Rob's Rants

I’ve written before about how most bar-b-que cooks are secretive about their rub and sauce recipes. I’m not. Even if I were cooking competitively I’d tell you 99.9% of what I do. But I’m not cooking competitively (yet – I need something to save for retirement 20 years from now) so I’ll tell you 100% of how I do things and you can use my recipes as a base from which to experiment.

My wife recently had her Aunt and Uncle here in the US from Germany. For the first of several dinners I thought I’d introduce them to something uniquely American. And what’s more American then bar-b-que? I’d argue that even the Hamburger has been exported so much that it’s lost its unique American-ness. You can get a hamburger in any country in the world now. But bar-b-que? That hasn’t been exported yet.

So I decided to make real spare ribs – using a rub I’ve been working on for several months. I also did these in my Bradley smoker since I wanted to actually be able to sit and talk to my guests rather than spend my time tending a fire.

Here’s how I did it:

Smoked Pork Ribs in a Bradley Smoker

Ingredients:

• 2 racks of St. Louis cut Spare Ribs. (I buy whole cryo-vac ribs and trim them myself. See my BBQ guide for a good video link and explanation, including how to remove the membrane from the back of the slab.
• ¼ cup molasses or Grade B maple syrup
• ¼ cup BBQ sauce (I use Sweet Baby Ray’s sauce)
• 1 T Dark Brown Sugar
• 2 T Apple Cider Vinegar
• Rib Rub (see recipe in this post, about half way down the page. Basically 6 parts Brown Sugar, 3 parts salt, 1 part other spices.)

Preparation (12 to 24 hours before smoking)

1. Pat the ribs dry.
2. Mix molasses, BBQ sauce, and 2 T vinegar together until blended. Use the brown sugar to sweeten to your taste if using molasses. Probably not needed if using maple syrup. Brush the mixture over the slabs until completely covered.
3. Sprinkle rib rub liberally over the surface of the ribs.
4. Wrap in plastic wrap and place in refrigerator for at least 8 hours and up to 24.

Smoking

I used the 3-2-1 method on these ribs. Especially because I had people eating who have never had ribs before and might not appreciate the chew and pull of regular smoked ribs. I use hickory smoke as always.

1. Remove ribs from refrigerator at least 1 hour prior to smoking and let them come t room temperature.
2. Set Bradley Smoker oven temp to 220° F. Timer set for 6 hours and 40 minutes.
3. Let smoker warm up for 40 minutes.
4. Place ribs on Bradley racks.
5. Set smoke generator for 3 hours of smoke and start. (You’ll need 11 bisquettes in the tube for this).
6. After 3 hours, remove ribs from smoker and wrap in aluminum foil. I add a splash of cider vinegar to each foil pouch at this point.
7. Put foil covered ribs back in smoker for 2 hours. No smoke during this time.
8. After 2 hours, remove foil packs from smoker. Unwrap ribs and place back on Bradley racks. Be careful to reserve the liquid from the foil pouches – collect it in a small saucepan.
9. Start the smoke again for one hour (5 bisquettes).
10. While smoking, reduce the collected liquid to a glaze by heating until reduced by half. Mix this with any additional sauce or spices that you prefer. It will be the final finishing sauce.
11. After the final hour, remove the ribs from the smoker (they may fall apart at this point, so handle carefully). Brush on your reduced glaze and serve.

They were a hit! I think I may have started a German BBQ cult. Hope this recipe works for you too.

The first strawberries in may garden started to ripen last week while I was away in California. My wife and daughter were luckily home to begin the picking. The growing season has been weird this year, with some very warm days in April to get things started, followed by a cool period in May, and then another heat wave in the last week of May with temps pushing 90° F. So many plants seem “confused” and the strawberries are no exception.

I have three varieties planted: Earliglow (an early bearing variety), Seascape (a day-neutral variety), and Jewel (a mid-late variety). But all three are beginning to set fruit. The Earliglows have the biggest fruit by far though.

This is only the second year for the bed, so the plants aren’t dense and the berries are sparse. I cut back all the flowers and runners last year to help the plants establish themselves. This year, I’ll start to let the runners fill in the rows and make the area more dense.

They are growing this year on top of hemlock mulch. I started them last year with red plastic mulch that made it through the winter. Since I started the beds on a hillside that was pretty much weeds the year before, I wanted the plastic to help with the first year weed control. But now I want the plants to have room to set some runners.

There seems to be mild to moderate slug damage this year – probably 1/3 of the ripe berries showed some signs of being gnawed on. Time to sprinkle the Sluggo snail killer. Otherwise, I haven’t had to spray for anything.

