NEVER Wrap Your Ribs in Foil Again - Try This Old TEXAS FARM Trick

Everything I know in one place. The Cookshack Book: https://earlhargrove.shop/ Tear off a sheet of foil for a rack of ribs and you've made a choice without knowing it. Barbecue folks call that wrap the Texas crutch. It came off the contest circuit, where the meat has to hit the judges' table on the minute. Your supper table isn't on a clock. What comes out of that foil is a rack that falls apart before it reaches the board, with the crust gone soft and gray. My daddy Roy fed a branding crew of fourteen men out of the pit under our shed in May of 1961. That was twelve slabs of spareribs, two nights running, and not one sheet of foil touched them. Every rack came off near black and bent like a cane pole when you lifted it. I was standing right there. I'm Earl Hargrove. Eighty-four, cattle and a little field in Gonzales County, Texas. Forty years cooking for fifteen men at a time. In this one: why SPARERIBS forgive you and baby backs don't — the SKIN on the back that never melts — SALT the night before, not the minute before — a RACK over water, never flat in the grease — 275 and the STALL, and why foil only cheats it — the BEND test, and the number if you want one (195 to 203) — SAUCE last or not at all — and the eighth piece, Roy's: the MOP, a bucket and a rag that does everything foil does without steaming your crust off. Foil holds the steam against the meat, so the crust never gets a chance to set. The mop lays down a thin wet coat that dries off, then another, and every coat builds the crust. Did your daddy wrap his ribs or mop them? What was in his bucket? Tell me his name and what county he cooked in. I read every one.