Wedding prep. Vacay. Those are my excuses for taking so long to post. Yes. A hint of procrastination and a sprinkling of laziness MIGHT play a part, but why are we dwelling on the negative here? Let’s focus on the positive, namely food and wine!
There are certain things I like to smoke, the reason for which skews slightly to the novelty. I just smoked my first picanha roast, for instance. That will be for a later post. This time, I did a rack of beef back ribs.
This cut of meat is hard to find in my local grocery stores and butchers. Believe me, I’ve tried. So for something like this, I have a few go-to online stores. In this case, CertifiedPiedmontese.com.
Fred Flinstone Ribs
If you’re not familiar with beef back ribs, these are the big mother effers. The kind of meat Fred Flinstone orders at the drive-in and knocks his car over, narrowly avoiding that dainty, size-zero waitress who somehow possesses the strength to carry them to the vehicle.
I’ve done this meat before, but sliced them up into individual ribs before cooking at the direction of a recipe I found in a book. That was before I had significant BBQ time clocked, so I didn’t really know better. This time, I cooked the rack as is.
For this cook, I didn’t want to do anything fancy: just a simple rub. I used Meat Church’s Holy Cow, a rub that’s designed to bring out the best in beef.
After spreading on a little olive oil, I generously sprinkled the ribs. While they rested on the counter, I lit up my Myron Mixon G-20 to 240 degrees. The ribs went in once I reached temperature.
I waited until I saw a good, dark color on the ribs (about three hours), then took them out of the smoker to wrap.
To help maintain moisture and enhance the beefy flavor, I poured a mixture on the back of of the racks consisting of:
- 2 ounces Worcestershire sauce
- 2 ounces soy sauce
- 2 ounces beef broth
Once wrapped, they went back in the smoker, meat side down, for about another two hours.
For ribs, I rarely worry about internal temperature. I’ve been trying to train myself to rely on color and tenderness more than depending solely on what the probe reads. Ribs are easier for this. You look at the backside of the racks for recession of the bone from the meat. When you have that, your ribs are the perfect temperature and tenderness. Time to take them off.
Big ribs on the plate this day. Luckily I had friends over to help devour them. Everyone agreed that the tenderness and the bold beef (enhanced by the Holy Cow rub) were near perfect. One rib is deceptively more filling than it appears, so my folks were well fed.
It’s not a cut of meat I do often, as I mentioned. But this shall be in my smoker again.
The Wine: 2017 Bodega Cuarto Dominio Blancat Estate Vineyard Selection Malbec
There were so many options to go with here. There are a plethora of red wines that seem to have been grown with such a big slab of beef in mind: Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Pinot Noir, etc. For this, my spidey sense just told me to go with a Malbec. And with Argentina killing it with their offerings over the last few decades, I went this direction.
The only one I had in my collection was the 2017 Bodega Cuarto Dominio Blancat Estate Vineyard Selection Malbec. So this is the guy I called up to the big leagues.
Swirled and sniffed, I got some bold aromas out of the glass: black and red cherry, plum, leather, oak, and violet. On the tongue, some of the same but including raspberry and chocolate.
Bold beef and a bold red – need you speculate whether this pairing was a good one?
This particular Malbec hails from the Mendoza region of Argentina. As always, Wine-Searcher.com is my teacher when I want to find out more about a wine region:
Mendoza is by far the largest wine region in Argentina. Located on a high-altitude plateau at the edge of the Andes Mountains, the province is responsible for roughly 70 percent of the country’s annual wine production. The French grape variety Malbec has its New World home in the vineyards of Mendoza, producing red wines of great concentration and intensity.
The province lies on the western edge of Argentina, across the Andes Mountains from Chile. While the province is large (it covers a similar area to the state of New York), its viticultural land is clustered mainly in the northern part, just south of Mendoza City. Here, the regions of Lujan de Cuyo, Maipu and the Uco Valley are home to some of the biggest names in Argentinian wine.
The wine’s producer is Bodega Cuarto Domino. It’s actually not that easy to find their website, but I did eventually find it. While there’s more details about the current winemakers on their site, the brief history of Bodega Cuarto Domino can be found here:
…BCD is a small family winery born from two 4th generation families in the art of viticulture and winemaking.
From one side Andres Blanchard Perez, belongs to the 4th generation of a French/Spanish origin family with a long tradition in viticulture and Javier Catena Pedro 4ta generation winemaker, of Italian origins, his family has been producing wines for over 110 years.
Go big or go home. That was my mindset when cooking this meat and finding the perfect pairing, and it paid off.
Speaking of proteins you don’t do very often, wait until you read my next post.
Cheers!