My tomato seedlings are about 8 inches tall now. For the last 6 days they have moved from my basement to a small cold frame I have outside to harden off, or adjust to the temperature and sunlight swings outdoors. Usually this helps grow healthier plants. But I’m afraid that I may have done more harm than good this year.

I wrote about the devastating effects of Late Blight on the tomato crop in New England last year. (And this was a problem all over the Northeast … check out this post on The Big Blog of Gardening.) I vowed that this year would be different. I started seeds bought from a reputable supplier (Johnny’s Selected Seeds) in fresh potting soil in my basement. I kept them on heated mats and under lights in a dry environment for weeks. Then moved the plants outside to my cold frame.

And this morning, I noticed that some of the leaves on my plants were showing small gray patches. Almost like powdery mildew. More distressing were one or two leaves with brown spots … spots that look to me like Late Blight.

Here’s an example:

I guess it makes perfect sense. Inside the cold frame at night, lots of condensation forms. So many mornings I  have opened the top to find the leaves of the plants soaked. And these are the perfect conditions for Late Blight — cool nights in the 50s, daytime temperatures in the 60s, and wet leaves.

When I first put the plants out last weekend I sprayed them with a combination of Plant Guardian Biofungicide and Shield-all II fungicide (both from Gardens Alive). I pulled out and threw five of the worst looking plants into the trash. And I plucked all the visibly infected leaves off the remaining plants. I just hope I’ve caught it in time.

But something tells me that my tomato crop is doomed this year. I mean, if there are already enough spores floating around to infect my plants, then many gardeners are going to be in trouble this year.

In one of my earlier garden posts I implored people to start their own vegetables from seeds rather than buying some mass produced seedlings raised by the thousand in some Mexican greenhouse. The benefits of selecting specific varieties are great – you can choose specifically for conditions that match your geography. Here in New England, we have a short growing season. Usually not much longer than 150 days between frosts. Choosing your own varieties lets New England gardeners select fast maturing varieties.

When a commercial greenhouse selects plant varieties they tend to emphasize things you wouldn’t – like plant strength and drought tolerance so that the plants will witstand a couple of weeks being shipped across country on a truck and won’t wilt when the Home Depot or Lowe’s people forget t water them a couple of days. Flavor isn’t always high on the list of characteristics.

If you can’t choose and start your own seeds, then the next best thing is to work with a greenhouse as local as possible. Mainly because a local business has an interest in selling things that will grow well in your local climate. Selling a bunch of plants that grow a few scraggly vegetables that taste like garbage isn’t exactly good for business.

Today I found another source here in Grafton, Massachusetts: Mapel Plants. Mapel has been around for 20 years, but is one of the best kept secrets in town. The owner, John Mapel has run a small greenhouse business along side of his other gardening businesses for years. And he stocks a variety of vegetables and herbs that are selected for flavor and for their ability to grow in this part of the state. My first clue that Mapel takes an interest in people’s success: they won’t sell warm-season vegetable plants before May 15th. Especially after the warm weather we’ve had recently, he is kind enough to remind people that we won’t really be frost safe until near the end of May. In fact, even though last weekend the temperatures hit 90° F, today it hasn’t climbed out of the 40s and we’re expecting frost tonight. I’ve seen a lot of small tomato seedlings in people’s front yard gardens that might not be there tomorrow.

Mapel has a great selection of the common vegetables and herbs, but they specialize in tomatoes, including some hard to find heirloom varieties. The list of varieties is posted here. In addition they have a variety of annual and perennial flowers and a selection of native New England wildflowers that they’ve propagated from ones growing on their property.

Mapel plants is the kind of local business I like to support. My wife and I grabbed a few things to supplement our garden this year and I’m sure we will be going back. Mapel plants greenhouses are only open from May through June, so don’t wait to check them out. Take a ride through one of the nicest parts of Grafton up Brigham Hill Road and check them out.

Updated 7/3/2010 with first impressions.

About Me

I’m going to admit this up front … I’m not really a car guy. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a fast car as much as the next guy. I’ve lusted after a Corvette since I was a kid – either an early 60′s split window or maybe a 1967 convertible like the one in the picture to the left. I watch Top Gear regularly and keep up with the world of supercars. I even work on cars (most recently changing the entire front disc brake system from the proportioning valve forward including calipers and discs on my F-150). But when it comes time to spend my money on a car for daily use, I just can’t do it. I currently drive a stock 5 year old Toyota Matrix with over 100,000 miles on it. This car replaced a 6 year old Honda Civic which had 189,000 miles on it when I traded it. None of these cars had aftermarket rims, performance exhausts, or anything else attached to it. Hell, I didn’t even replace the radio. For me, a car is a tool. It gets me to work and back again. As long as it does that reliably and with a minimum of fuss, I’m happy. Cars are not status symbols for me, nor are they investments. I don’t give a shit about scratches and dings or small dents. I rarely wash them, never wax them, and almost never change the oil (I average about 50,000 between oil changes). So I consider the replacement of the basic consumable parts of a car (like tires) a royal pain. I know some people research these things like they matter, but not me.

