Dry Rub Oven Rib Tips

AKA mini meat lollipops

Just another variation of the other rib tip recipes I've posted. These look giant in the photo, but they're only like 5 centimeters.

About 3 pounds of rib tips, cut apart

Covered in salt, put in ziploc bag, two cups vinegar, 1 cup Dale's liquid seasoning, and a smashed entire head of garlic overnight. These would be good to go as is.

Drained the marinade and microwaved for 3 minutes or so, to get the core temp warm (saves a good hour of oven time) and rolled in simple dry rub:

1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons 1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1 tablespoon salt
2 teaspoons garlic salt
2 teaspoons 1 teaspoon chili powder
2 teaspoons black pepper
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon celery salt
1 teaspoon 1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon Accent (MSG)
optionally sage and/or dry mustard, but just going simple this time.

Set some aside for finishing if you wish

Placed riblets on top toaster oven rack with a lined water tray below, preheated to 400 to get the water steamy. Put ribs in, turn temp to 275F for 2 hours or so, turning once halfway through. There is no need to worry about covering with foil, they are in a steam bath with the water tray.

These came out lovely, after giving it an extra half hour to cook it finally "gave" and became fall-off tender. Flavor is pretty simple, mostly the smoked paprika and peppers came to the front, leaving the natural delicious pork as the second flavor note, which was the goal for this time.

Unfortunately, I'm not ok with "lovely" for this batch. The smoked paprika and pepper was too much for me, so corrected course by making a very thin basic ketchup-vinegar-sugar-mustard powder mop glaze, and coating them for the last 10 minutes at 350F. PERFECT. That quieted down the paprika and brought tang and depth back. Rub recipe above has been adjusted.

Impromptu glaze:
1 cup ketchup
1 cup vinegar
Juice of half a lime (because I had half a lime sitting there)
tablespoon onion powder
tablespoon garlic powder
half teaspoon mustard powder
handful (1/4 cup) brown sugar
dash worcestershire sauce

Basic oven (but taste like grilled) riblets with rub and glaze, bomb-diggity schmack-o-licious with some rice a roni on the side.

Versatile little guys, I'm now thinking about a tossed green salad with a few of these thrown in for lunches. On the long voyage to reverse my meat to vegetable ratio to mostly veg with a bit of meat, I'm getting there. These mini-ribs make it easy. I bagged these 4 or 5 to a serving, which to me is actually a lot. 3 would be fine. I usually give one or two away at work for feedback, anyway.