Smoked lamb ribs are fatty heaven and easy to cook
On the topic of ribs, pork is the meat that garners the most attention. Those big meaty spares are one of the backbones of barbecue, and that Chili’s baby-back-rib jingle is probably already in your head. (Sorry about that.)
Those large, dinosaur-looking beef ribs are mighty impressive also, even though they can deliver a sledgehammerlike blow to your wallet, with prices upwards of $20 per pound.
But if you are looking to try something a little bit different, in both flavor and texture, lamb ribs make for a tasty and eye-opening alternative. Fat equals flavor, and lamb is absolutely loaded with it in the rib section.
“For the people that try it and like it, the lamb ribs will always be their go-to order,” said Tanya Limon Ollerbidez, owner of The Smokehouse in San Antonio. “It’s one of those meats where you either love it or you hate it.”
Americans don’t eat a lot of lamb, which is any form of sheep less than 1 year of age. According to most estimates, only 1 pound per person is consumed annually. Most grocery markets stock lamb chops though, and leg of lamb is usually available around Easter.
The full racks of ribs are mostly available at specialty meat markets. The racks have a little bonus: a good flap of tip meat that can be cut off and cooked like a small, fist-size chop.
There are a lot of techniques to cooking lamb ribs out there, but I default to the simplest: treating them like smoked pork ribs, with just a few alterations, including a shorter cook time.
Like pork, it’s best to remove the silverskin rib membrane from the back of the ribs, so the smoke has a better chance to permeate the meat. I then rubbed the meat down with mayonnaise (something I would never do with pork) and seasoned it Mediterranean style with a rub that featured thyme, rosemary, coriander and lemon pepper versus the classic Texas blend of simple salt and pepper.
The usual smoker temperature between 225 and 250 degrees works equally well with lamb, producing tender finished meat in about three hours. Most of the local restaurants smoke their lamb ribs with mesquite or mesquite mixed with pecan. I opted to use cherry wood, and it might have been the best result for any meat I have used with it.
Finished lamb ribs differ from pork ribs in some important ways. The bones aren’t as evenly spaced, producing slightly random and less attractive cuts with plenty of shag, and the meat is more likely to fall off the bone like a roast because of the high fat content.
But that rendered smoky yellow fat is truly something to behold. It goes from hot and translucent to the texture of lard very quickly, but the flavor is out of this world.