Which all leads to my most recent adventure – replacing the tires on my Matrix. What lead to this? I got screwed, literally. Arriving home on my train last Wednesday I found my right rear tire flat. After driving home I discovered what appeared to be the shank of a drywall screw embedded in the tread. Since these tires had close to 60,000 miles on them, it was time for four new ones.

[Skip the rest of the bullshit and jump straight to the review...]

Given my attitude about things automotive, I was willing to put all of three hours total into the process of getting new tires. This isn’t something exciting for me … I don’t enjoy researching the latest tread compounds and wear promises from manufacturers. I want something decent that can get done quickly so I can get on with my life.

What I Wanted

I did put enough thought into this to at least come up with my list of priorities:

1. Tire should be quiet when driving.
2. Tire should be available locally and able to be on my car in under two hours from the time I arrive at the store.

There was my comprehensive list. Notice cost and tread life aren’t on the list. Tread life isn’t terribly important for me anymore, because, thankfully, I now have a job that I commute to by train. Last year I drove all of 6300 miles. Really. So even a shitty 30,000 mile warranty tire should last me close to five years. And price isn’t on the list because I am willing to pay to not have to research and deal with the hassle of comparing tires between retailers.

So, I hopped into my car and drove off to my local Town Fair Tire store. The guy there started showing me what they had in the 205/55 R16 size I needed, beginning with the cheap $79 specials and working up from there.

Let me point out that just because I hate researching tires and shopping for them, doesn’t mean I don’t care what they drive like. On the contrary, I care very much. Tires are one of the most important parts of the car. No other part  affects all the critical performance features of the car as much as tires do. Stopping distance, wet and dry cornering, ride comfort, and quietness – all largely determined by the tires. So I want something decent. On the other hand, I know that my stock 1.8 liter, 130 horsepower engine isn’t exactly going to stress the rubber like a Bugatti Veyron. So high performance tires might be a bit of a waste.

My Research Rant

Which leads me to my biggest lament: researching tires is a waste of time so you never know what the hell you’re going to get. Seriously. The number of permutations of cars and tires make it utterly impossible for someone else’s review to have any meaning to you. Couple this with the fact that most people in the world drive like shit and are idiots, and getting a decent opinion on the web is utterly hopeless. The major objective reviews available from places like Consumer Reports and Car and Driver only touch a fraction of the brands and models available in any given year. And the variability between tire models within a single manufacturer’s line means that the manufacturer’s performance in one test for one type of tire can’t be extrapolated to another tire model. And the chances of the magazines testing tires on the same make and model car as you have are so slim that most test results are meaningless. I mean, will a given touring tire perform as well on your Honda Accord as it did on some test BMW? Chances are it won’t. You could rely on the subjective reviews on various web sites, but really – do you trust the four sentence reviews of people you haven’t met? Hell, knowing how my friends drive, I don’t even trust the reviews of most of the people I know, never mind strangers. Think of this simple example: I grew up in rural northeastern Pennsylvania driving on winding back roads in very hilly country and living on a dead-end dirt road. I then went to college in southwest New Hampshire and worked winters at a ski area in Vermont where I had to be to work every day no matter the conditions, and where the season after Winter is known as “mud season.” Trust me on this — my definition of “good winter traction” is significantly different than someone who lives in Indiana or Maryland. Think of that the next time you read a tire review online.

The Buying Process

So here I am standing in Town Fair Tire today. The first shocking thing was how many brands of cheap tires there are that I’ve not had any experience with. Hankook tires? Really? Kumho? Fuzion? WTF? Never mind the ones I have heard of but had no experience with, like Yokohama, Sumitomo, Toyo, and others. So I tell the guy to narrow down the choices based on my criteria: quiet ride, in stock, and middle of the price range. I end up with three tires in front of me:

• Goodyear Eagle RS-A
• Mastercraft Avenger Touring
• Hankook Optimo

This was putting me in the roughly $100 range per tire, about $20 below (per tire) the meat of the Goodyear, Michelin, Dunlop, and other recognizable brand name lines.

