Sous Vide Barbecue Pork Ribs Recipe

For most people who live outside of the southern US, the opportunities to taste excellent, smoky, low-and-slow Southern-style barbecue pork ribs are few and far between. You may be lucky enough to have a backyard and a smoker or Kettle grill, but even then, nailing that perfect temperature time after time can be a tricky affair that takes years of practice to get right. Enter sous vide.

With a vacuum sealer and a precision cooker in your kitchen, you're guaranteed perfect results every time. I'm talking pork ribs with a crusty bark or rich glaze of sauce and a texture that's tender yet meaty. Ribs that don't fall off the bone—any barbecue lover will tell you that ribs that fall off the bone are overcooked—but that release with just a gentle tug of the teeth.

What We're After: Characteristics of a Perfect Rib

When you cook barbecue ribs in a smoker, a number of things are going on.

• First, slow, gentle heat in a smoker allows the ribs' copious connective tissue to convert into gelatin, turning the tough ribs tender.
• Second, the exterior of the ribs dehydrates and browns via the Maillard reaction, a series of chemical processes that give browned meats their complex flavor. This is what creates the pleasant, crisp bark on the outside of a good rib.
• Third, the meat becomes more and more flavorful as smoky compounds from the wood and coal are lifted into the air via water vapor. That water vapor then condenses on the surface of the meat and re-evaporates, leaving smoky flavors behind.
• Fourth, the ribs develop a "smoke ring," a ring of pink just below the surface of the meat, caused by the interaction of its red pigment with nitric oxide or carbon monoxide from the grill.

So, in order to get great ribs from our sous vide cooker, we need to address all of these issues.

Getting a Tender, Meaty Interior Using Sous Vide

Turning tough meat tender requires two things: heat energy and time. When meat is held at a temperature of around 130°F (54°C) and up, tough connective tissue will break down into gelatin. The rate at which this conversion takes place is a function of temperature; the lower the temperature, the longer it takes. At the same time, the lower the temperature, the more internal moisture the ribs will retain as they cook. To determine the optimal temperature and timing range, I cooked several dozen ribs at temperatures ranging from 130°F all the way up to 180°F (82°C).

At the lower end of the spectrum, the meat takes far too long to tenderize—up to three days or more, and even then, the meat comes out more mushy and soft than tender and meaty. Too hot, and the meat falls apart in shreds, tasting more boiled than barbecued. The middle, between 145 and 165°F (63 and 74°C), was the sweet spot, and, to be honest, there were quite a few temperature and timing combinations from that range that I enjoyed. Here are my two favorites:

Extra Meaty Ribs: 145°F (63°C) for 36 Hours

At this low temperature, ribs retain plenty of moisture as they tenderize. The result is an extra-meaty rib that has the texture of a moist pork chop, but is still tender to the tooth. It pulls away from the bones nicely with just a little tug. I've never gotten meat with this texture using more traditional means of cooking, so if you really want to see what sous vide can do, this is the way to go.

Traditional Barbecue–Style Ribs: 165°F (74°C) for 12 Hours

At 165°F (74°C), you end up with meat that's a little more loose and shreds more easily, though it's by no means dry. This is meat that pulls off the bone and almost melts on your tongue, washing it with porky flavor and leaving behind shreds with a more significant chew. The texture is very much like that of traditional barbecue, though a little bit moister.

You can extrapolate from these two temperatures and timings to figure out what other combinations in between will yield. Cooking at 152°F (67°C) for 24 hours was a close runner-up, resulting in a texture that's a little more tender than the 145°F ribs, but a little juicier than the 165°F ones.

So, while ribs cooked at 145°F will take about three times as long to tenderize as ribs cooked at 165°F, they'll end up with a meatier, more succulent texture that eats almost like an extra-tender steak. Ribs cooked at a higher temperature will have a more traditional barbecue rib texture, with well-rendered fat and meat that shreds as you eat it.

For Extra-Juicy Sous Vide Pork Ribs, Turn to Salt!

With temperature and timing addressed, I turned to the next question: the rub. I mixed together a basic spice rub using our guide to spice rubs as a template, adjusting the flavors until I got something I was happy with. I ended up with a combination of paprika, mustard seed, black pepper, garlic powder, dried oregano, coriander seed, and red pepper flakes, along with brown sugar for sweetness.

A couple of questions came up immediately. Some sous vide recipes recommend against adding spice rubs to the bag as the meat cooks, because they can alter the flavor in a negative way. I have never found this to be the case, whether I'm cooking a steak, vegetables, or ribs. Spice rubs work just fine in sous vide bags.

