So let me tell you a story of me being dumb from a long time ago.
I was working late closing the restaurant when the manger started asking people if they wanted some ribs.
Slightly confused and curious, I was like okay.
Someone had prepped the ribs earlier that night but hadn't put the ribs into the walk-in before the internal temperature dropped too low to sell.
Now that means the meat was still fine but couldn't be sold. I took about 8 full racks, put them in big clean trash bags and brought them how.
The problem is that I was REALLY tired and the meat HAD to be cooked that night.
Oh, and don't know anything about cooking ribs.
I took about 20 minutes putting different rubs on the ribs. I put a layer of a aluminium foil on the bottom rack of the oven and put all the ribs on the top rack. I put the temperature to like 300 degrees and then went to bed.
Yes, I went to bed. My thought process was that it would cook slowly all night, I'd wake up in the morning, take them out, put them in the fridge and go to work.
Nope. An hour and half later the smoke alarms are going off. I come our of the bedroom (door is closed so not much smoke came into my room) and the house is FILLED with smoke. It's an hour an half later.
I immediately open all the doors, windows, and turn any fans on full blast. The problem is I don't have fans in the living room or dinning rooms. I pull box fans out of the basement and point them at the doors.
The cause was not a fire but all the fat/grease was hitting the bottom of the hot stove and causing the smoke.
Now, the ribs at this point are moved from the oven to the grill outside.
I was tired, I was delirious and I still wanted to save the ribs and I figured I had not cooked them long enough. Which, writing this, I could have put them in the fridge at that point and tried again the next day. However, I was not of sound mind.
The grill idea sound good, except that there was no light outside, the flames are VERY close to the meat, and I was not paying attention.
No, I was on my front porch with the light on watching the smoke leave the house through the screen door.
Needless to say, about 45 minutes I was crawling back into bed. My house smelling like bad, very bad, the now burnt ribs in the fridge and fans still on full blast.
The next day I tried to cut the burnt parts off the ribs and throw the rest of good parts into a crock pot to finish the cooking. The meat tasted like burnt.
I take away from this experience that ribs have more grease than one would think. Cleaning that much grease off the bottom of the stove is not a fun game. Smoke burns your eyes really bad.
Anyone else have a life fail like this? Please let me know with a comment below!
