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Blackberry Summer, Part 2: Blackberry Ribs

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After making galettes and scones I still had a bunch of blackberries left, and my thoughts turned to a blackberry barbeque sauce for pork ribs. I’d heard of other fruit-based barbeque sauces, such as peach, and a quick Google search came up with several such recipes featuring blackberries. The one I went with is from Bon Appetit magazine, and includes honey, ginger, and hot sauce (which I substituted for chipotle pureé, because I put that stuff in everything!). It also makes a TON of sauce, so feel free to scale down the recipe.

Rather than puréeing the sauce in a blender and then straining it and using it to baste the baked ribs as the recipe originally instructs, I gently mashed the berries and didn’t bother straining, to end up with a chunkier texture. My favorite way to cook ribs involves smothering them in sauce and baking them, rather than just basting them with sauce at the end, and the berries broke down quite a bit with cooking, so next time I might just leave them mostly whole to begin with.These ribs, while not particularly photogenic, came out tasting fantastic. Pork works especially well with fruit, and the blackberries gave a nice tangy sweet flavour to the sauce. This recipe is definitely a keeper – I imagine the sauce would be equally delicious on chicken or steak.

Baked Ribs with Spicy Blackberry Barbeque Sauce

Recipe adapted from Bon Appetit. As I mentioned, this makes a LOT of sauce – probably half would still be enough for this amount of of ribs. I thought about parboiling the ribs (partially cooking them in boiling water to make them cook faster in the oven), but after reading some rib-lovers’ opinions on the matter (sacrilege!), I changed my mind – essentially it just boils out the flavour, which is never a good thing. Turns out they only took a little over an hour to bake anyway, so I didn’t really have anything to worry about.

Preheat the oven to 325˚F. Mix together the spice rub:

3 cloves garlic, minced

3 tsp chili powder

1 tsp each salt and pepper

Rub the spices over both sides of 1 3/4 – 2 lbs of ribs (baby back, spare, whatever). Arrange the ribs in a baking dish.

For the sauce, combine:

2 1/2 cups blackberries

1/2 cup ketchup

1/2 cup honey

1/4 cup fresh grated ginger (about 1″ chunk)

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 tsp chipotle purée (or regular hot sauce)

salt and pepper

Stir gently to keep some of the berries whole (alternately, purée in a blender and strain through a fine mesh strainer). Pour the sauce over the ribs, turning to coat (make sure they are meaty side down when you’re done).

Those should be meaty side down!

Cover the baking dish with foil and bake in a 325˚F oven for about 1 hour, until the meat pulls away from the bone easily but is not totally falling apart. Remove the lid, flip the ribs over (meaty side up) and bake uncovered for another 10 minutes or so. Remove from the oven, put the ribs on a plate, and pour the sauce into a saucepan. Taste to check the seasoning (add salt and pepper as needed) and then bring it to a boil and simmer to thicken it. Cut the ribs between the bones into individual ribs, and serve smothered with sauce. Mashed potatoes work well to soak up the extra :).


Chinese BBQ Pork Spareribs

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Downtown in Victoria’s Chinatown (the oldest Chinatown in Canada, yo!) (also probably the smallest, as it’s literally only one block long) there are several Chinese BBQ shops with barbequed ducks, chickens, and meat hanging in the window. If you go in and order some barbequed pork, the guy behind the counter will grab a hunk of pork from the window, throw it down onto a worn wooden chopping block, grasp a formidable-looking cleaver, and hack the pork into little bits, which he will then wrap in purple butchers’ paper and hand to you with a little smile, like he knows how much you are going to enjoy those juicy, salty-sweet, porky morsels. Mmm-mmm indeed. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water a little bit.

I stumbled across a recipe for homemade Chinese BBQ pork on someone’s blog, and of course it made me want to try it for myself. I had also recently seen a recipe for Chinese pork spareribs, and I happened to have some ribs in the freezer, so I decided to combine the two to make Chinese BBQ pork spareribs. SO GOOD. I cooked them most of the way in the slow cooker and then finished them on the barbeque, because the Chinese name for barbequed pork means something along the lines of “fork toasted” – as in, the meat is toasted over flames on a fork to finish cooking it. I figured on a grill over flames was close enough!

The only thing I had to purchase for this recipe was the Chinese 5 Spice Powder, the ingredients of which vary but apparently the most common is a combination of cinnamon, star anise, cloves, fennel, and Szechuan pepper. In fact, my Chinese 5 Spice Powder is simply labeled “Chinese Spice Powder” and only has four ingredients! But it still tasted great, so I’m quite sure that whatever five or so spices sold together as Chinese 5 Spice Powder will be just fine in this recipe! Some more authentic recipes call for using maltose as a sweetener, but I couldn’t find any so I just used honey and a touch of brown sugar.

I chose to use this sauce on ribs, but you could also use it on other cuts of pork. Most recipes recommend marinating either pork tenderloin (for leaner BBQ pork) or pork butt (for fattier, juicier BBQ pork) in the sauce before roasting and then grilling it and brushing it with more sauce. I want to try making this with pork butt and rotisserie-ing it on the barbeque!…

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Delicious Ribs and Slow Cooker Fail

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This morning I put ribs in the slow cooker to do their thing all day and be delicious and fall-off-the-bone ready for dinner. This is something I have done many, many times before with consistently awesome results, so imagine my surprise when I got home from work, lifted the lid to check on the ribs, and discovered that they were well on their way to becoming burnt. Luckily it was just the sauce that was turning black, so I put the ribs in a covered baking dish with some more sauce, stuck them in the oven to finish, and they turned out just fine.

Normally, the slow cooker works perfectly for these ribs, so I don’t know what the problem was. I think it might be time for a new slow cooker, because it was on low and the lid was on properly and everything. Anyway. The ketchup can be substituted for any tomato product (perhaps with an added dash of cider vinegar) – once when I was out of ketchup, I subbed in some cherry tomatoes from the overabundance growing on the porch, which turned out to be incredibly delicious. And if you don’t have a slow cooker (or just don’t trust yours anymore!), these can also be done in a covered dish in the oven….

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All content © Korena Vezerian and Korena in the Kitchen, 2011 – 2021. Please contact me before duplicating any content, including pictures. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Korena Vezerian and Korena in the Kitchen with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.