My immediate problem was that I had some experience with the Goodyear Eagle RS-A tires and I hated them (they were on my previous Civic for a while). The others I never heard of. While the guy was talking about sidewall strength etc. I did some quick research on my iPhone. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’s never heard of Mastercraft tires either. And I quickly determined that the Hankook was basically a cheap Korean OEM touring tire. But I was intrigued by the Mastercraft for some reason.

Who the Hell is Mastercraft?

Turns out Mastercraft is the budget or “private-label” division of Cooper Tire. Cooper is a perennially on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy (or as of the summer of 2009, bankrupt) American tire manufacturer. They have a decent reputation as a replacement tire option with solid wear and good, if not stellar performance. You know, just what you need on a 1.8 liter economy car. Mastercraft is Cooper’s “private label” brand of tire. For those not familiar, private label products are products made by a major manufacturer using much of the same technology and equipment as their own “white label” products, although often up to a generation of technology behind. The advantage to the manufacturer is that it lets them use excess plant capacity and old (depreciated) tooling to produce products at a low cost, which discount retailers can offer as an option to established brands. The products are typically sold wholesale at a low price compared to similar quality name-brand products because private label products aren’t burdened with high marketing and other costs. The advantage to retailers is that it typically gives them a brand that they can price competitively with similar quality brands but for which their profit margins are higher due to the reduced acquisition cost.

So I get why Town Fair Tire is stocked with several Mastercraft models and why they probably show up on every list that the Sales Guy makes – Town Fair makes more money on them. I’m not morally opposed to that mind you, if they are decent products.

Bottom Line

So I listened to the guy’s pitch and decided to take a chance. And had them mount up four Mastercraft Avenger Touring (H rated) tires. I was out the door, mounted and balanced and with a front-end alignment about 90 minutes later. Total price: $560.64 including 6.25% Massachusetts Sales Tax and mounting, balancing, front-end alignment, lifetime road hazard replacement, and disposal of old tires. The plan also includes a bunch of stuff I’ll never use like free rotation and free snow tire changeover.

And before anyone tells me I could have gotten a better deal from Tirerack.com or some other place, remember my criteria. I am more than willing to pay $100 more to have gotten this done in two hours so I could go play with my daughter.

Are The Tires Any Good?

How the hell should I know? I’ve only driven on them for 30 miles. Not nearly enough time to tell yet. But I can at least start this review by talking about what I’ll be comparing them to.

My most recent set of tires was a set of Goodyear Assurance Comfortread tires. They were decent. At best. Overall I’d say that, although they worked pretty well for 50,000 miles or so, they had a noticeable drop in traction after only 20,000 miles. And they were never that great in the wet to begin with. And Jesus H. Christ they were noisy. Unbearably noisy toward the end of their lives. They definitely didn’t go quietly. But their gas mileage was good as was their dry traction. And I’d say the wear was great, considering the fact that I barely rotated them more than twice in 50,000 miles.

Prior to that I had an OEM set of Continental ContiTrack touring tires. They were fucking horrible. If the road was so much as moist you felt like you were taking your life into your hands. These tires were scary-bad in wet weather. Not only did they slip all over the place, but they hydroplaned if there was anything more than a molecular film of water on the road. Truly so horrible that I will never buy another set of Continental tires again as long as I live. They weren’t much better when it was dry either.

On my prior Honda, I had a set of Michelin Harmony somethings. They were OK, but they wore oddly, showing signs of scalloping long before they should have. And I know it was the tire not the inflation or car etc. because the set of Goodyear Eagle RS-As which replaced them never showed the same signs.

For additional opinions, I did find a few things on the Internet. Several people think that the Mastercraft Avenger is the same tire as the Cooper CS4, which has some good reviews. But I can tell you that the tread pattern isn’t the same. See for yourself:

Mastercraft Avenger

Cooper CS4

So this is what the Mastrcrafts need to live up to. I’ll keep this updated over the next year.

Update 7/3/2010

I’ve now had these tires almost two months and have finally put a thousand plus miles on them. My quick impression thus far is that they offer good dry traction, excellent wet traction, and decent mileage. They seem only OK as far as quietness – they are definitely louder than the Goodyear Comforttreads when they were new.

Starting and cornering when the road is wet is definitely better than with my old tires, and when driving through some absolutely huge puddles (more like minor flooding) from big thunderstorms at road speed I can say they do not hydroplane easily. I’d call them excellent tires in wet conditions. I have no complaints about dry traction either. They are, however, relatively noisy compared to some other tires. They are a marked improvement over the worn tires they replaced, but they could be quieter.

Overall I’m pleased and I would recommend these tires to others.