Technique #82: Smoke Ribs Indoors Using Tea Leaves

As we learned with our Indoor Pulled Pork, barbecue is as much about cooking method as it is about flavoring agents. A steady low temperature and moist environment work almost like braising, turning the collagen—a protein in meat’s tough connective tissue—into rich-tasting, silky gelatin.

While some stovetop smokers work fairly well, they are small and they leak smoke.

We wanted a technique for indoor smoking that didn’t require any specialty equipment and that was done entirely in the oven, thus containing the smoke and preventing the kitchen from reeking for days afterward.

Contrary to what you might guess, wood chips aren't the answer.

Even at 500 degrees, a home oven can’t get hot enough to generate enough smoke from wood chips to flavor the food. Instead, our secret ingredient for success is tea leaves.

We were inspired by Chinese cooks, who smoke a variety of foodstuffs over black tea. Smoky-tasting Lapsang souchong tea, which is cured over smoldering pine or cypress boughs, proved to be the right choice; grinding the leaves to a powder maximizes the surface area of the tea.

With the oven set to high heat to start and a baking sheet containing the tea leaves placed on a hot baking stone, smoke is generated within minutes.

To prevent the ribs from toughening up under these conditions, chill them in the freezer as the oven preheats. This cools them enough that they can withstand the superhot oven.

After just 30 minutes at 500 degrees, the prechilled ribs absorb as much of the smoky flavor from the tea as they can.

Then, lower the heat to 250 degrees and add apple juice to the bottom of the baking sheet to mimic the moist environment of a smoker (apple juice is a common “mop” used in outdoor barbecue).

Roast the ribs until the meat is falling off the bones, then broil them briefly for that crisp barbecued crust.