8 Steps to Amazing Venison Ribs
When cooked with care and proper technique venison ribs can be every bit as tasty as their domestic counterparts. Read on for a step by step guide to making delicious #smoked and BBQ’d deer ribs every time.
1. Cook your ribs in an Instant Pot, slow cooker, or Dutch oven, submerged in stock, until fork tender.
This is a crucial step that transforms deer ribs from impossibly tough and tallow ridden cuts of meat to tender and delicious morsels. If cooking in an Instant Pot, use the slow cook setting and cook for about 4 hours. If using a traditional crock pot, you might need to go longer. This key is to monitor the ribs and pull them once they’re fork tender but before they are so tender that they’re completely falling off the bone.
This same effect can be achieved through a slow braise in a dutch oven. Whichever cooking method you choose, be sure to salt and pepper and then brown the ribs in a hot skillet beforehand. You can also add whatever herbs and spices into the mix that you’d like, or just let the BBQ sauce that you’ll be applying later be the start of the show. It’s up to you.
2. Remove the cooked ribs and sauce liberally with a BBQ sauce of your choosing.
Once you’ve reached the desired tenderness, remove your ribs from the Instant Pot, Crock Pot or braising vessel, let them cool for a few minutes, and then apply a liberal application of your favorite BBQ sauce. For me that was a homemade Carolina mustard sauce. Where I live, in the South Carolina Upstate, mustard sauce is the sauce of choice, and it’s available in most grocery, but a good home-made version only requires some yellow mustard, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire, brown sugar, honey, melted butter and Texas Pete’s hot sauce.
3. Play sauced and cooked ribs in a vac-sealed bag, along with additional sauce, and let them marinate overnight.
This step is not mandatory, but it is advised if you want to take the flavor of your venison ribs to the next level. Any overnight marinade will enhance the flavor of a cut of meat, but the flavor is infused even better when you marinate your meat in a vacuum sealed bag with no oxygen.
4. Soak some hickory chips in water for 1-2 hours.
These chip will be used later during the final grilling process.
5. Setup indirect heat on a charcoal grill.
If you’ve never used your charcoal grill to smoke meat, it’s not as difficult as you may think. Just pile your charcoal one side of the grill, leaving an equal amount of empty space on the other. Once your coals are up and running, put your soaked wood chips in a foil boat and place them on the empty side of the grill well.
6. Place ribs on the cool side the grill, above the wood chips, re-sauce and let smoke for an hour so.
You can also do this process on a wood pellet grill such a Traeger. Just set it to the smoke setting and let it cook for about the same amount of time.
7. Re-sauce one more time and move the ribs over to the hot side of the grill for 3-5 minutes.
This will ensure thorough caramelization of the sugars in the BBQ sauce and give the ribs a nice crispy char.
8. Serve hot with a cold beer and enjoy.
It’s important to serve these babies while they are piping hot. Otherwise, the remaining fat or tallow that didn’t render out during the slow cooking process will begin to set up. Once this happens, it can lend the ribs an unpleasant, waxy mouthfeel. Serve them while they’re hot though, and you’ll never have to worry about that. The only thing you’ll be left wondering is why in the hell you haven’t been cooking your venison ribs like this since the day you harvested your very first deer.
