Cooking with Spare Ribs

As a frugal mom, unless I am cooking Bak Kut Teh, I will not consider using spare ribs to boil soup since it is the more expensive cut compared to soup bones or chicken carcasses.  Moreover, I boil soup on a daily basis.  

On days when I want to cook a dish with spare ribs, I will add about 6 to 8 pieces of them to the pork or chicken soup I am boiling for the day as this will help me save time. I like it that the additional spare ribs added will also enhanced the flavour of my soup.

If you do not plan on making soup or soup stock, you can just boil the spare ribs in a pot of water. You want to boil them till they are soft enough to bite into but not falling apart, which is about 30 minutes on high heat or about 45 to 60 minutes on low heat.

Once they are ready, you can remove them from the soup or stock and stir fry them in a wok with:

-8 to 10 table spoons of water (or soup/stock)
-1 Tbsp of white or brown sugar (or honey)
-1 Tbsp of garlic oil.
-1/2 Tbsp soya sauce.
-1/2 Tbsp oyster sauce
-Dash of black or white pepper or
-1 Tbsp BBQ Sauce

Stir fry till the liquid is reduced and the sauce thickens to glaze the ribs. If you have been too heavy with the sauce, just add more water. You can then thicken the sauce by whisking together 1 tablespoon of corn starch with 2 tablespoons of water to create a slurry. Once the sauce starts to boil again, add the slurry in bit by bit while stirring till it thickens.

Here is another way to reduce cost to purchase a larger quantity of spare ribs if you plan on cooking for more people to eat. Boiled spare ribs can be kept in the freezer. Each time you use them to make your soup stock, you can store them in an airtight container. Once you have accumulated enough in your freezer, you can thaw them to marinate for at least an hour or store it overnight in the fridge a day before you airfry them to serve.  Watch this video to see how it is cook in the airfryer.

You can watch the video from the beginning if you would like to know how the Char Siu Sauce (BBQ Sauce) is prepared and how it can be used to cook other dishes.  These are the ingredients used in the video to make the Char Siu Sauce (BBQ Sauce) for 1kg pork spare ribs:

This is how you prepare the spare ribs to airfry.

If you plan on using BBQ sauce from Lee Kum Kee, watch this video and learn some Cantonese phrases along the way.

This sauce can also be used to make char sui with the following parts of the pig:

-pork butt or shoulder 
-pork collar
-pork belly (very fatty)
-pork loin (leaner option can turn out dryer when cooked)