Last Christmas my wonderful wife gave me a gift certificate to Creekstone meats, which is a fat boys dream present...HA!!! So, in light of, IMO, the less than stellar pork ribs you find in stores these days I thought I would buy a few racks of the Creekstone St. Louis cut ribs for the freezer.
Then while walking through our local wally world i noticed some Tyson St Louis ribs in the cooler and they actually looked pretty good with straighter than normal bones, good meat and fairly even thickness from one end to the other....so I thought....how about a comparison cook between these and the Creekstone Duroc ones now in my freezer....so here we are.
After unwrapping i noticed that the Tyson rack was significantly thicker and wider....which in this first picture you really don't notice...the Creekstone are closest and the Tyson are the ones on top.
After trimming they both had about the same amount of trim waste but i did notice that the Creekstone slab had been trimmed better at the facility than the Tyson's. Also the Tyson slab had a lot more fat throughout. Now you will notice the price I paid for the Tyson which was a tad over $18, and the Creekstone came out to roughly $25 per slab which is a bit expensive but so is everything else right now!!!
Both slabs were treated exactly the same, and I did something i've never done to ribs before.....injected. I thought I'd use the Kosmos chicken injection, which we like, mixed with chicken stock. You can read my thoughts about this in the conclusion below.
So for my rub, i wanted to keep it pretty simple and not reinvent the wheel so to speak. I used the Kosmos Honey killer bee dry rub. But once it was on I didn't care for the look....it was kind of yellowish IMO. So I grabbed the Smoked Paprika and gave them both a quick coat.
Here's what they looked like after the rub was applied and they had a few mins for it to sweat in.
It was pouring rain all day today....and boy we needed it, but that meant that my cooking partners couldn't come outside with me.
So for todays setup i chose to use the 26" weber kettle outfitted with the standard sized SnS, Fireboard controller and the BBQ Guru Pit Bull fan...yea it's way too big of a fan for the kettle but hey, I wanted to try it out...HA. I used B&B briquettes and a couple Hickory chunks.
I ran 250F internal temp the entire cook. Another thing I did was spritz every 15-20 mins or so. I usually just use a 50/50 mix of apple juice and ACV but this time instead of using the ACV I threw in some good Bourbon instead....not sure it really imparted any flavor but it gave me an excuse to keep pouring myself a drink!!!
Here's a shot of the midway point of the cook....now is when I figured out that the smoked paprika might have added a little too much darkness!!!! The Creekstone rack is the closest, bottom one.
I did wrap these just shy of the 3 hour mark but didn't take any pictures. In my wrap i used some brown sugar, butter honey and a little more of the Kosmos Rub. After about an hour I took both racks out of the foil and glazed them with the juices from inside the foil wraps. I did the glaze three different times for about another 45 mins then removed and put a final coat of Sticky Fingers sweet and smokey sauce on and let them rest.
I let them rest about an hour while I cooked some boneless skinless chicken thighs for sandwiches later this week. After cutting, I didn't see any smoke ring at all....I used a couple decent sized chunks of wood....not sure what happened?
Final thoughts....Not sure about injecting and if it really imparted a ton of flavor other than making them salty....so next time, if there is one, I would use unsalted chicken broth or apple juice to mix the powder.
Yes, these were some sweet ribs. I did them as competition style and everyone really liked the flavor profile. Both racks were very tender but not fall off the bone as you can see in the above pic and the bite marks. Neither rack had much if any smoke flavor...which again really surprised me?
I did a blind tasting with 7 different people not including myself and the results were 6-1..........and the winner is.........CREEKSTONE DUROC ribs.
Both racks were very good but the Tyson ribs had way more intermuscular fat that i'm not sure really added to the flavor much? The Duroc rack had a nice mouth feel and almost a sweet flavor to the meat compared to the Tyson rack.
To be fair, I could have left the Tyson slab on maybe another 30-45 mins in the wrap to help render more of the fat but after 5+ hours I was worried they were too dark. All in all if you fed either of these to a group I doubt anyone would complain.
