce that we discovered at a ribfest.  It is one of our favourite purchased barbecue sauces.  The deep, spicy, smokey rich flavour is perfect for using with any cut of pork but it was perfected for use on ribs.  The trick for cooking pork spare ribs is long and slow.  I like to add a bit of moisture during this process before adding the sauce later.  The ribs can be seasoned if desired but this time I didn't.  They went into the oven at 200ºF to slowly cook for the afternoon (about 5 hours).  About 4 PM I poured half a bottle (about 20 oz) of Sweet Baby Ray's Barbecue Sauce over the ribs and let them cook at 275ºF for one hour then raised the heat to 400ºF, removed the lid and cooked for 20 minutes to caramelize the sauce a bit.

Ribs cooked in the oven this way are mouth-watering delicious with wonderfully tender, fall-off-the bone texture.  The caramelized crust give a texture similar to that found on ribs cooked on the grill.  I served the ribs simply with a side of rice and mixed vegetables.  We are eating more rice now that I stopped using the rice cooker.  I am quite pleased that I finally learned how to cook rices on the stovetop.  The results are considerably better than rice cooked in the rice cooker!  I now longer need to add a bit of butter when cooking rices like I had to do with the rice cooker and I can still use a wide variety of liquids for cooking the rice.

It was a delicious, easy to prepare meal with the taste of summer just perfect for a chilly, late winter's day.  Spring is in the air so we will be doing a lot more outdoor grilling. Tonight we are gilling steaks on the charcoal side of our grill.  Gardening is just around the corner so there will be more canning to do.  I'm looking forward to getting busier in the kitchen as well as enjoying more opportunities for entertaining in our home!


3 food lovers commented:

LindaG said...

Okay, so when you first put them in the oven, you added maybe a cup of water and put the lid on?

I'm guessing you used the lid because later you mentioned leaving the lid off. :)

I definitely want to try this because we love BBQ'd ribs, too.
I don't have a stainless steel roaster, but I have 2 enamel roasters.
Did you use a rack in your roaster?

I do not like this new Blogger. I love following comments and I can't in most blogs now. :(
But I have bookmarked this so hopefully I will remember to check back to get your answers.

Hope your steaks turned out great (if you cooked them, I know they did); and that your gardening goes well! ♥

P.S. Thanks for this post! I love easy to fix meals. :-)

Garden Gnome said...

Hi Linda :) I added about a half cup of water then cooked with the lid on. Any lidded roaster would work as long as the ribs fit in it. I don't use a rack but if you want a bit drier rib you could.

Thanks for the well wishes. The steaks were delicious!

LindaG said...

Okay. Thanks for the extra information, GG! :-)