Hunka-hunka- burnin' meat.

Actually, there was no burning...

So, on Friday I prepared some spareribs to be grilled on Saturday.

Saturday was pretty hectic. Mer and the kids were out the door by 5:45 (AM!) to get to their swim meet. I joined them at just about 8 am and caught up with the kids right after their first swims -- they were very excited about their starts. Both kids swam fabulously and shaved time off every one of their events. In TWO CASES, Griffin had dramatic improvements of more than 8 seconds! She also swam the individual medley for the very first time, and although she had a technical DQ, she swam strong for the entire 100 yards.

But back to the ribs... I pulled the rubbed ribs out of the refrigerator at about 2 o'clock. Then we had a few errands to run and got back at 3:30, at which time I began preparing the grill to get the ribs on. I also did a little backyard work -- mostly filling a cooler of beer and putting up our 10x10 canopy and getting some righteous tunes going on the ol' iPod + onStage.

The ribs spent the next 4 hours on the grill in very low heat. My gas grill has two burners, one front and one back that both run the entire side-to-side distance of the grill. I only had the "front" burner on and it was all the way on low. The internal temperature of the grill averaged probably about 230 degrees (F) and ranged from about 170, when I'd open it to rotate the racks to an upper bound of about 260 at one point. Temperature management was pretty consistent and easily accomplished with a spacer wedged under the edge of the lid -- the further back, the more open the lid.

The rotation scheme was pretty complicated. Okay, not really, but it was time intensive and it requires me to pretty much hang out in the backyard for the duration (thus the beer and iPod).
Basically, every fifteen minutes I rotate the rack of ribs that's on the main grate up to the hanging basket/upper shelf and the rack that's up there comes down to the main grate. Oh, and the rack that goes up also gets flipped over.

During the last hour (at about 7 pm), I started basting the ribs with half of the sauce as I rotated them. This made them extra sticky and did a bit of carmelizing. For the last 20 minutes of the cooking, I cut each slab in half, mainly to facilitate situating them all on the main grate at the same time. I then turned on the back burner (keeping them both on low), but I closed the lid all the way and let the SAUSE carmelize even more.

Then the ribs all came off and got wrapped in foil for about 15 minutes. Ideally, I would let them stay wrapped for 30-45 minutes, but it was late and we were all hungry.

I sliced them individually and served them with the remaining sauce, which was reheated to "warmish". They were great and I highly recommend both the rub and the sauce, but the rub is quite spicy -- I was fine with it, but it was a little hot for the family. I think cutting the cayenne back to 1/4 teaspoon and the black pepper to about half-a-tablespoon would be perfect.

I give this recipe, combined with the ATK prep/cook method a definite thumbs up.