Who’s Gonna eat the Nipple?

A while ago we bought a rack of pork ribs and passover is the perfect time to indulge ourselves in some greasy satisfying baked spareribs dish. Don’t get confused, we do keep passover kosherness as a tradition (as long as we’re in Israel on this week, otherwise we couldn’t care less about the Matza madness going on here). Pork can be one of the greatest things, taste and budget wise, but it does need some spacial attentions and it’s not sold everywhere. This cut we bought in the Carmel market for about 30 nis per kilo which is very cheap if you compare with beef.

This was a team work of Barak and I.

While prepping it we noticed our little friend is showing a nipple or two. But look on the bright side: how cool is that?? we’re gonna eat a nipple!

We put it on a bed of red cabbage and carrots because this is what we had. Everything else is also welcomed (slices of potato, onions, fennel.. ). In retrospective, I think it would be better if the carrots were soften a bit before (3 min in the micro-oven). The skin and fat layer was slitted to diamond shapes.

This is my favorite part: there’s no two identical sweet and sour sauces in our kitchen. The secrete is to use a combination out of all the ready sauces in the fridge. This time we put emphasis on the hickory b.b.q and ginger. We also used regular and dark soy, chili sauce, basil thai sauce, tabasco style sauce, ketchup, fresh grated garlic and silan (date honey).

Mixing it all together, don’t be shy to taste and fix so there will be the right balance between sweet, sour and salt but also a nice spiciness. 

Sauce was rubbed over and under the pork and some garlic cloves tucked inside the slits. Keep some of the sauce aside for glazing while cooking.

Into the oven mmm…. We were pretty hungry at this stage but this size of cut has to be cooked mid-temp for about an hour.

Every now and then we spreaded some of the sauce and turned it over.

After an hour we took out the small piece and left the big one to cook for 15 min more (cut in half).

We ate the small piece as an appetizer…

… And the big piece as the main course. It was perfect inside, moist but done enough. When dealing with pork it’s super important not to dry it out. The thick layer of fat helped it keep its juices, and we didn’t eat all this fat, don’t worry (though it’s very tasty!). Shuarmi asked for some although he usually don’t eat forbidden meat (comes from a jerusalem family) and said only good comments.  

So who ate the nipple you ask.. I’ll keep it a mystery for now 🙂