Pork, fresh, backribs, separable lean and fat, raw

Backribs are a bone-in cut best suited to low and slow cooking: oven-roasted, smoked, or braised until the meat pulls easily from the bone. They are a classic barbecue rack, typically dry-rubbed with a spice blend or basted repeatedly with sauce during a long cook, and the bones themselves add flavor to the meat as it cooks, releasing gelatin that keeps the meat moist over hours of low heat.

Look for ribs with good marbling and a fresh pink color at the butcher counter, and plan to cook raw ribs within a day or two of purchase or freeze them for longer storage until you are ready to fire up the smoker or oven. Per 100 grams, raw backribs provide 224 calories, 19.1 grams of protein, rich in protein at 38% DV, and 16.3 grams of fat, with no carbohydrate in the raw meat itself. Sodium is low at 87 milligrams per 100 grams in the raw state, which means most of the sodium in a finished rack comes from whatever rub or barbecue sauce is added during cooking, giving the cook direct control over how much to use, and since it is a raw cut, food safety practice calls for cooking it to a safe internal temperature rather than serving it rare.