The other, more important question was that of salt. Specifically, when and how much to add. Salt can have a profound effect on the texture and flavor of meat proteins. As salt sits in contact with meat, it will dissolve some muscle proteins, which in turn helps the meat retain moisture better. That's the reason a ham has that particular juicy and tender texture—which is great in ham, but not always desirable in barbecue. I tried cooking a few different sets of ribs side by side.

The first batch I left completely unsalted, rubbing the ribs with the salt-free rub, cooking them, then adding salt only to taste at the very end. These ribs came out tender, but relatively dry, and they also weren't particularly well seasoned on the inside. The ribs I rubbed with a mixture that included salt, on the other hand, came out far juicier in the end. Juicy enough that you could immediately see the difference with your naked eye before even biting into them.

I also tried salting the ribs by soaking them in a brine solution for a few hours before rubbing, bagging, and cooking them. The ribs that were brined in salt water ended up with the same problems I find in almost all brined products: They are juicier, but that juice is watery. The ribs end up tasting more wet than juicy and meaty. Regular salting is the way to go.

As for timing, even salting immediately prior to bagging and cooking is okay, but I got the best results out of ribs that were salted and bagged a day in advance and allowed to rest overnight in the refrigerator before cooking the next day. Any longer than a day in the fridge, and they start to take on a much hammier texture.

Liquid Smoke Is Real Smoke!

Now we get to the real question: How do you get smoky flavor into ribs without actual smoke? Some sous vide recipes use a hybrid method, either starting or finishing the ribs in the smoker to add real smoke flavor to them. To me, this seems to miss the point. If I'm willing to fire up the smoker, then there are any number of traditional recipes out there that don't necessarily require sous vide for great results. I want a method that allows me to cook the ribs indoors from start to finish, no actual fire necessary.

Liquid smoke gets a bum rap, but it shouldn't. The good brands, such as Wright's or Colgin, are quite literally nothing more than smoke and water in a bottle. To make it, manufacturers burn hardwood—just like you would in your smoker—then run the moist smoke through a condenser, where water vapor condenses and traps the smoky constituents—just like how water vapor condenses and deposits smoke flavor on the surface of meat. This water drips down and is collected and packed into bottles.

According to flavor and fragrance experts Leffingwell & Associates, the vast majority of compounds that lend smoke its unique aroma—smoky phenols derived from burnt wood lignin, and burnt caramel–scented cyclopentenones from cellulose—make their way into those liquid smoke bottles as well. In taste tests I've held, most folks cannot tell the difference between truly smoked meats and those treated with judiciously applied liquid smoke.

To get a smoke flavor that penetrates the meat but doesn't overwhelm it, I like to add liquid smoke directly to the sous vide bag just before sealing it. The good part is that you don't have to worry about distributing it evenly. Just shake a few drops in and seal the bag, and as the meat cooks, the juices it releases will distribute the liquid smoke flavor naturally.

Achieving Smoke Rings Using Sous Vide

The smoke ring? You mean that pink ring of meat that appears around the edges of a well-smoked rack of ribs or brisket? Yeah, what about it?

Here's the fact: The smoke ring is purely cosmetic. That's right. It signifies absolutely no guarantee of smoke flavor or proper cooking. The smoke ring appears due to the interaction of carbon monoxide (CO) and nitric oxide (NO) with myoglobin, the natural pigment that makes meat red (a close relative of hemoglobin, the red blood pigment). As meat cooks in a carbon- and nitric-oxide-rich environment, its pink color becomes "fixed," preventing it from oxidizing and turning into metmyoglobin, the brown pigment you see in cooked (or old) meat. A red "smoke" ring will appear in any environment in which meat is slow-cooked in the presence of CO or NO, whether or not any smoke is involved in the process at all. For some deeper science on the smoke ring, I highly recommend reading this great smoke ring myth-busting article from AmazingRibs.com.

All that said, what if you do want a smoke ring to help you replicate the barbecue experience as fully as possible? There is no CO or NO present in a sous vide bag, so getting that smoke ring seems like an impossibility, right? Not so fast. We can't get the exact same reaction, but we can get one that's darn close by using pink curing salts, a.k.a. sodium nitrite. The reaction between sodium nitrite and myoglobin is very similar to that between myoglobin and CO/NO, and it has the same end effect: fixing the pink color. By adding a small amount of sodium nitrite to the spice rub and letting the meat rest in that rub overnight, you end up with a nice pink "smoke" ring after it's done cooking—no actual smoke involved!

I can already hear the cult of barbecue beating a path toward my door. "That's not real barbecue!" "It may be delicious, but how dare you!" "Only a Yankee would dare call this stuff barbecue!"

All I can say is, you can fret and call me names all you want. In the meantime, I'll be over here enjoying my smoky, tender, meaty, delicious, and 100% replicable ribs. If you'd like to join me, you're welcome to pull up a seat and grab a rack or two.