Glad you stopped by. Sit a spell and take some time to visit. There's a lot to consume on this site.
My name is Craig Goldwyn. My barbecue buddies call me "Meathead" or "Meat" for short. Sometimes they call me other things that I can't print here. You don't want to know what my editors and my wife call me. If you've read this far, you're my buddy and you can call me whatever you want.
Why am I writing Amazing Ribs? Because I am a Hedonism Evangelist. An eater, drinker, writer, photographer, and teacher based in the Chicago area and I lovvvve barbecue. The Greek god Bacchus is my idol. I've had the privilege of judging barbecue from Kansas City to Memphis, and wine from California to Italy. I am a regular judge at the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue and the California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition. In addition, I am Chief Judge of the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition and I have served as the chief judge of the College Football Hall of Fame Kickoff Riboff (click here to read my case for being enshrined there).
Along the way I have tried to share my love of the sensory. I have written hundreds of articles about food and drink for consumers as a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, and scores more for Restaurant Hospitality magazine. The Trib and Post still occasionally buy rants on politics and whatever else ails me occasionally for their editorial pages, and I post them to my blog.
I hosted the Food & Drink Network on America Online for nine years, and I have taught at Cornell University's famous Hotel School in Ithaca, NY, and at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. As founder of the Beverage Testing Institute I produced seven books on wine, beer, and spirits. Somewhere along the way I studied photography with the great Jerry N. Uelsmann and picked up the world's first Masters degree in Art in Technology. My photos have been bought by a lot of folks from TIME to Playboy, and my first one man show was at the gallery at Robert Mondavi Winery. I work hard to avoid doing business with food and drink producers in order to avoid conflicts of interest.
Among my most powerful childhood memories is the seductive scent of sweetly-sauced ribs sizzling and crisping on Dad’s grill. In cooler weather Mom would roast them in the oven and serve them swimming in sauce. When I was at the University of Florida I first discovered real barbecued ribs, smoked over wood, at a rickety joint named Y.T. Parker’s. I also discovered hot pepper sauce at Y.T.’s. He put four sauces on the wobbly tables, mild, regular, and hot were the standards. If hot was not potent enough for you, he would whup one up even more flammable. If you could eat one hotter than the hottest anyone else had eaten before, he let you name it, and that was the fourth bottle. Last time I was there, in the 1970s, he was up to "Super Sabre Jet".
When I smoked marijuana in the '60s my parents warned that it would lead to harder stuff. They were right. I gave up weed and now I smoke pork. But my interest in food is all their fault. It started when they bought a restaurant on Main Street in Sarasota, Florida in the late 1950s. It was named the Oleander, a beautiful local plant. We did not know it was poisonous at the time we bought it. And at age 10, I got to be a real jerk, a soda jerk that is.
Since then I have become an omnivore, eating and drinking for a living since 1970. It's a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it. And I've got wine and sauce stains on all my shirts and the well-marbled waistline to prove I do it well.
Over the years, ribs have become my passion (my wife would call it my obsession). My ambition to make what I call "Amazing Ribs" is what has fired me to bring this website and forthcoming book to fruition. Please let me know how I'm doing.
AmazingRibs.com is all about the Zen of Barbecue, cooking ribs, and all kinds of BBQ recipes and techniques: Baby back ribs, spare ribs, pulled pork, beef brisket, chicken, turkey, steak, lamb, barbecue sauces, rubs, side dishes, with the net's best buying guide to barbecue smokers and cookers.
About links on this site. The links within the tan areas at the top and right of these pages are paid ads. Within the white, editorial content areas on this site, links and recommendations are absolutely positively not advertisements or paid endorsements. They are products, services, and websites I admire. Your suggestions are always welcome. Click here to send them to me. If you would like me to link to your website, click here to read my links policy first. Most product photographs are provided by the manufacturer, all the rest a made by Meathead.
Copyright (c) 2008 by Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn. Unless noted, all text, photos, and recipes are full protected by US copyright law. This means you need my written permission to publish or distribute anything on this website. But I'm easy. To contact me, click here.
My Privacy Promise.I promise to never sell or distribute any info about you individually without your express permission, and I promise not to, ahem, pepper you with email or make you eat spam. Click here for more about my privacy promise.
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If you have a Weber grill, you need the amazing Smokenator. It really works! List is $55, but it's less at Amazon.com.
Glad you stopped by. Sit a spell and take some time to visit. There's a lot to consume on this site.
