The regional table / Tennessee
Memphis Dry-Rub Ribs
The rub goes on twice, the baste is half vinegar and half water, and the sauce bottle never comes to the table.
Nothing old lies behind this one. Memphis rib houses are a twentieth-century business and the quantities below were worked out for this page, so I am not going to hang a date or a founder on them. What is written down is the cut, and it is written down twice by the federal government. USDA's Institutional Meat Purchase Specifications, Fresh Pork Series 400, effective November 2014, defines Item No. 416, Pork Spareribs, as at least 11 ribs with their costal cartilages, taken off the belly with parts of the sternum and diaphragm attached and the heart fat held under a quarter inch. Item No. 416A, Pork Spareribs, St. Louis Style, is that same slab with the sternum, the ventral ends of the cartilage and the flank cut away — the flat rectangle the butcher case sells. What comes off in making it is Item No. 416B, and the specification itself says the trade calls that piece rib tips. Item No. 422 is a different animal: back ribs off the loin, at least eight bones, the thoracic vertebrae taken out, which the government allows you to call baby back ribs. Meanwhile 9 CFR 317.344, the list of major retail cuts, names pork spareribs and has no entry for a back rib at all, which is the plainest way of saying that back ribs are what is left when somebody bones a pork loin.
For how the city actually cooks them, the Southern Foodways Alliance is the record, and it is open: Rien Fertel spent July 2008 in Memphis for the Southern Barbecue Trail and the transcripts are posted in full. They do not agree, and their disagreement is the recipe. Craig Blondis of Central BBQ cooks a loin back rib — "your St. Louis cut is from the belly side of the pig and the loin back is from the backside" — for about five hours at 225 to 250 degrees. Frank Vernon of the Bar-B-Q Shop, whose 2002 interview says flatly "We use sparerib, St. Louis cut", gives three to three and a half, maybe four hours. Jim Neely at Interstate says four and a half to five and a half depending on thickness, and rubs his meat a day or two ahead. And at Charlie Vergo's Rendezvous they do none of that: Nick Vergo told the SFA in 2002 that the ribs sit "18 inches off the fire and the fire is as hot as we can get it" and are done in an hour and fifteen minutes, because "we don't cook slow". John Vergos, in 2008, will not even accept the label the rest of the country has hung on the house — "I hate the expression dry ribs" — and says of his cut, "they're not spareribs, they're not St. Louis cuts; they're loin-back — and they're not baby backs". What follows is the slow lane rather than the hot one, on spareribs, because that is the version a backyard fire can hold to.
Why this version works
250°F, and no foil. At 250°F the fat in a sparerib renders at about the rate the collagen lets go, which is the whole trick. It is also the temperature the Memphis houses cook at once you set aside the Rendezvous's hot-and-fast oddity. None of the seven pitmasters in the 2008 transcripts mentions wrapping ribs in foil; wrapping is a competition habit, it steams the surface the rub is meant to build, and it costs you the crust Frank Vernon is after when he warns that overcooking gives you "dry ribs" in the bad sense.
The rub goes on twice. Once the night before, which is Neely's practice at Interstate and Blondis's overnight marinade at Central, so the salt has time to work into the meat. Once more the moment the rack leaves the fire, which is what Andrew Pollard describes at A&R: "you rub the ribs after they come off the pit hot." The first application seasons; the second one, landing on a hot wet surface, is the grainy red coat people mean when they say dry.
The cut sets the clock. A St. Louis slab is belly meat over heavy bone and cartilage and it wants four to five hours at 250°F to give up its connective tissue. A back rib is loin meat, leaner and thinner — Blondis calls it "less fat and more meat" — and the same time will take it past tender and into dry. Buy by the specification, not the sign: if the label says 416A or St. Louis you are on the times below, and if it says back ribs or baby backs take an hour and a half off.
Vinegar and water, and nothing sweeter. The Rendezvous baste is "50% white vinegar, 50% water" with some of the house seasoning stirred in, and it does two jobs at once — it keeps the surface from setting hard over a long cook, and, having no sugar in it, it cannot burn. Anything with molasses or ketchup in it applied at hour two will be black by hour four. Sauce, if you insist on it, belongs on the plate and not on the fire.