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Buccaneer Baby Back Ribs With Pineapple Barbecue Sauce
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Mar 31, 2025
Who doesn’t love ribs? These tender baby backs explode with the tropical flavors of rum, pineapple juice, and West Indian spices. The pineapple rum barbecue sauce brings sweet heat to the smokey bones. So put on some calypso music: the feast is about to begin.
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0:00
In the 17th century, French pirates gathered on the north coast of Haiti
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where they took to smoking meats like the natives. The local word for smoke was boucan, and the pirates became known as buccaneers
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That's the origin of our last dish, buccaneer baby backs. As with so many dishes on primal grill, it begins with a rub
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Start with coarse salt, brown sugar, black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, ground cinnamon, and ground cloves for a tropical flavor, cayenne pepper, or hot paprika
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Mix the ingredients with your fingers to break up any lumps that may be in the brown sugar
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For the rib, I'm using a baby back. It's a rib that's cut right next to the backbone
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We have an expression in American barbecue. We say eating high off the hug. These ribs are the most tender and the best marbles
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What you want to do is sprinkle the rub over the ribs
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and rub the spices into the meat. If you're a newcomer, baby backs are great ribs
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They're very tender and they cook quickly. And the cloves and the cinnamon really give these ribs
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a nice tropical aroma. These baby back ribs came peeled If there a skin on you just pry it off with the probe of your instant read meat thermometer And if you want to cook a number of racks of ribs in a small space you can stand them upright in a rib rack
1:42
When you place the ribs in the rib rack, you want the fat part of the ribs upwards
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that way. As the ribs cook, the melting fat will baste the meat. Now the grill
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We're working over charcoal. It's much easier to smoke on a charcoal grill than
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a gas grill and I've lit natural lump charcoal in a chimney starter. What you want to do is set
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the grill up for indirect grilling. That means dumping the coals into these side baskets
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and leaving the center of the grill open. Now take a couple of aluminum foil pans
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and place them in the bottom of the grill. The foil pans actually serve two purposes
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First, they catch the dripping fat from the ribs, and second of all, they force you to have an indirect grilling setup
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Simply grab the ribs, place them on the grill directly over the drip pan away from the heat
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And then to generate smoke, place a good tongueful on each mound of coal
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Cover the grill and you want to position the vents so that it between the two mounds of coals That way the smoke will be drawn up evenly Cook at a temperature of about 325 to 350 degrees Yeah I know that a little
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bit hotter than the low-slow method used for spare ribs, but with baby backs, I like to work
3:18
at a higher heat. The meat comes out a little bit more crisp. The next step is to make the
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pineapple spray glaze. Start with pineapple juice. To it, add dry white wine, rum
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and Worcestershire sauce. And the cool thing here is that we'll place the spray glaze
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in a spray bottle and spray it directly on the ribs. Pineapple is native to the New World
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It was one of the first fruits brought by Columbus back to Spain
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Okay, and then simply attach the sprayer. Good. Now, the ribs have been cooking for about 30 minutes
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And what you want to do is just spray the ribs with this pineapple mixture
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And what this does is helps keep the ribs moist and adds an extra layer of flavor
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We'll cover the ribs and cook for another 30 to 40 minutes
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And they look beautiful And the way you check for doneness is you actually look at the ends of the bones You can see the meat has shrunk back
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by about a quarter of an inch. That tells you the ribs are ready
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I'm going to do one final preparation here, and that is I'm going to place the ribs
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directly over the fire and baste with a little bit of our pineapple rum barbecue sauce
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The idea is that you actually sear the sauce right into the meat
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The recipe for the sauce is on our website. One very common mistake in cooking ribs
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is to put the sauce on too early. Remember, most barbecue sauces contain sugar
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and the sugar will burn. So if you put the barbecue sauce on, do it right at the end
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So here are the buccaneer baby backs. Another test. They'll be tender enough to pull apart with your finger
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You just cut the ribs into three or four bone sections. Arrange them on a platter, just like the buccaneers would have done
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