This was a fun cook and something I'll do again...maybe just a little dry rub and not wrap next time?
Then while walking through our local wally world i noticed some Tyson St Louis ribs in the cooler and they actually looked pretty good with straighter than normal bones, good meat and fairly even thickness from one end to the other....so I thought....how about a comparison cook between these and the Creekstone Duroc ones now in my freezer....so here we are.
After unwrapping i noticed that the Tyson rack was significantly thicker and wider....which in this first picture you really don't notice...the Creekstone are closest and the Tyson are the ones on top.
After trimming they both had about the same amount of trim waste but i did notice that the Creekstone slab had been trimmed better at the facility than the Tyson's. Also the Tyson slab had a lot more fat throughout. Now you will notice the price I paid for the Tyson which was a tad over $18, and the Creekstone came out to roughly $25 per slab which is a bit expensive but so is everything else right now!!!
Both slabs were treated exactly the same, and I did something i've never done to ribs before.....injected. I thought I'd use the Kosmos chicken injection, which we like, mixed with chicken stock. You can read my thoughts about this in the conclusion below.
So for my rub, i wanted to keep it pretty simple and not reinvent the wheel so to speak. I used the Kosmos Honey killer bee dry rub. But once it was on I didn't care for the look....it was kind of yellowish IMO. So I grabbed the Smoked Paprika and gave them both a quick coat.
Here's what they looked like after the rub was applied and they had a few mins for it to sweat in.
It was pouring rain all day today....and boy we needed it, but that meant that my cooking partners couldn't come outside with me.
So for todays setup i chose to use the 26" weber kettle outfitted with the standard sized SnS, Fireboard controller and the BBQ Guru Pit Bull fan...yea it's way too big of a fan for the kettle but hey, I wanted to try it out...HA. I used B&B briquettes and a couple Hickory chunks.
I ran 250F internal temp the entire cook. Another thing I did was spritz every 15-20 mins or so. I usually just use a 50/50 mix of apple juice and ACV but this time instead of using the ACV I threw in some good Bourbon instead....not sure it really imparted any flavor but it gave me an excuse to keep pouring myself a drink!!!
Here's a shot of the midway point of the cook....now is when I figured out that the smoked paprika might have added a little too much darkness!!!! The Creekstone rack is the closest, bottom one.
I did wrap these just shy of the 3 hour mark but didn't take any pictures. In my wrap i used some brown sugar, butter honey and a little more of the Kosmos Rub. After about an hour I took both racks out of the foil and glazed them with the juices from inside the foil wraps. I did the glaze three different times for about another 45 mins then removed and put a final coat of Sticky Fingers sweet and smokey sauce on and let them rest.
I let them rest about an hour while I cooked some boneless skinless chicken thighs for sandwiches later this week. After cutting, I didn't see any smoke ring at all....I used a couple decent sized chunks of wood....not sure what happened?
Final thoughts....Not sure about injecting and if it really imparted a ton of flavor other than making them salty....so next time, if there is one, I would use unsalted chicken broth or apple juice to mix the powder.
Yes, these were some sweet ribs. I did them as competition style and everyone really liked the flavor profile. Both racks were very tender but not fall off the bone as you can see in the above pic and the bite marks. Neither rack had much if any smoke flavor...which again really surprised me?
I did a blind tasting with 7 different people not including myself and the results were 6-1..........and the winner is.........CREEKSTONE DUROC ribs.
Both racks were very good but the Tyson ribs had way more intermuscular fat that i'm not sure really added to the flavor much? The Duroc rack had a nice mouth feel and almost a sweet flavor to the meat compared to the Tyson rack.
To be fair, I could have left the Tyson slab on maybe another 30-45 mins in the wrap to help render more of the fat but after 5+ hours I was worried they were too dark. All in all if you fed either of these to a group I doubt anyone would complain.
This was a fun cook and something I'll do again...maybe just a little dry rub and not wrap next time?
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