The other week, I tried to take a shortcut when smoking some pork ribs because it was so cold outside. The charcoal was working overtime trying to keep everything up to the safe temperature and I was getting tired of trying to regular it all so after three hours of smoking, I pulled the ribs off and brought them in. Normally in the 3-2-1 strategy of smoking you smoke your meat for three hours, then wrap them up in foil with some apple juice or water for two hours. Then you open them back up to firm up a little during the last hour.
In my shortcut, I simply popped them into the over in my kitchen for the last two hours. Big mistake.
Well, it wasn’t huge, the meat was just a little smoky and tasted a lot like they were baked in the oven at a low temperature for a few hours. My mistake was not wrapping them in foil and juice, that helps in the tenderness, so in the future I’ll know better.
The real lesson here is that smoking is a delicate process that cannot be rushed. While I’m sure the ribs would come out nicely in the oven if wrapped in foil with some juice, it doesn’t come close to another two hours of access to some nice mesquite smoke. Even a grill novice knows that!
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If you wrap them in foil they nolonger have access to smoke. The foil wrapped ribs do not know if the 250 degrees comes from an oven or a smoker . So you followed your normal plan except the moisture. Hopefully we learn from our mistakes