Went through with smoking the ribs after the family discussion about Mom's passing this morning...
One thing we all agreed on is since the two big sisters have everything under control, and we had set Mom up with a "pre-planned" burial fund it is pretty well takend care of, and with a lot of people coming from a long ways we decided to have the funeral on next saturday...
And since our Mom ALWAYS made sure we had a "picnic" on "Decoration Day," we all decided to go through with them with our families, Mom would have liked that...
Anyway, the ribs turned out GREAT, just maybe a little too salty, so I'll cut down on the salt with the next batch of brine...
And I actually forgot to use the rub until after they were already in the smoker, oops.
Took about 3 1/2 hours, Hickory over a bed of charcoal in the offset firebox to start, tried to keep it between 250 and 275 degrees, had to spray the fire with water sometimes when it pushed 300....I'm thinking next time I will soak some of the hickory logs in a bucket of water for a while. These ribs were from my button I took this year, I imagine an older buck would take it a lot longer longer and with a little cooler smoke...
But even my wife liked them a lot. And they were jucier than I thought they would be, but I kept ladling some of the brine over it as they smoked.
We had WAY too much food today because she went ahead with her Jalapeno/cilantro/Lime marinated chicken on the other grill since that is what she was planning, and she also thought she and my daughter wouldn't like the ribs!
She says cut down the salt, and we will do them every year for Memorial Day! Provided of course I get my deer!
We are all on a low sodium diet, we can taste all of the "intrinsic" salt in any ingredient, (There's a LOT more than you think, cut down on your extra salt and everything will taste just as salty eventually as you get used to it...) and we never add any more, don't even have salt shakers, so maybe they wouldn't be bad for somebody used to salt...
I'm thinking cut the salt in half, use more water, and add twice as much vinegar next time...
But now I am PISSED I threw away all those ribs from the 40 or so deer I have butchered over that many years!