The Cook’s Kitchen

Today we welcome Joe Levinson of the Hot Zone Online to The Cook’s Kitchen. Joe has a zest for fiery foods and is kind enough to sacrifice his tongue for us. Take it away, Joe.

This is my first posting here at the Cook’s Kitchen, so please humor me until I get myself oriented here to my new audience!

Slowly but surely, we’ve been working our way through all the goodies we brought home from our big ol’ trip to ZestFest 2006. This BBQ sauce/marinade by Goleta, Inc. was one of the tasty BBQ treats we tried there. It was a tasty marinade, at least as far as we could tell from a two-ounce sample that we chugged to give this sauce a try. BBQ sauces perform best with cooking. so we knew that this sauce could only show off its tasty, spicy schwerve after being used in our kitchen.

An excuse for us to make spicy BBQ ribs? No arm-twisting needed! A look at the ingredients list reveals this:

Ingredients: sour orange juice, tomato paste, corn syrup, vinegar, brown sugar, garlic, habanero peppers, and natural spices

A good sign is that all the ingredients appear to be pretty natural, without preservatives or artificial colors and flavors. We’re not a big fan of corn syrup, but at least it’s not the high fructose corn syrup which is slowly poisoning many of the foods we like. We’ve not seen too many spicy sauces made with sour orange juice, so we were curious to see if that sourness would translate to our ribs.

Our last BBQ rib recipe used boneless beef ribs, so we wanted to try something different this time around. A trip to our local grocer produced about three pounds of baby back ribs, which had the potential to be a little better than the beef ribs….but how to make them? Admittedly, we’re BBQ rib novices needing a lot of work to get better at making them. We scoured the web looking for some recipe ideas, trying to find one that would yield tender ribs like we’ve had when we have enjoyed them the most.

Most of the recipes we found suggested that the ribs be boiled before oven-roasting them, so that they would be more tender. What is seen above is what the ribs looked like after boiling them for 30 minutes on our stove. The ribs were laid out on our cooking dish to await their coating with BBQ marinade.

Here is our marinade on the ribs. We can say marinade rather than sauce, because there is a thinness to this concoction more akin to a marinade rather than BBQ sauces, which tend to be a little thicker. The instructions on the bottle suggest that the ribs sit overnight in the marinade, but we didn’t have that much advance preparation for these. So, we let them sit in the marinade for an entire afternoon of football-watching before we cooked ‘em up.

This is what the ribs looked like after oven-roasting. These were cooked at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, then broiled at 450 degrees for 15 minutes to really brown them up like BBQ should look. We did re-apply some of the marinade every 5 minutes during the broiling, and it really helped add an extra element of cling to the BBQ coating on the ribs.

Taste: From oven to plate, here’s the final product. Nice BBQ flavor without the sickeningly-sweet taste that so many BBQ marinades can provide. Nicely blended and with a mild amount of heat (perhaps 5/10 on the heat scale), these ribs were indeed tasty. What we can say was that these were not the best baby back ribs we’ve ever tried, but part of that was the ribs themselves. These ribs were just plain fatty, and lacked the amount of meat we are accustomed to having on our baby back ribs. That said, these were decent. Not great, but decent. This marinade saved these from being merely mediocre.

Overall recommendation: Looking for a spicy BBQ that won’t overwhelm your heat sensors and taste pretty good, then Mr. Mojo’s Hot marinade might be one worth giving a try. With its mild heat, it’s a pretty accessible mix of heat and flavor for your BBQ palate. However, the folks at Goleta don’t have a website where you can order this marinade…only a phone number. It does make for good BBQ, just make sure you choose a better choice of ribs than we used. Slightly sweet without too much vinegar taste, this marinade might have benefited from more time to let it soak in to the meat. Give it a try for yourself and see what you think. Enjoy!