[AKMIMNAK]

OK so here's the skinny. The fatty is coming in a video I need to spend a bunch of time editing over the next week or so.....

#1: Naked ribs. No rub. No sauce. No wrap. Just smoke and meat for 4.5 hours. These were much, much better than I expected. I could have eaten these gladly with no other ribs available. They would've made a fine meal. Shockingly, they were the juiciest of the bunch. I think I underestimated how much rubs contribute to the overall drying out of the surface. These things glistened the entire time on the smoker and were dripping when I took the first bite. Totally floored me.

#2: Traditional rubbed, smoked, wrapped with sticky numnums, unwrapped briefly. Not much to say here. Delicious. And typical.

#3: PBJ. Wow. These were good. Rubbed with a pork rub, smoked three hours, then smeared on strawberry jalapeno pecan jelly (found at TexasFood.com and they kindly sent it to me to review), peanut butter, some Annie MooMoos Maple Spice Rub (also from TexasFood.com) and brown sugar. The flavor was awesome. It was mainly surface flavor as the ribs were already cooked when I applied the PB, but the gooey mess it made in the foil was awesome. And the slight jalapeno background is very necessary to offset the sweet and compliment the PB. Only thing I'd change next time: either heat the PB and Jelly to thin them, or add some liquid or butter for the same purpose. The goo was too thick. Would've been more pleasant if thinner.

Also, used jalapeno mustard made by Truly Texas as my binder on #2 and #3. Not sure if it made a huge difference in flavor (the mustard never does, but not sure if the jalapeno did, or if it was all the jalapeno jelly that gave it a jalapeno essence). Regardless, as I said, the jalapeno ended being an important (albeit unexpected) complement to the PB and balance for the jelly.

Highly recommend.

PSS: The ribs pictured above were the #2 traditional (uppermost left rack with the bone pullback visible) and the #1 naked cherry smoke (lower right, beautiful cherry color). The PB goo was very ugly and not photogenic. But tasty :)