Cherry Cola Ribs – Baked BBQ Baby Back Ribs – Food Wishes

I’m not a big fan of drinking soda, but I have no problem cooking with it, and in this easy recipe we use a bottle of Cherry Coke to produce a tender, delicious, and absolutely gorgeous rack of baby back ribs. Enjoy!

For the fully formatted, printable, written recipe, follow this link: https://www.allrecipes.com/cherry-cola-ribs-recipe-7547750

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Hello this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with cherry cola ribs that’s right I am not a big soda drinker and if I do it’s never Cherry Cola okay I’m more of a celery soda with a pastrami sandwich kind of guy but as I’ve come to find out Cherry Cola

Does make for an incredibly delicious rack of ribs which strangely enough really don’t taste like cherry or Cola but anyway we’ll get into the tasty notes later for now let’s go ahead and get started by mixing up a very simple dry rub which is simply some kosher salt

Some freshly ground black pepper some smoked paprika some onion powder and finally a little touch of garlic powder and that’s it we’ll give that a quick mix and then we will set that aside and move on to the wet rub which is equally simple since it’s just a little bit of yellow mustard

Plus a small Splash apple cider vinegar and then a couple tablespoons of the star of the show some cherry cola and don’t worry we’re going to use way more than that okay I don’t want to get sued for false advertising so we will in fact use the rest of the bottle later

But anyway we’ll give that a quick mix before we move on to prep our ribs and what I have here is about a three pound slab of baby back ribs and before I season these I’m going to do something I almost never do I’m going

To show you how to peel off the membrane which you can’t really see but if you scrape against the bone on the smaller end you’ll kind of see it peel up a little bit and if you grab that with a towel you’ll be able to peel that straight across

Which people do because they think it’s tough or prevents flavors from getting in although I don’t really buy it and instead of peeling it off I usually just slice across like this with the blade of the knife and speaking of knives if you see any large chunks of fat go ahead and trim

Them off but anyway I just wanted to show you what I was talking about in those other rib videos where I made fun of the people that peel off the membrane but anyway whether you dismembrane or not we will transfer that meat side up onto a foil lined baking sheet

At which point we can brush over our wet rub followed by about 60 percent of our dry rub okay like a little more dry rub going on the meat side than the bone side and of course what you think the meat is thicker you can put a little more rub

Versus those thinner sections oh and by the way make sure you give yourself lots of foil on either end and you’ll see why in a few moments and then once that meat side has been brushed and seasoned we will flip it over and do the same thing to the other side

And no you’re not going to have to use all the wet rub so just say whatever you have left but we are most definitely using all the dry rub since this is a lot of meat and we have to season it properly oh and we do want to end up with a bone

Side up which is the position we will start roasting this at and what we’ll do is turn this until it’s centered on the foil and then we’ll kind of fold and crimp the ends to make sort of a boat shape and we want to try to do this in a way

Where no juices are going to leak out since we’re going to use those juices later so as we crimp that together we kind of want to bend it up and then we’ll also attempt to seal that across the top which took me a while because I’m using standard size aluminum foil instead of

That large roll that I usually use for this stuff but the good news is it doesn’t have to be airtight okay we just want to basically have this covered and since a lot of you are not going to have the large heavy duty foil I guess it was

Good to show you could do it with a regular stuff and that’s it once we have that sealed in position we will transfer that into the center of a 250 degree oven where we will let it roast low and slow for two hours at which point we’ll pull it out

And we’ll perform the only semi-diffical step in the whole operation since we’ll do is carefully open that up and once that’s opened up we can transfer those ribs onto another pan for a second at which point we will vary very carefully pour all the accumulated juices into a saucepan

What you definitely want to do on the pan since I’ve never done this and not spilled it oh and it’s easier if you don’t put your pan on the foil but anyway grabbing that from the ends we will very carefully pour that in and then we’ll set that aside for now

And then we’ll put our ribs back on top of the foil only this time with the meat side up and I will give that top one more brush in with our mustard mixture before somehow someway sealing that back up and again I’m glad I was able to show it

Can be done with regular foil but man this would have been so much easier if I use the larger size in fact I’m not joking when I say this if you’re looking for a gift for someone that cooks a lot buy him a few boxes of that large size heavy duty foil

Now that in a culinary context is pure luxury but anyway when we do get that sealed back up we will pop that back in for another hour still at 250. and while that’s working we can move on to make our mop sauce which will eventually just be our saw sauce

