- 1kg short ribs, or spare ribs
- 1/2 cup sweet paprika
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1/4 cup cumin
- 1tbs cinnamon
- 1tbs dried powdered ginger
- 2tbs coriander seeds
- 1-2tbs dried chili
- S&P
Mash the spices using a mortar and pestle (מכתש ועלי).
Take about a third of the mixture and add to it a little water. Rub the ribs with the watered mixture cover and let it rest over night in the fridge. Don’t forget the salt in the mixture, this is its chance to be soaked in the pork (I adopted this salting method from Eli Landow’s book of pork “הספר הלבן”).
Take the pork out of the fridge at least 1 hour before you put it in the oven. Preheat the oven to 200C. Cover the ribs with the rest of the spice mixture and put in the oven with some water in the baking pan (about 1cm height. The water are for protecting the pan from the stickiness of the pork’s fat and for extra moisture) for about 50 min, covered with tin foil. Put under the ‘grill’ option in the oven for 10-15-20 min, until the rub is crisp but not burned (you can grill the pork on the oven net at this point, but make sure you have some other pan with some water underneath to catch all the dripping fat). Make sure to put a nice layer of spices on the one hand, to get that nice spicy crisp, but not too much so it won’t taste like eating powder. The dry rub should ‘interact’ with the fat on the pork, whatever is left dry after 5 min in the oven (i.e. not ‘combined’ by the melting fat) is excess spice. In any case if you are not sure, you better put a little less spice then a little more, in my opinion.
You may serve with potatoes in any form or rice, preferably not spiced since the pork is very rich in flavors (and fat, just the way we like it).