Herbed Ribs Smoked with Onion and Garlic

I know most people, when they think of smoking meat they think of hickory, mesquite, apple or cherry.  Not the fruits, in the case of the latter two, but the wood.  And 99% of the time, I use woods to smoke with, but I’m here to show you how you can smoke with something other than wood and it is fantastic.

Have you ever had a White Castle or Krystal belly bomber?  They cook the burgers over a bed of onions so the meat gets infused with that flavor.  This is the same concept. 

Let’s start with the ribs.  I did two slabs of baby backs that I brined overnight.

Brine Ingredients:

2 slabs baby back ribs, membrane removed
1 quart apple juice
1/2 cup salt
3 tbsp minced garlic
10 turns of black and white pepper

Remove the membrane from the back of the ribs and put all brine ingredients in a plastic bag. Churn around the bag until the salt dissolves and put in the fridge for 3-12 hours.  I did these overnight.

The next day, they were removed from the brine and patted dry with paper towels:

Ingredients:

2 slabs of baby backs (brining optional)
1/2 cup garlic infused olive oil (regular oil can be used instead, in which case, add a tbsp of minced garlic)
1 tbsp Italian herbs (in this case Penzey’s)
1 onion, thick sliced
2 ears of garlic, cloves separated

Slice the onion:, and don’t worry about leaving the skin on:

Take the garlic cloves out of the ear and put in a bowl, again, don’t worry about the papery skin:

Place the onions in with the cloves and submerge in water:

Set that aside and for about 30 minutes.  You could leave them in the water for a couple hours if necessary.

Combine the oil and herbs in a bowl:

Now brush the herbed oil onto the bone side of the ribs first:

then hit the meat side with the herbed oil:

Always apply sauce or a rub to the bone side first, so that the curve of the bones will keep the rub or sauce up off the cutting board when you flip them.  If you do meat side first, when you flip them over to do the bone side, the sauce or rub will stick to the cutting board when you go to put them on the grill and require a third coating. 

Here are my two slabs ready for the grill:

I set up the grill for my standard two zone grilling, coals on one side, meat on the other:

There’s a third slab on the grill (bottom right) which I was using to develop another rib recipe. It’s not quite perfected yet, so more on that later.

Now, instead of throwing on a chunk of wood to smoke the meat, I toss a handful of the onion slices and garlic cloves directly onto the coals:

I closed the lid and my grill leveled off around 290 degrees.  My goal was between 275-325 degrees and a cooking time of 2 hours.  This is called the high heat method, but medium heat is more appropriate.  If I were doing spares, I would increase the cooking time about 30 minutes.

The smoke from the onions and garlic is practically invisible.  I took a bunch of different pics with a bunch of different settings on the camera and none of them showed the smoke at all.  The smoke is really, really faint, so don’t let that worry you.  You will definitely smell the onions and the garlic.

After 1 hour, here’s what those onions and garlic cloves look like:

And here are the ribs:

A close up of the ribs on the left:

As long as I have the lid open, time to hit those ribs with some more herbed olive oil:

I’m a firm believer of doing all I can every time I open the lid to reduce the number of times I have to open it.  The temps have been holding steady and my coals still look pretty good, so I’ll just add some more onions and garlic:

At 90 minutes the temps started falling so I decided to open the lid to add more coals.  The ribs look like this:

The ribs are coming along nicely. Check out these on the top shelf:

I want to focus on a particular aspect of the above pic:

That’s some nice separation on the end of those ribs.

I hit the ribs with more herbed oil:

And back to why I opened the lid in the first place, more coals and some more garlic and onions:

Now, I’ve got a bit of a problem. I’m in the back yard, where I have no cover and this is what it looked like out front at the 1 hour mark:

And 30 minutes later  (when I cracked the lid to add coals) it looked like this:

I rolled the grill around front, to the edge of my front porch so at least I could stay dry while I grilled:

I timed it well, because within five minutes, my grill looked like this:

And here’s out front:

The 2nd and 3rd pictures above this one,shows that my grill has an offset smoker box, yet I put the coals in the main chamber.  Why?  Because I can’t get the temps in the main chamber above about 200 if I use the firebox, so I rarely use it anymore. Now that I have a two toddlers, I just don’t have the kind of time to smoke ribs for 5 hours.  And the product is fantastic after just 2. 

Speaking of after 2, here they are:

I think either of these methods would be too subtle for ribs.  The herbed oil doesn’t add a ton of flavor by itself, and the smoking with garlic and onions don’t add a ton by itself either, but the combination of the two makes an excellent rib.  If you’re a lover of heavily sauced ribs, this might not be the recipe for you, but if you are looking for something different that really shows off the flavor of the pork itself, then this might be just your recipe.  I really enjoyed these, and Andy and Mike at work, who I tested them on the next day, agreed.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them below or shoot me an email.

If you would like other rib, click here.

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