Alright. Our experiment with Gator ribs was pretty successful. We smoked up 20lbs of them for the Auburn-LSU game yesterday. We also cooked up two rib rolls, some vidalia onions, and some bacon wrapped water chestnuts and bacon wrapped shrimp.
As for the gators, here's what we did.
I made up a jerk rib rub Friday. In it was onion flakes, onion powder, thyme, powdered sugar (realized at the last second I didn't have any granular sugar...doubt it mattered)), dried chives, salt, allspice, black pepper, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon. The gator ribs came Friday afternoon at about 4:00 from a farm in Louisiana, killed "fresh to order" the previous day. Or, so we were told.
We rubbed the ribs and wrapped them individually in plastic until the next day. Around 8am the next day we started putting them in the smoker. At about 2 hours, they were looking pretty done, so we removed them,added a pineapple-jalapeno glaze that I reduced the evening before (juice from two pineapples through my juicer, about 4 cups), brown sugar, black pepper, apple cider vinegar, and 3 jalapenos, seeded but with the membranes still attached. The ribs were wrapped in foil, and placed back on the smoker for about an hour.
We took them out of the foil and put them back on the smoker for another 30 minutes or so.
The verdict? Most people said they really liked them and requested we do them again. The rub/glaze combo was amazing, but personally, I wasn't impressed with the overall meat quality. I think we overcooked them a little as they almost developed a jerky texture to them. The meat, what little there was, under this "skin" was pretty decent, though. The rib "bones" were more like cartlidge.
As for photos, here's a slew of them. Let the page load, scroll to the bottom, and work your way back up.
Gator Meat