Today we are mixing it up a bit and Scott will actually be sharing one of his favorite rib recipes- perfect for summer, Father’s Day, or Fourth of July! Don’t worry, Cooking with Nina will definitely be back, but my mom says she needs a little time to come up with some new, delicious recipes- she claims she has shared all her good ones haha! She is also in the midst of preparing for her last baby to leave the nest for college, so they have been very busy gearing up for that big change!
I have been wanting Scott to start sharing more recipes as he does quite a bit of cooking- especially on his Traeger in the summer. I definitely don’t complain because it gets me out of cooking and clean up is usually a breeze. Heads up- if you don’t have a smoker, you can either follow the directions for cooking on a gas grill here or purchase one of these pellet smoker tubes to give your meat a more smoky flavor.
Jalapeno-Apple Smoked Ribs
Ingredients
- Rack of pork ribs (or more if cooking for a large crowd)
- Traeger pork and poultry rub
- Jim & Nick’s BBQ Dry Seasoning Rub (we have this brand at our grocery)
- Apple Juice with spray bottle
- Jim & Nick’s Habanero BBQ sauce (we have this brand at our grocery)
- Hot jalapeño pepper jelly (found this at our local grocery with the gourmet cheese)
- Stick of butter
- 1 cup brown sugar
- Heavy duty foil
- Smoker pellets – we opted for hickory flavor
Directions
- Prepare your smoker at 250F. We are using hickory pellets for this recipe.
- Flip the ribs meat side down and remove the membrane off the back of the ribs. You can easily accomplish this by grabbing the membrane with a paper towel and pulling it off. Removing the membrane will allow your rub to penetrate into the meat more effectively.
- Sprinkle seasoning (we used the Traeger and Jim & Nick’s rubs noted above) all over one side of ribs- let sit for 10 minutes. Flip ribs and season other side- let sit 10 minutes.
- Place ribs meat side up in smoker/grill. Spritz ribs with apple juice every 45 minutes.
- Smoke for 2.5 hours or until ribs turn a mahogany color.
- Wrap ribs in foil to protect color- Lay out 2 long pieces of heavy-duty foil. Create a bed with one handful of brown sugar and 5-6 pats of butter on the foil. We also added some pepper jelly across the mixture. Lay the ribs meat side down on the sweet mixture.
- Return the ribs to the smoker/grill and continue to cook until meat has pulled back and exposed the bone (usually takes 2 hours).
- Remove ribs from smoker and sauce them! You can honestly use whatever sauce you prefer, but I do recommend creating another foil bed, so your sauce doesn’t drip down into your smoker/grill. Once sauce is applied to ribs, put back on smoker/grill for 10 more minutes- this just keeps the sauce on the ribs and prevents it from dripping off (and down your face haha!).
- Remove ribs from smoker. Allow to sit for a few minutes and enjoy!
I hope you guys enjoyed this summer recipe! I know cooking food on a smoker definitely takes more time, but truly you don’t have to do much other than prepare the meat- you let the grill/smoker do all the work while you spend time with family and friends (oh, and clean up is a breeze). Scott definitely wants to share more recipes with you all including his delicious margarita recipe, so maybe we will do that next week! As always, we love seeing your tags on Instagram when you make our recipes 🙂 Have a great rest of your week! -A
