"Buddy Can You Spare a Rib?"

A bachelor party hired our soul food kitchen recently to cater their event: BBQ brisket, Cajun Shrimp, Hot Crispy Nashville Chicken, Roasted Wings, and, of course spare ribs.I tried to steer them away from the spare ribs. Nope. Nothin’ doing. They had to have it. Shit.

I freak out every time someone orders spare ribs. Let’s start from the ending and work our way backwards. Spare ribs is the only item on my menu that I serve blind. In the roughly six hours it takes to cook them, during the last 3 hours they are wrapped up tightly in aluminum foil, so I have to go by feel when deciding to serve them. That’s already cause to consider creating a kosher kitchen.

And then there’s the meat itself. Of all the different cuts of meat and fish and poultry and lamb and pork that we have served up, spare ribs is the ONLY cut that can vary in quality from some sorry bony-assed looking thing to something glorious. Plus, the available sources for fresh pork here in Israel are limited, made even more challenging by COVID. So you have two choices: You can shop around in advance until you eventually find quality ribs and then you freeze them until you need them. That kinda sucks. Or you can take your chances and buy fresh whatever the market has available that day. Which also sucks.

So I hedge my bets: I usually have a really good rack of ribs as a back-up, stored in my freezer. And then I go shopping for fresh ribs right after receiving an order, hoping against hope that the culinary gods (yes I get the irony here) will be kind. And even when I find something that looks great, the quality can be uneven from one cook to the next, the degree of meat and fat varying greatly from one purchase to the next, which of course varies the cook time, which of course I can’t even see because the damn thing is wrapped in foil.

I would take spare ribs off our menu in a heartbeat, except that when it all comes together, the result is simply amazing. My grandmother, who kept kosher, used to say “God never meant shrimp not to be eaten.” I’d say the same thing about our ribs.