Fast Ribs in a Slow Cooker

Slow Cooking Pork Ribs - The Fast Way!

A fast dish, from a slow cooker?  This guy has gone off the deep end, you're maybe thinking.  I haven't actually - and using this unique method, you can take a dish that usually needs a bare minimum of 3 hours, and make it ready in that same three hours, but it will taste more like it's been slow cooking for five. 

Here's how...

Ingredients You Need: 

• Side of pork ribs
• Some of your favourite pork rib flavourings
• A kettle, a slow cooker, and an oven

The Process: 

1. First, I'll assume you have a flavour you love on your pork ribs. Everyone does. So I won't force you to make my recipe (will save that for another post). Instead, pay attention to the method and apply it to your own recipe. 
2. Turn everything on at the start. Get your Oven on a high heat. Around 450F, or a low-medium broil if you have that kind of control. Boil a full kettle of water. 
3. Take your ribs out of their packing, drain and rinse in the sink. Pat dry with paper towel. 
4. Place ribs on a baking sheet. Sometimes I cut in half depending on the size of the rack.  About 4 to 5 bones per piece make a manageable size for plating later - and you won't want to cut them later or they'll fall apart on you. 
5. Season your ribs well. Salt and pepper and a bit of oil at the very least.  If you have a dry rub you love, or some pre-mixed spices, use that, just avoid adding any sugar to it at this point. (It will burn) 
6. Place your ribs in the hot oven. We want to sear them. That is we want to cook the outside very quickly so it develops some browning of the colour, but we don't need that heat to make its way through the meat cooking it entirely. Just the outside. Thats why we use relatively high heat. 
7. While the ribs are in the oven searing up, your crock pot should be warmed up mostly. Add your rib braising flavours.  Some of my favourites are: onion, celery, any fresh herbs available at the time, garlic, a little bit of liquid smoke, some of the BBQ sauce I intend to use on them later, hot sauce, a bit of mustard.  You could really add any number of strong flavours here depending on the finished dish you have planned. 
8. Allow those things to heat up in the crock pot for now. Reboil your kettle. Check your ribs in the oven. 
9. If you're broiling your ribs and the top side looks moderately browned, flip them over for the other side. 
10. Now, with your reboiled kettle, pour it into the crock pot which should have the other sauces and ingredients somewhat warmed by now.  Replace the lid of the crock pot and keep it on high heat. 
11. Check your ribs again, if both sides are now browned, you can pull it out of the oven and shut it off. 
12. Place your ribs into the crock pot set to high.  The liquid should cover at least three quarters of the ribs. 
13. Check back in about 45 minutes, if you can see a gentle boil of your liquids in the crock pot thats great. Turn it to low. If you have ribs outside of the water, try to exchange it periodically (once an hour) with the ribs at the bottom of the pot so it gets evenly braised. 
14. Allow to cook on low for the next two hours. 
15. If your ribs are still early for your meal, set your crock pot to 'keep warm' if you have that option. The longer you have your ribs sit on 'keep warm' the more amazing they'll get. 
16. When you're about ten minutes away from being ready to eat - I like to pull the ribs out of the braise, brush with a good coating of my favourite barbecue sauce, and then finish them off on the grill, or a very hot oven (450F or higher again - maybe even a carefully supervised broil) 
17. The high heat will help to caramelize the sugars in your barbecue sauce and add a little extra dimension to the flavours. 
18. Thats it. You're ready.  Not only will these ribs fall off the bone, but they'll be full of flavour and sure to impress anyone who tries them. 

The reason why this method works is because we are mixing everything together when it's hot.  For a typical braised ribs recipe, you may find yourself adding 'un-seared' ribs to a cold crock pot of water.  On high, that will probably take upwards of an hour and a half to reach its boil the first time. Compare that to the 45 minutes or less we dealt with in this method.

So because everything gets heated separately in its own fastest way possible, when you mix all the hot items together, they instantly start cooking, and tenderizing.  Which saves all that time you'd otherwise be waiting for your mixture to reach a boil the other way. 

For Beef/Texas ribs, you'll want to double the cooking time at least - they are a larger animal, and have stronger more developed muscles and connective tissues.  You'll need to cook them longer in order to break those tissues down, making them tender. 

And it's that easy.  Ribs are one of my favourite things to make when we are entertaining guests - once they make it into the crock pot - I can direct my attentions elsewhere.  Not only that, but I haven't met someone who isn't a fan of ribs, or at least my ribs, yet.   

I developed this recipe out of necessity - we were planning to entertain guests one day, and I realized we didn't have much to make for them besides ribs that I should have started two hours ago.  Knowing that 'bringing something up to heat' is often the slowest part of any cooking process, I decided to do exactly that in the fastest way possible using the method above, and was very pleasantly surprised with the results.   This doesn't just work for pork ribs, anything you braise can be substantially sped up by using this general process.