Side Dishes with Barbecue Ribs

"The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star." Anthelme Brillat Savarin from The Physiology of Taste 1825

By Meathead Goldwyn

Whenever you cook a recipe, it is a good practice to read it through all the way before you start, making sure you have all the ingredients and tools. In the same way athletes visualize the race, you want to do a mental walk through.

About our recipes

I am very proud that I get almost no complaints that the recipes on these pages don't work or taste bad and when I do it is usually because the cook left something important out or made a wierd substitution.

That's because I create them from scratch, test, and test again, and I have a professional chef on staff to test them again. It is not unusual for me to try a recipe on a gas grill, charcoal grill, and pellet grill. Then I listen to your feedback in the comments.

That's the difference between recipes created by cooking professionals versus the recipes on large recipe sites where anybody can post a recipe. I have a standard procedure for writing recipes and testing them. I do this for a living. Select recipes from professionals like me. A poor recipe can be a health risk and a waste of time and money.

For example, my recipes specify table salt or kosher salt or another salt. A recipe that says "1 tablespoon of salt" could easily lead you astray because kosher salt is larger grain and has more air between the grains so 1 tablespoon of kosher salt is roughly equal to 1/2 tablespoon of table salt. If a recipe calls for "four ounces of grated cheese" you have a bad recipe. I will say "4 ounces by weight". If you grate cheese and pour it into a measuring cup to the 4 ounce mark, it will weigh only about 2 ounces, and if you pack it down you might get in 3 ounces. Big diff.

So remember, not all recipes are created equal.

I know you want to play with your food, but I strongly recommend that you follow my recipe closely the first time, no substitutions, no improvisation. You will then know what it is supposed to taste like. Then, on your second go round, you can customize it and riff on it by adding and subtracting and substituting. You may not like rosemary so you will be tempted to leave it out of Meathead's Memphis Dust, but I'm here to tell you that you'll never taste it on the final product because it is just on instrument in an orchestra. You may want to substitute honey for molasses, but the sulfur in molasses interacts with beans differently, making the meal less, shall we say, noisy? I know you think you can amp it up with a bit more chipotle or sugar, or by substituting cider vinegar for distilled vinegar, but I have worked really hard to get it right and there is a good reason for each and everything in a recipe. When there are good and safe substitutions, I list them. Try it my way the first time.

Then, when you change a recipe, it is a good idea to change only one thing at a time so if something goes wrong you know what the cause was. Change the rub and the cooking temp and if the chicken skin is flabby, you won't know for sure which was the culprit.

One of the most important keys to success is mise en place, a basic technique practiced by all professional chefs. Basically it means, before you fire up, get all the ingredients and tools out and do all the measuring, chopping, and blending. Trim the meat, chop the onions, peel the carrots. Scurrying to chop an onion at the last minute can mean disaster to a sauce. I help you by listing the ingredients in the order they will be used and the numbered steps in the recipe are the order in which I strongly recommend you work.