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20th December 2016
12:10am GMT
If you head into any good butchers over the Christmas holidays you will find yourself salivating uncontrollably. It can be embarrassing when a staffer has to ask you to stop licking the display fridge windows. These places are literally stuffed to the gills with amazing meats of every kind, making it very difficult to choose what to buy. So I flipped a coin and between short ribs and Toulouse sausages. The ribs won... But I bought the sausages anyway too!
All your Southern style rib ingredients.
Kick off by making the dry rub and the marinade. Combine the dry spices in one dish and in the other mix the mustard and Worcestershire sauce.
Dunk the shorties into the marinade and make sure they get well coated, this will help the spice mix stick to the ribs and create the 'bark' we are looking for.
Coat the ribs well with the dry rub, get every last part coated evenly as it will also protect the meat from the intense cooking its about to face. Whatever mix is left you can sling on top.
Roughly slice the onion and chilli and scatter into a large roaster.
Lay the shorties onto the onion and chilli and pour in the beer, this is the foundation of your chilli/BBQ sauce to come later.
Tightly cover the roaster with 2-3 layers of foil, there's a long cook ahead here so you need a really good seal to keep in all of the juices that will form the chilli sauce. Roast up for 3 hours at 150C.
After 3 hours this is what you have, 'nearly' fully cooked shorties. At this stage drain off all the liquid into a pot and remove the cover from the ribs and return to the oven for about 30 minutes to get the 'bark' going (bark being a spicy charred crust).
You can reduce the liquid for a little bit and whizz it up with some hot sauce and then boom, home made BBQ glaze made.
Take the ribs out after 30 minutes or so when they have formed a nice crust, you can now paint them with your BBQ glaze.
Simply serve up with slaw, refried beans and spiced onion rings.
