Grab A Pack Of These Kirkland Ribs To Look Like A Grill Master With Half The Effort
For all but the most zealous backyard barbecue czars, a couple of shortcuts here and there are totally acceptable. Store-bought barbecue sauce can be fine provided you're buying the best, for example. Likewise bottled rubs and marinades. Costco, of course, has an item that applies said seasoning before you even get it in your cart.
The big box membership store's Kirkland Signature St. Louis-style dry rub ribs coat the rack in what it calls a souvlaki seasoning before packaging. A scratch-made souvlaki seasoning like you might see covering skewered chunks of lamb and chicken would typically include ingredients such as salt, pepper, oregano, cumin, onion powder, and garlic powder. Buying it already adhered to the pork saves you a little time mixing it all up, and lets you skip an audit of your spice cabinet to make sure you aren't missing any ingredients for this otherwise pretty forgiving recipe. If you do ever need to swap an ingredient, such as the oregano, Italian seasoning has been known to pinch hit for it and other herbs, such as basil.
Actually cooking these pre-seasoned ribs at home
Even the finest proprietary spice mix in the world can't fix poorly cooked ribs. The 3-2-1 method is one of the best for cooking ribs on a gas grill. This easily recalled equation has you cooking the ribs low and slow for three hours before wrapping them in foil and grilling for two more hours, ultimately saucing and adding it back to the grill for — you guessed it — another hour. You can also make oven-baked ribs that fall off the bone with more or less the same technique.
The trick is to avoid overcooking, lest you're left with sad, unintended jerky instead of the cookout hit you expected. A meat thermometer can be tricky in this case since there isn't as much area to pierce (versus steak cuts and the like), so you have to trust a little more in the timing than you might be used to. Some home pitmasters rely on their eyeballs instead, and mark doneness once the meat begins to separate from the bone on its own.