Horseradish BBQ Sauce and an apple cider baste.

Last weekend Farmer Mike left me a pint of freshly made horseradish. He left it with the bartender at Flanagan's. For some reason he felt that It would get delivered to me if he did that, and as luck would have it, I stopped in for a sarsaparilla. Mike grows horseradish in his garden, or as he puts it - he planted it in his garden and it now grows wherever it wants to. The roots have a bad habit of spreading beyond the spot you had expected them to stay in.

Freshly made horseradish is very potent stuff. I recall the first time I made it - using a food processor and a root that I had dug up from my yard. When I took the lid off the food processor and took a whiff I almost hurt myself. If it's possible to burn your nostrils using only a vegetable I think I did it.

Mike's container spent a week in my refrigerator without me even making a bloody Mary to put some to use. On Saturday morning I was putting the finishing touches on a BBQ sauce I intended to use on some pulled pork, and I decided to add the horseradish to the mix. It was surprisingly good, adding a little bite, a discernible horseradish flavor, without adding too much more heat. I think I will add it to my standard recipe in the future.

Last weekend I also experimented with the ribs that I was cooking up for the same party. Cooks Illustrated showed up in my mail, and contained an article on how to try and make barbecue ribs, without actually making them in a BBQ cooker. Their test kitchen used a combination of grill time and oven time to try and duplicate the "fall off the bone" texture of real BBQ. What I found interesting was the apple cider baste that they used on the ribs during the process.

Rib aficionados are firmly divided into two camps - sauce and no sauce. Some wimp out and do the sauce on the side. I come down on the side of no sauce, which is traditionally known as a Memphis style rib. I think that a properly prepared rib should stand on its own, with out any help from additional sauce. The dry rub's seasonings and the essence of wild cherry wood from the smoker is more than enough for me. A sweet BBQ sauce, traditially made with ketchup and vinegar and molasses, would only mask those wonderful flavors. But this recipe was different. It called only for three parts apple cider and one part cider vinegar. Nothing else. No overwhelming sticky stuff. I have used variations on this theme - adding apple juice or apple cider in a sealed aluminum foil pan to cut down on the cooking time and to add some moisture to the ribs during cooking. It is know on the BBQ "circuit" as the Texas Crutch. Not actually cheating, just moving things along a bit. Traditional Texas BBQ uses beef brisket, not pork, and beef tends to dry out more quickly than pork while cooking. It's easy to see how a crutch would become popular down there.

The true test of a perfectly cooked rib is getting it to the point where it is just about "fall off the bone" tender, but not so tender that it is mushy. We don't want overcooked pot roast. The texture should be firm, but still tender. Covering a pan of ribs using a Texas Crutch it is easy to go overboard and miss that point of "but still firm" texture. Basting the ribs every hour with apple cider involved more work, but the results were quite impressive.

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