And to do that we will transfer in any of the unused mustard mixture into those accumulated juices along with a little bit of ketchup followed by as promised the rest of the bottle of that cherry cola oh and by the way if you want to use a different flavor pop go ahead

I mean you are after all the Carol DOTA of which flavor soda and this would work with all kinds of things right root beer ginger ale just to name a few and then the only other thing I’m going to add to this before we head to the

Stove would be a little bit of freshly ground black pepper and what we want to do is bring that up to a simmer on medium high heat although be careful this can foam up in spillover so maybe give it a quick stir to degas it and then once it is simmering we’ll

Reduce that by about half which at that point is going to work as a mop sauce and you’re going to see that in a second but once it does get to this stage we’ll just turn our heat to low and we will let this keep producing keeping a close eye on it until

Eventually it thickens up into something similar to a barbecue sauce and assuming our ribs have finished that third hour we’ll go ahead and pull those out and unwrap them in this time as we unwrap we’ll go ahead and flatten that foil out all the way since from this point on we’re going to

Cook these uncovered while basting these with our mop sauce which as you can see here is just reduced by half and is still pretty thin but that’s totally fine what we’ll do is go ahead and brush that over and then we will turn our oven up to 300

And we will pop those in for about 15 minutes at which point we’ll pull it out and brush it with more of our sauce and you’ll notice every time you do this that sauce will get a little bit thicker because we still have it reducing slowly on the stove

And basically we’re going to keep doing this process basting this about every 15 minutes until it’s beautifully glazed and as tender as we want and again keep an eye on that sauce don’t let it get too thick and burn okay once it starts looking like barbecue sauce just turn it off

And we’ll keep doing these brushings and baking for another hour or so although as usual an exact time is hard to give but before I do this last basting let me show you an old Pit Master trick for telling when your ribs are probably done

Okay if you pick these up in the center with your tongs and the ends droop down like this you’re probably very close all right if they’re still stiff they’re undercooked and if it breaks in the center and falls apart it’s overcooked so to me these were just about there

So I went ahead and brushed down one more coat and here you can really see how that sauce is thickened up and now pretty much has the texture of an actual barbecue sauce but anyway I popped that back in for another 10-15 minutes at which point I did something extremely

Dangerous and optional but I did want to mention it if you promise not to walk away from the oven we can turn our Broiler onto high and we can caramelize that surface for just a minute at which point it should look like this but fair warning it will go from this

Beautiful caramelized color to jet black in about 14 seconds so if you do finish like that be extremely extremely careful and that’s it once we’re happy with the look and the feel of our ribs I like to let those rest for about five or ten minutes before I transfer them onto the

Cutting board and we’ll take a knife and slice in between the bones and how do you know you’re cutting in the right place well if you hit a bone that’s not the right place move the knife over a little bit until you hit meat and that’s it I fan those out and took

Way too many pictures before I grab that rib on the end and went in for the official taste and even though it stays attached and we get a nice clean slice when we bite in that meat should come perfectly clean off the bone with little to no effort

So as far as the texture goes we nailed it and then as far as the flavors go if I blindfolded you and I gave you one of these ribs you probably wouldn’t be able to tell it was Cherry Cola since this really does taste very similar to your classic All-American Midwest style barbecue

So basically instead of things like sugar and brown sugar and molasses and honey we’ve used the sweetness of a soda accomplish the same thing and even though we can’t necessarily taste Cola and Cherry is individual flavors you have to admit it is a very catchy name oh and if everything goes according to

Plan after all our basting and reducing we should have a little bit of that sauce left over with which we can serve on or with the ribs which I did here is I plated some up for a few more pictures and to tease an upcoming video since

That coleslaw in the background is a scoop of my famous Carolina red slaw which I’m going to show you how to make very soon and no those are not just some prop pickles okay because the ribs are kind of on the sweet side and that slaw has

Kind of a hot sweet flavor profile I like to have something on the plate that’s just crispy and sour and not sweet at all since that does a great job of resetting your palette for those next series of sweet succulent bites but no matter what you decide to serve

These ribs with I thought appearance wise texture-wise and flavor wise these ribs were fantastic which is why I really do hope you give them a try soon so please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts a printable written recipe and much more info as usual dissolves enjoy foreign foreign