Harold Makes Ribs

[Cameraman] Why are you mopping?

It's like soaking in all the liquid

and it also looks cool.

So, that's how we're doing it.

[gleeful music]

What up, what up? It's your boy, Chef Harold,

AKA Uncle Harold.

Welcome to Martha Stewart's house.

We out here gonna make some nice juicy ribs today,

we're gonna show you how to make it in your apartment

and you don't need any kind of special equipment.

This is just using ovens,

and then you can just change temperatures to

create the crust and kind of that essence of barbecue.

We're also going to give it a little bit of vinegar oomph,

just like they have down in the Carolinas.

It reminds me of Filipino food,

which has a very prominent vinegar based sauces.

[gleeful music]

You need to make the rub for the ribs itself.

So we're going to do a little bit of brown sugar.

I think it'll help caramelize the meat a bit more

and it'll give it that char and kind of a

ultra flavor profile that you need.

A little bit of a Maldon salt,

some black pepper,

some paprika,

and some garlic powder,

use some onion powder.

And then we gonna do mustard,

a little bit of cinnamon,

and celery seed and then a cayenne.

And we're just going to mix it really well.

Make sure everything's incorporated.

What makes a great dry rub is the balance between heat,

spice, saltiness and a little bit of fat also,

if you have some.

So what we have here is a baby back ribs.

These ribs are not trimmed, which I like the most

cause you don't want to waste the product, right?

Usually guys, this like white sinew in the back of the ribs

you can just take that out and clean it.

You can have this nice clean rib,

and also when you bite into it

you don't have that stringy texture when you bite into it.

You can tell that this pork has been treated fairly well

with how much fat is in there. It's bred nicely.

It doesn't smell anything at all, which is a good thing.

Go ahead and put the dry rub and when you season something,

you always got to make sure that you

season them from up top, alright?

It's one thing I learned a long time ago

and you want to make sure that you cover

every single aspect of this animal.

Give it a massage a little bit

and a flipping on the other side.

Let me get some of that flavor in there too.

Usually at a restaurant, you'll get six bones

and you get a half a rib and

you can do a full rib if you want to,

but I mean, this thing will serve only one Harold.

This is definitely one serving for a person like myself.

All right, so next step is we're going to wrap this thing

in aluminum foil.

[aluminum crinkling]

[aluminum rips]

You wanna lay it out. Oh well.

You want to do this, just fold it like a grid almost.

I'm wrapping this just to keep it insulated and marinated.

I don't want to air dry it at all.

I want the rub to seep in it,

A little bit of moisture is going to like make the rub

a little bit wet and it's going to go right into

the ribs itself.

Go ahead and let her rest in the fridge for about

30 minutes.

[gleeful music]

I really enjoy South Carolina barbecue,

and the one thing that's prominent in the Carolina

barbecue is vinegar.

So today we're using cider vinegar and...

Oh, that's potent, you know what I'm saying?

Like this is the good stuff right here.

So you put a little bit, a couple of cups of cider vinegar.

We're going to cut it with a little bit of brown sugar,

some salt, black pepper, super simple.

A little bit of chili flakes.

And then because you know, I'm Filipino

we're gonna add a little twist to it.

This is banana ketchup, for you people that don't know

what banana ketchup is, it is what it sounds like.

It's banana ketchup.

If you want to make it a home from scratch

I like to use plantations, like ripe plantations,

yellow ones, fry those till it's crispy and brown.

And then you put it together with the ketchup

and you blitz it. A little bit of honey, a little bit

of chili flakes, and you got your own little banana ketchup.

You can use that for fries, fried chicken.

We use it for everything in the Filipino communities.

The best part about this is while you're cooking your ribs

this will start glistening the ribs,

they'll start making this crackling noise.

They'll also start giving it the smell

in your house that you've never kind of experienced before

if you never kind of barbecue with vinegar like that,

it'll give your house a great smell.

[gleeful music]

It's been about 30 minutes the ribs have been sitting,

we're going to go grab it from the fridge.

I've lived in really small apartments,

and we had no access to a fireplace,

and you can't have a grill in your apartment.

You gonna burn your place down.

