By Dylan Clay
Unless it’s salt, it doesn’t really matter much.
There isn’t much of a difference in taste or bark between ribs that “sweat” for 1-15 minutes OR 24 hours.
Salt is capable of penetrating meat, enhancing flavor, and tenderizing.
The rest of the ingredients barely penetrate – instead they sit on the surface and create a crust OR bark.
This includes stuff like:
If you’re salting or applying a dry rub that contains salt, you can dry brine 2-24 hours in advance.
This gives the salt enough time to actually penetrate the meat.
In experiments by Greg Blonder, he found that Salt was capable of penetrating meat:
You could also opt to wet brine in a salt solution too.
This is because the salt in the rub pulls water out of the meat.
This water then re-hydrates your rub (which are dehydrated spices) and then the water reabsorbs back into the meat because of the salt.
The rub will now want to “stick” to the meat because it’s wet.
BUT again, this doesn’t matter.
You could literally put rub onto the meat while it’s in the smoker and it won’t matter. Bark will still form, it won’t wash off – just allow it to smoke for several hours.
After several hours take your finger, dab the ribs and if any rub sticks to your finger, they need to keep smoking.
If you dab, no rub sticks to your finger, and the bark is dark, it’s likely time to wrap.
The mustard can help to bind the ingredients to the surface like glue – water does the same thing.
I don’t really find that a lot of these ingredients “fall off” though.
The only one that can tend to fall off is something like Turbinado sugar – but not on ribs since they lay flat.
