In celebration of this week’s RibFest happening here in Ottawa, I thought it was appropriate to share a recipe for ribs 🙂  RibFest is that wonderful time of year when you step out of your office and all you can smell is BBQ!  All the options are there to tempt you; Pulled Pork, BBQ Chicken and Ribs. It is difficult to sit at your desk, eating your garden salad, when the smell of BBQ is coming in from the street.

Now, as you know, Jamie and I live in an apartment and do not have a BBQ. I was curious if I could create ribs that were fall off the bone tender and had that great BBQ flavour, without using an outdoor grill. The short answer is YES! (high-five!) You can totally accomplish great BBQ ribs with time and an oven.

I was searching through some of my cooking magazines when I stumbled across a recipe for Sticky Oven Ribs in one of my LCBO magazines. The photos made these ribs look so tasty, so I wanted to give this recipe a try.

The first step for tender, fall of the bone ribs is to remove the membrane from the back of the ribs*. This is a tedious and labour intensive task, but trust me; the end result is totally worth it! Jamie first introduced me to this technique. The benefit of removing the membrane from the bones is that it helps to allow your sauces and dry rubs flavour the ribs more thoroughly. Plus, the cooked ribs will be more tender and easier to eat.

*See how to remove the membrane from a rack of ribs. (click here for a video)

Once you have removed the skin from the back of the ribs, the next step is to braise your ribs in stock. You actually end up cooking your ribs three times, but that is how you get them to transform into succulent and tasty BBQ ribs.

After they have been cooked, let them cool, and generously apply your dry rub, and cook them again. After this cooking process has been completed, you baste the ribs with your homemade BBQ sauce and let them get all sticky and delicious before serving!

Since we enjoy food with a little bit of kick (read: spice), we added Sriracha to our BBQ basting sauce. Now that I have discovered just how spicy and awesome Sriracha sauce is, we put it on/in almost everything; eggs, chicken, pork chops, hummus, trust me, we eat it almost every day!

The spiciness of the ribs was perfect for us! We cooked up two racks of back ribs, and we ate all of them over a period of 24 hours. They totally tasted like they had been cooked over a BBQ. I was very happy to discover that ribs can be cooked in an oven but taste like they had been cooked over a grill 🙂

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Adapted From:
LCBO – Sticky Oven Ribs
Monda Rosenberg

Ingredients: