Wagyu short plate ribs

With summer being over and my freezer still full, I’m realizing that I didn’t cook as much as I
had planned.  In addition to trying out some Wagyu short plate ribs from Wiens Wagyu, I made
sure to utilize a few items from the freezer for this cook.

The rib slab looked a bit different and I needed to trim what appeared to be the navel cut from
the ribs.  That cut will be put to good use in the near future.  Here’s what I was working with:

You have to love the abundance of marbling.

The ribs were seasoned with a rub made of Himalayan pink sea salt, French grey sea salt,
pepper, onion, garlic and porcini mushroom powders and tossed onto the Egg with mesquite
and a bit of cherry at 235F.

The rations procured from the freezer included beef sausage and bacon.  I cored out the rope
of sausage, stuffed it with a blend of smoked cream cheese, white cheddar and parmesan,
which was then seasoned with the porcini rub used on the ribs.  It was wrapped in beef
bacon which was partly held in place with some butchers twine.  I’ll just term this as a ‘heifer log’.

A few hours in, with the Wagyu ribs getting basted with beef bacon fat drippings.  The smell
wafting from the Egg was heavenly.

I have a huge jar of apple butter taking up space in my fridge, so I added some to polenta
cornbread batter for flavor and moisture.

I pulled the heifer log off the Egg once the bacon had reached the desired level of crispness.

The ribs took their sweet, slow time cooking but eventually hit the point where they probed
like butter.  I FTC’d them for 1.5 hours and cut a rib off to see what became of them.

Dinner was plated.

The ribs were so succulent and juicy.  The texture is like some other beast altogether.  The
only thing better than smoked sausage is cheese stuffed, bacon wrapped sausage.  The apple
butter added moisture and a hint of apple spice to the polenta cornbread.  All in all, it was quite
delicious.

For dessert, I made a dulce de leche apple crisp.  Sweetened condensed milk was poured
into a mason jar and heated in a pot of simmering water until it caramelized into dulche de
leche.

A few gala apples were peeled, cored, diced and marinated in apple cider.  The diced apples
were seasoned with allspice, cinnamon, and cloves.  The extra sweetened condensed milk
left in the can was tossed onto the Egg.  The resulting caramel was added to the diced apples
and placed on the smoker.

:

Streusel was made using flour, brown sugar, butter, cinnamon and butter and used to top
off the apples.  The Egg was cranked up to 350F to bake the crisp.

The dulce de leche had a chance to cool off during this time.

The apple crisp was topped with dulce de leche, a scoop of smoked vanilla bean gelato and
more dulce de leche.

I grinned from ear to ear the entire time while eating this.  Stupid good.  Good eats.