Pit Barrel Cooker #1

My wonderful wife was kind enough to let me pick out my Father's Day gift this year and since I was looking at getting a smoker, I decided after much research on the interweb to get a Pit Barrel Cooker from the Pit Barrel Cooking Company.

It showed up after a month and I was excited to get started with cooking, since I had never smoked anything before.  I watched all the videos on how to cook the different meats and noted that they stated multiple times during said videos that cooking times would vary from what they were seeing due to the fact that they were in Colorado and the air is much thinner.  After looking around on Youtube and at the Amazon reviews, it was challenging for me to find some helpful information of cook times so I thought I'd post about my experiences with them and try to give as much detail as possible to help others who might be in the same situation as I was.

St Louis Style Ribs
Cook Time:  ~4 hours 15 minutes at 500 ft above sea level (Official video says 4 hours 45 min in Colorado)
Seasoning Used:  Lightly with Beef & Game (not salty at all)
Sauce Used:  Sweet Baby Ray's Honey Chipotle

Mmmmm

I'd never tried ribs before so I was very excited to try this out.  I had seen reviews that said the seasoning was too salty so I decided to go a little lighter with the Beef and Game seasoning than they did in the video on the website.  How light?  Take a gander at the slab on the left and see for yourself.

Just like stockings

Next up was to figure out the cooking time and if I needed to trim the ribs or not.  Everyone else who had posted cook times that I could find had done baby back ribs, not St Louis style and was quoting times that were ~30 minutes less than what is quoted on the video.  Since the same video quotes 4 hours and 45 minutes for St Louis style ribs, I decided to check them after 3.5 hours to see where they were.  With that, the ribs were hung in the cooker with care, in hopes that tasty meat would soon appear.  I decided not to trim the ribs before hanging them and the bottom of them was JUST barely above the coals.  I neglected to measure them but next time, I will so you can know before hanging how long your ribs could be.

Fast forward a couple beers and 3.5 hours later, and I checked the ribs.  They looked like they could have used a little more time since the meat wasn't pulling back off of all the bones yet, so I put them back in with the intention of checking on them in another 20 minutes.  However, sometime in the next 10 minutes, disaster struck and one of the racks ripped and fell onto the coals.  For everyone (including my wife) who is now yelling "See, hanging them is a TERRIBLE way to do this, I told you they'd fall off!!!!" allow me to explain what happened.  While removing the membrane, I believe I removed too much tissue between the bones and then that same area was weakened further by testing the ribs to check if they were done.  This was all MY fault, and not a faulty design in the cooker.  Rack #2 was perfectly fine, but at that point, I pulled it off as well, applied sauce, and tossed it back into the cooker for 15 minutes while I wrapped poor Rack #1 in tinfoil to keep it warm.  

So what's the final verdict?  Pretty damn good, especially considering I simply lit the coals, hung the meat, and walked away.  The sauce I used has just enough sweetness and kick to really finish it off just right.  I will for sure try this again.  My guess is the ribs are done somewhere between 3 hours and 30-45 minutes, with another 15-20 added on for that once you put the sauce on.  A smashing success for my first attempt at doing ribs.  Next on the menu is three whole chickens for a birthday party.