Raise your hand if you love ribs. Fall-off-the-bone meatiness just doesn’t get any better than some properly cooked ribs. Some would proclaim that they are too fatty and will therefore cause heart disease. However, the reality is that the only problem with most ribs is the sauce that they’re covered in. The typical barbeque sauce is mostly sugar, to the tune of 15g per 2 tbsp, which doesn’t go very far. Even worse, I dare you to find a barbeque sauce from somewhere other than Whole Foods/Wild Oats that isn’t made with high-fructose corn syrup. Nasty stuff indeed!

Yesterday, I decided to make some ribs in the crockpot so I didn’t have to deal with watching them on the grill. I had a 2 pound package, a total of 4 ribs. First, I chopped two medium-sized onions, one fine and the other a bit more coarse. I put the coarsely chopped onion on the bottom of the crockpot, hacked between the 2nd and 3rd ribs (only because the ribs were too long to put in as a 4-some) and set them in. The finely chopped onion went on top of the ribs, along with a handful of chopped basil and 3 cloves of minced garlic. I topped it all with two cans of Mexican tomato sauce, one El Pato and one La Preferida, which is a bit tamer than the El Pato. I set it to cook for 8 hours and left to go about my day, stopping in to stir occasionally.

After about 5 hours, most of the meat had fallen off the bones and the initially very liquidy sauce had thickened. I knew that I was going to get a delicious platter of meat without having to fight with bones to get it all. To complete dinner, I sauteed a bunch of kale with some arame to add some greens and sea vegetables, which I’ll touch on in an upcoming post. I put the finished kale/arame into my big bowl, opened the crockpot and began fishing the goodness out. I removed the bones and sucked the remaining meat and fat off the bones, then put the meat on top of kale. It had the consistency of pulled pork and was well-saturated with my amazing sauce concoction. The sauce and meat had become one and the onions, garlic, basil must have liquefied into the sauce because I couldn’t find a chunk of any of them. I did add some cumin to the meat once it was in the bowl since I didn’t have it when I started cooking. It would be better cooked into the sauce of course.

I wouldn’t classify the sauce as “barbeque” because it tasted nothing like a typical BBQ sauce. It was far more complex, spicy, and flavorful than the sugary mess that graces (I would almost say “insults”) most ribs. After removing the bones, I probably had about a pound of meat, which was all gone by the time I was done eating. It was different than cooking them all day over a low flame, but it was delicious in its own way.

Quick Ingredients Run-down
2 pounds of ribs
2 medium onions
3 cloves garlic
Handful of basil
2 cans of Mexican tomato sauce of your choosing
1 tbsp cumin

Here is a picture of the completed masterpiece. Total cook time: ~8 hours. Total work time: ~20 minutes. Now them’s good eats!

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Tags: barbeque, crockpot, kale, ribs, sea vegetables