You may recall earlier this week I wrote a post about a disappointing mid-century recipe for pineapple-tomato-vinegar ribs. It wasn’t that it was bad so much as that it just… was. There was little flavor, and Rich opined as how ribs with my barbecue sauce, or mebbe with cherry cola sauce, were much more flavorful. Which got me to thinking… ‘what if I replaced the canned tomato sauce with a bit of my ‘sup! and some of my barbecue sauce?
Much more better!
INGREDIENTS
Pineapple Barbecue Sauce:
•1 cup ‘sup!
•1 cup barbecue sauce
•1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
•1 tsp Earl’s (or your favorite hot sauce)
•1/3 cup cider vinegar
•1/2 cup green pepper, diced
(about 1/2 pepper)
•1 cup onion, diced (about 1/2 medium)
•2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 can (20oz) crushed pineapple in juice
•1 tsp dry mustard
•1/4 cup brown sugar
Ribs:
•1 or two racks of pork ribs
•Seasoned Salt
•Black pepper
•Garlic powder
•Aleppo pepper
Heat your oven to 350º.
Arrange the ribs in a large, rimmed baking pan – I used a non-stick anodized roaster, with any other type of pan you may want to line it with foil first.
Season both sides of the ribs to taste, rubbing it into the flesh a bit, then cover the pan tightly with foil and pop into your hot oven for 75 minutes.
While the ribs are baking, make the sauce by combining all the ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.
Once the ribs are ready, you can use the sauce as is, but, one other improvement I decided to make over the original recipe was to purée it all together using my immersion blender. I didn’t want a totally smooth sauce, just a nice, kinda thick and pulpy texture.
Nice.
OK! Ribs are baked, now for step two:
Remove the foil cover and pour off any excess fat from the bottom of the pan.
Brush the ribs to coat with the sauce, then place them back into the oven for 45 minutes, turning and pasting the ribs with additional sauce every fifteen minutes.
Hmmm.
I seemed to have a fair amount of sauce left over – I probably could’ve done three racks easily – but it was just me for dinner, and it was a test; so while the ribs were cooking, I added one tablespoon of the sauce to my rice cooker with a package of Vigo’s yellow rice, some water and butter and pushed ‘start’.
Ribs were done, rice was done; now, how does it taste?
Pretty frickin’ fantastic!
Pineapple ribs done right, and served over a tasty bed of pineapple rice – this could easily be a company dinner.
Thing is, I still had a fair bit of that now not-at-all disappointing pineapple barbecue sauce left over.
What to do?
Hmmm. Well, as you may know, older posts on this blog have lost their image links, and I am going through the archives and re-adding them – which is a big job, but really for the best, since I’ve been wanting to edit and upgrade of lot of the older images anyway.
As it happens, one of my most popular posts is pineapple cocktail meatballs from December, 2011, and I was never happy with the photography – why not make a fresh batch and use the new -and hopefully improved – images when I relink?
And so, this parfait became PINEAPPLE-PALOOZA – one pretty now tasty sauce served up two pretty darned tasty ways.
Let’s get on to the meatballs:
INGREDIENTS
•1 lb ground beef
•12 oz sweet Italian bulk sausage
•1 tbsp olive oil
•3 onions, diced
•3 garlic cloves, diced
•1 jalapeño, diced (optional)
•Celery and/or carrots, diced
– enough to make about 5 cups of veggies with the onion and garlic
•1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
•1/3 cup panko
•1 cup buttermilk*
•1/2 tsp seasoned salt
•1/2 tsp Aleppo pepper or Cayenne
•1/2 tsp Caribbean Calypso Seasoning or some freshly grated citrus zest and mebbe a bit of chili powder
•1/2 tsp black pepper
•1/2 tsp dried parsley
*Don’t keep buttermilk in the house? No worries! Simply add one tablespoon of fresh lemon juice or white vinegar to a measuring cup, add milk to make one cup, stir, then let it rest for five minutes.
Ta da; Buttermilk!
Heat the oil in a large pan over medium-high heat, then add your veggies.
Sauté for about twenty minutes, until the onions are translucent, and the green veggies are still brightly colored. Set aside to cool.
Heat your oven to 350º and line two large baking pans with aluminum foil.
Stir the panko crumbs into the buttermilk, set aside to rest for five minutes, then stir in the seasonings.
Combine the beef and sausage meat together in a large bowl, then add the seasoned buttermilk, cooled, cooked veggies, and the cheese.
Some folk say it’s best to mix your meatballs by hand, and I started these that way, then just decided to tumble it all into the mixer and let it do its thing. Worked a treat.
Scoop about a tablespoon of the mixture together, form it into a ball, and place it on your foil lined baking pan. Repeat.
Note: a one tablespoon cookie scoop is ideal for making these meatballs cocktail size. Unfortunately, my small scoop it the dust, so 
I used my spare, large (2 tbsp) scoop – which still yielded about three dozen very generously sized meatballs.
Pop into the oven for thirty minutes, then remove and set aside to cool.
A couple of hours before youplan on serving the meatballs, arrange them in the bottom of a slow cooker and pour the pineapple barbecue sauce over.
Give the meatballs a light stir to coat them all evenly with the sauce, then cover and cook on low for two to three hours.
Serve from the slow-cooker with cocktail picks, or on a platter.
Ermmm, these would also be pretty nice on top of some of that pineapple rice.
Just a thought…