Recipe: The best spare ribs

I have been away most of this week, demoing pressure cooking to a lovely crowd in Paignton and made the most of a couple of days by the sea with bracing walks and a good mooch around Totnes on market day. I cooked these as part of the demo and hadn’t intended to do them again, but this morning at my farmers market, the Lincolnshire butcher I usually buy pork products from was selling racks of ribs for under £5 a kilo and I thought I should take advantage. And actually, I’m quite happy to be cooking them again - when I do cookery demos I can’t eat, so although I can appreciate how good something smells, I don’t taste unless it is for seasoning.

The recipe itself is is based on one from my first pressure cooker book, from over a decade ago. It is probably the stand out dish from the book. Here I have tweaked it a little, but it is in the same spirit. It came about because around 20 years ago or so I used to frequent a Chinese restaurant in Watton, Norfolk. The owners became good friends and I used to try to get them to persuade the chef to let me into the secret of his ribs recipe. No such luck, but they did tell me it took over 7 hours of slow braising to get them to the fall off the bone texture. I get them to the same texture here in half an hour if they are skinny ribs, 45 minutes, if they are thicker and meatier and while the aromatics aren’t quite the same, I am very happy with flavour here. Note - if you want to cook the ribs with a view to grilling/bbq-ing afterwards, you can reduce the cooking time so they are firmer and won’t fall off the bone. I would do 20 minutes for skinny, 30 minutes for thick.

Unusually for my pressure cooker recipes, you will find that there is a lot of cooking liquor left over. This is quite deliberate as it makes such a useful sauce. I strain it and use it as a dipping sauce, as a condiment for rice or noodles, dilute it to use as a soup base or for cooking rice. You can freeze it easily - if you do so in ice cube trays it makes excellent seasoning.

Incidentally, the pressure cooker will cook pork bones to edible - soft enough to easily crunch through. Adam has just chomped his way through a couple. And it reminds me of the pressure cooker’s original purpose - to cook fish to the point that the bones were soft, just as they are when tinned/canned (also achieved under pressure!)

Ingredients:

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1kg pork ribs

6 cloves garlic, finely sliced

15g ginger, finely chopped

Spices: 3cm piece cinnamon stick, 1 star anise, 1 dried chilli or 1/2 tsp chilli flakes, 1/2 tsp Chinese 5 spice

150ml dark soy sauce

100ml rice vinegar

200ml apple or pineapple juice

50g light brown sugar or honey

To garnish:

A drizzle of sesame oil

1 tsp sesame seeds

4 spring onions, halved and shredded

A small bunch coriander

Heat the oil in your pressure cooker. Sear the ribs on all sides - you will probably have to do this in 2-3 batches. Remove each batch, including the last one, to a plate. Deglaze the pressure cooker thoroughly with a little water, then add all the remaining ingredients. Season the ribs with salt and pepper, then return to the pressure cooker, pushing them below the liquid levels as much as possible.

Bring up to high pressure, then reduce the heat to maintain pressure - see my last post on this if you are unsure what I am talking about. Cook for between 20-45 minutes depending on their thickness and the end result you want (see the intro for details). Remove from the heat and allow to drop pressure naturally.

You can serve the ribs as they are, or grill as mentioned above, or you can fry in a little oil in a large frying pan to crisp them up a bit. If you do this, strain the sauce and ladle some of it over - it will caramelise around the ribs nicely.

Drizzle over a little oil, sprinkle with sesame seeds, spring onions and coriander. I serve with some plain steamed rice, but I also really like doing a quick fried rice in the pressure cooker using some of the rib liquor. Here’s what I just did:

Heat a tablespoon of oil in your pressure cooker and saute onion and any other vegetables you want to add - I diced up a courgette. Rinse 300g basmati rice. Measure out a couple of ladlefuls of the rib liquor and top up with water or stock to give you 450ml. Add the rice, season with salt and pour over the liquid. Bring up to high pressure, reduce the heat and cook for 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave to drop pressure naturally. Serve with the ribs.