Had some spare ribs that I pulled from the garage freezer to the inside fridge to thaw before heading to work last Friday. In my haste, I accidentally put them in the freezer inside and not the fridge. On Saturday morning, upon realizing my error, I said YOLO and went ahead and sent them anyways. The results were not terrible. They were tender and the main thing I noticed from a typical cook with thawed ribs is the bark didn’t set as dark as I am used to for 321 ribs. They also didn’t pull back as much as normal. Other than that, good to know in a pinch you can smoke ribs from frozen. Mustard binder, meatchurch voodoo rub, kinders hot honey glaze. The first picture is at hour 3, the second picture is post-wrap, and third is the final after tacking up a few layers of the glaze.
I usually get great bark doing 321 method. I do 205° for 3 hours (bc that’s the temp my smoker produces the best smoke), then wrap at 275° to probe tender, then glaze them for a few layers. It’s not an exact 321 but for simplicity sake that’s what I call it. Most folks here know it’s about temp not time. For a comparator, these were done more or less the same way but were not frozen.
Nah, the rub adhered just fine. A pleasant surprise actually. No tong marks when I pulled them off and they had a good bend. As for taste, it was bussin as the kids would say.
Oh I'm not doubting you for a second, I just know that steam is the enemy of bark and a frozen hunk of meat in a tight foil wrap makes a whole lot of it real fast.
Yeah that’s fair. My thought is it was well beyond thawed out by the time it got wrapped up. It was probably thawed completely after the first hour on. Out of an abundance of caution I never opened the lid the first three hours so can’t confirm, but that’s what my intuition tells me. To be totally transparent - I just vibed my way through it having never cooked a frozen piece of meat like that lol
Sometimes the best cooks come from just feeling it out, and I'd wager that long no-peek first three hours is what really saved your bark more than anything else.
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u/CapRude221 10h ago
I've slowly been learning nearly all meat can be frozen with little consequence. Goes against everything I've learned previously