As my wife was going to have to pop in to get the meat, and she worries that she might get the wrong thing, I phoned ahead to check that they'd have some ribs ready. I was originally planing on getting baby-back ribs, so asked about this, and the guy didn't sound like he knew what I meant... said something like "yeah, pork ribs, spare ribs, yeah". I thought rather than confuse the issue I'd happily just go with spare ribs, and told him my wife would be down to pick them up later.
When she went down, he suggested one and half racks for 6 people, which seemed reasonable (we were doing some chicken wings and stuff too) and she came back with the two cuts shown below.
Now, from what I can see, these don't look much like the standard spare rib cut. I know that when not trimmed to a St Louis, the tips give a fair bit of extra meat that isn't "on the rib" as such, but this is like 1/3 rib at most, and the half basically had none - just some of the white cartilage.
So the upside was we had loads of meat to eat - far more than we needed in fact. And it tasted fine (took a good 6 hours to smoke, mind). But it wasn't really the rack of ribs I'd been hoping to serve up to my guests!
Do these look normal? The whole shape of the cut looks odd to me - the ribs being at an angle to the cut - am I just imagining that? Is it a UK thing (given that pretty much everything you find on the internet about bbq cuts is American)?
