Ribs for the BBQ & Smoker

Pork ribs and beef ribs are low-and-slow cuts — collagen-rich, fatty and forgiving, built for the smoker or a long, low oven.

Pork ribs vs beef ribs

American-style pork spare ribs (and the trimmed St Louis cut) are the crowd favourite — meaty, quick by BBQ standards at 4–5 hours, and easy to glaze. Beef short ribs are bigger, richer and beefier, needing 6–8 hours to render; beef back ribs are the bones from a rib roast, less meat but great flavour. Lamb ribs (breast) are small, very fatty and best rendered hard. We remove the membrane from the bone side so the rub penetrates and the meat pulls clean.

Cooking ribs low and slow

Rub the day before if you can. Cook at 110–120°C — bone-side down — until the meat has pulled back from the bone ends and a probe slides through the thickest part with no resistance (pork spare ribs around 90–94°C internal, beef short ribs 96–99°C). Wrapping in foil or butcher's paper partway through speeds the cook and keeps them moist; glaze only in the last 30 minutes so the sugar doesn't burn. Rest 20–30 minutes before cutting. General meat cooking-temperature guidance is on the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand site.

Rubs, wraps and the stall

A basic rub is equal parts salt and coarse pepper, plus paprika and brown sugar for pork. Apply it a few hours ahead — overnight for beef. Somewhere around 68–75°C internal the meat stops climbing in temperature for an hour or two as moisture evaporates and cools the surface; this is "the stall". Wrapping in foil or butcher's paper pushes through it and keeps the ribs moist, at the cost of a slightly softer bark.

How many ribs to buy

Allow roughly 4–6 pork spare ribs per adult as a main, or one beef short rib each — they are large. A full rack of pork spare ribs feeds two to three. Frozen ribs should be thawed in the fridge, not on the bench, and cooked within two days of thawing.