In winter or unfavourable grilling weather, baking ribs low and slow in the oven is equally delicious and results in tender, fall-off-the-bone meat. Making a homemade BBQ sauce is easy, doesn’t have added preservatives, and allows you to tweak the sweet and savoury flavours to your liking.

Pork spareribs are incredibly inexpensive in Germany and easily accessible at farmers markets. There’s not a lot of prep work involved in making this recipe. All you need is time.

A delicious side dish is Oma Marion’s German-Style Warm Potato Salad with Bacon.

Ingredients for ribs

• 4kg pork spareribs
• 3 lemons

Ingredients for BBQ Sauce

• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 small onion and 3 garlic cloves, chopped (doesn’t need to be too fine as they will be pureed later)
• 140g or about ½ cup tomato paste
• 1 cup/250ml chicken stock
• ¼ cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp each salt and sweet paprika
• Dash of Worcestershire sauce
• Dash of liquid smoke
• Dash of cayenne (to your heat preference)
• 1 Tbsp yellow mustard

Instructions for Ribs

1. Prep ribs by removing or scoring silver skin on bone side.
2. Marinate ribs overnight in lemon juice.
3. Preheat oven to 120°C.
4. Slather bone side with BBQ sauce then flip and slather sauce on other side.
5. Place ribs in oven and bake for 5+ hours.
6. After 3 hours remove ribs from the oven, pour off liquid, turn them back bone down and reglaze. Return to oven for 2 more hours.

Instructions for BBQ Sauce

1. Heat olive oil in saucepan.
2. Add chopped onion and garlic. Sauté.
3. Add remaining ingredients and simmer until onions are soft. Shouldn’t need thickening.
4. Puree or blend until smooth.
5. Taste for seasoning.

Tips:

• If you need to cook the ribs at a higher temperature for time reasons, don’t put sugar-based BBQ sauce on until 1 hour before they’re done to prevent burning.
• Double the recipe for freezing leftovers.

🍷Wine pairing: Weingut Klaus Vorgrimmler Baden 2015 pinot noir aged in Barrique