By George, I think we have ribs nailed

sampled 7/9/16

click on the photo below, if you dare!

My wife offered to bring some ribs to a party today so we smoked a couple of racks and did things just a little bit differently.  The results were spot on.  We had perfect moisture, texture, and flavor with good smoke penetration.  We've never done any truly bad ribs, but these qualified as great.  Here's our methods.

First, as usual, we had to trim down the racks and cut them in half to fit in our little bullet smoker.  I kept the belly meat separate, but instead of chunking it we went ahead and smoked it, too.  I figured it would be a bit dried out, as it is a smaller piece of meat, but it sure had great flavor.  The only seasoning we used was some North Main BBQ All N 1 seasoning, which we applied liberally.  We didn't bother removing the membrane so no seasoning on that side.

We put one rack and belly meat on the lower rack and the other on the top rack.

We smoked everything over charcoal with liberal additions of dry oak and pecan twigs from our yard.  My Mrs kept the smoke billowing for 3 hours.

This is what we had when we popped the top after 3 hours.

From there we wrapped each piece individually in heavy aluminum foil and put it in a pre-warmed oven at 250 degrees for 1 hour and 15 minutes.  We then pulled the ribs, slathered on some Dr Pepper BBQ sauce, then re-wrapped and put them back in the oven for an additional hour and a half at 150 degrees.  Here's the result.

I got to chow down on about half a rack (for quality control, of course) and the rest went over like gangbusters at the party my Mrs went to. They sliced like butter but the meat held onto the bone just perfectly.  Each rib I ate had the classic KCBS bite mark.  They were so good, we plan to do 2 more racks tomorrow, just for us.  Hopefully we can repeat this performance.