The Cardboard Smoker Box Ribs Experiment

With rib festivals happening numerous times throughout the year over the city, Ottawa's love for grilled meat has been well established. In honour of the Orleans Ribfest, I decided to try making some pork ribs using the cardboard smoker box method popularized by the cooking world's mad scientist Alton Brown.

Build Materials:

cardboard box (big enough to hold a BBQ grill in, but not so big it will take forever to heat up, something under a metre high and at least 60 cm.wide)
2 wooden dowels
BBQ grill
aluminum foil
aluminum pie pan
hot plate
old frying pan
wood chips
probe style cooking thermometer
small fan (optional)

I lined as much of the inside of the box with aluminium foil as a safety precaution.

I then cut a hole in the bottom of the box as shown below, in order to make access the wood chips easier during cooking.

Because the food needs a place to be cooked on, I inserted the wooden dowels through the box and placed the grills from my propane BBQ on top.

When it was time to start cooking, I hauled everything up from the basement, and set it up outside, placing the hot plate in the centre of the box through the hole in the bottom. I soaked the wood chips as instructed on its packaging, and then filled the frying pan with the wood chips. Placing the frying pan on the hot plate, I topped it with a pie plate with holes poked through the bottom, allowing the smoke to fill the box while protecting the burner from any juices that drip from the meat. I then plugged the hot plate into an outlet and turned it on. If you have a small fan, you place it in a corner of the box away from the hot plate so it can circulate the hot air and the smoke throughout the box, but don't be surprised if the fan runs out of power, or shuts down during the cooking process as mine did.

The night before, I prepared the pork ribs. For the rub, I went with a recipe from my go-to BBQ reference, "Weber's Way to Grill: The Step by Step Guide to Expert Grilling".

Ingredients: Rub

45 g kosher salt
30 g chile powder
30 g light brown sugar
30 g garlic salt
30 g  paprika
20 g dried thyme
20 g ground cumin
20 g celery seed
10 g black pepper (freshly ground if possible)

1. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Season the ribs with rub you created.

I placed the ribs on the grill bone side down, and then closed the box up to allow it fill with smoke. I had to be careful as the box got warm to the touch quickly About every half-hour or so, or whenever I saw less smoke coming out of the box, I carefully checked on the wood chips in the frying pan,  dumping out the burnt up wood in a fireproof container, and adding more wood chips, and adjusting the temperature control on the hot plate as needed.

YOU ARE DEALING WITH FLAMMABLE OBJECTS ENCASED IN A FLAMMABLE OBJECT - DO NOT LEAVE THE SMOKER BOX UNATTENDED!

Knowing the ribs will take at least 4-5 hours to cook, I did some yard work in the backyard, then enjoyed a few of my favourite IPAs while watching the pilot episodes of "The Defenders" and "G.L.O.W." (I liked the former more than the latter) and some "Lucha Underground" on Netflix while watching the ribs cook. Every hour or so I flipped the ribs to make sure they were evenly cooked, and sprayed them with the following liquid to keep them moist:

Ingredients: Mop / Spray Bottle liquid

240 mL apple juice
120 mL apple cider vinegar
30 mL Worcestershire sauce

1. Combine the ingredients in either a spray bottle or a bowl if you prefer using a BBQ mop.

After several hours of smoking, I finished the ribs on my BBQ so my hungry family could get their dinner. The ribs tasted great, tender and flavourful, I was surprised by how much smokiness I got on the meat. I may not win any grilling competitions with this method, but it's not bad for something you can make with stuff you may already have lying around your house, and it's something to try in between ribfests while drinking beer in the great outdoors.