So this idea here is a way to kind of

incorporate those flavor profiles.

Gonna double wrap this thing,

you call it the ghetto sous vide,

you know what I'm saying?

And you just kind of create the little pouchy pouch

fold it first, before we lay the water in

Sous vide is a French term for cooking under vacuum.

We have these really fancy machines that you

vacuum your product and you keep it

in this water bath and it becomes cooked

and tender meat for a certain period of time.

And then we'll grab a little bit of water.

You just want to create this little baseline here.

And this is how we do this.

So we make a little teepee then boom,

create this little hat situation.

So what's going to happen here is the moisture itself

is going to create kind of a vacuum in here.

They'll steam in here, cook the ribs,

and the one way you can tell if ribs are ready is

can start seeing the bone just start popping out.

And that's when it's telling you a little peek-a-boo like

Yo, I'm almost ready. Got 10 left or like 15 minutes left.

And by the time he goes down, maybe 3/4

of the way, you lit.

That's when you know that the rib is done and ready.

We set it and forget it, we gonna come back

in about an hour and check on it, and see we got.

[aluminum crinkles]

One of the tell tale signs that this method

works is, the water is almost gone as you can see.

That's what we're going to do is transfer our ribs.

Flip our ribs.

Yes. And what you want to look at is you can tell the rub

it's really seeped into the rib itself and some of the meat

on the backside it started coming down

a little bit right here.

So what we're going to do is we're going to

give it some more love.

I take our trusty little mop.

Mopping it is really such a great way to cover this thing

with the sauce.

Cause the mop itself, it's like soaking in all the liquid

and when you dab it in there and like seep

into the meat itself.

We've raised the temperature now to 450

and we're going to go ahead and get

this caramelization on the outside of the ribs and let them

in barbecue sauce, like seep in there.

Give it another layer of flavor.

Oh.

What you want to do is want to just give it,

[ribs sizzle]

Baste it in.

Turn it.

Oh yeah. Yeah, the char is amazing, right?

It's like a nice Maillard reaction.

And I love that when vinegar like caramelizes

with brown sugar, that's, it's such a, such a great flavor.

Oh boy.

[tray slides atop stove]

[ribs sizzle]

Gonna mop it a little bit more just for good measure.

This type of ribs don't really need any other barbecue sauce

dipping sauce, anything like that.

And all you got to need is just a little bit

of these garnishes. We're going to go cut and wow.

Yeah, look at that.

I'm cutting it on the bone.

Some people like it when it's like super soft and

like the bone comes up.

But for me, I like that kind of bite to it a little bit.

And this is like, when I'm cutting through it,

the juices are just flowing

and I can just taste how juicy it is.

I'm salivating while I'm cutting this.

We're gonna go ahead and plate this up.

Baby back ribs.

Nice.

Super simple.

Peanuts up a little bit.

It's really conducive to Asian flavor profile

with a little bit of chopped peanuts and in garlic.

And I like to eat my ribs that way.

It's all like this.

And for the cilantro, I just like to tear them.

I don't need to, like, chop them up.

Like roll the top, like this.

[plate slides]

Filipino style ribs, baby.

These ribs look amazing.

I'm super excited to taste them.

I'm going to get a piece right here.

That's a great tasting rib.

The taste flowed fine, so good.

The rub is very prominent in it.

And the rub itself has a little bit of spice,

a little bit of sweetness and the barbecue sauce

also has kind of those parallels on the same side.

So when you have them all together, they kind of heighten

up the flavors of all those things and

and they were also kind of melded well with the ribs

and giving it the flavor that it needs,

especially the baby back ribs

is a little bit of a leaner cut.

It was good, man. That is just, you know

I think at the end of the day, it's really about

fit people's flavor profiles and what they like.

And for me, this is great.

I can really taste the vinegar.

I can taste the rub.

It's still in my mouth, it's a little bit tingly

from the spice.

Like it's, it's all there, you know?

And I think you'll have fun creating this from your home

especially in your little ass apartment, without a grill.

And you can really create something that you're

proud of and succulent like this.

Like we always say on Bon Appétit,

never attach yourself to the outcomes.

South Bronx all day. Peace.