Don’t ask. I wasn’t even planning to make ribs today, but one thing led to another and here we are. Then, since I suddenly had both ribs and a huge chunk of presa Ibérica, and the original plan had been to do a whole presa in hoisin marinade (more on that later) I didn’t want to make my tried and tested hoisin pork ribs. So I got to wondering if my friend Lizzie’s method for baking chicken wings would work on ribs (it works great on drumsticks!) but without the help of nice fatty chicken skin I wasn’t sure if the ribs would get crispy. Then I found a recipe that slathered whole racks of ribs with mayo before dredging them in flour and baking them so I thought I’d try doing this with spare ribs and my salsa az. And they turned out great, nicely crisp and still tender. I would just make sure to shake off more of the excess flour before baking next time.

Ingredients and instructions below…

• 800 gr pork spare ribs
• 1 cup (240 ml) salsa az
  (50/50 mayo and greek yoghurt, splash of soy, tsp dijon, red & black pepper)
• 1 cup (130 gr) self-raising flour
• 2 tbsp corn starch
• 2 tbsp baking powder
• salt & pepper
• sweet chilli sauce

Rinse and dry off the ribs with paper towels. Season with salt & pepper, and rub it in. Prepare the salsa az and put it in a large bowl. Toss the ribs in the salsa and let them sit awhile on a cutting board so that the sauce dries a little and sticks to the ribs.

Heat oven to 180ºC

Mix the flour, cornstarch and baking powder and then coat all the ribs. Place them on a large baking sheet lined with parchment paper, leaving space between them. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 30 minutes, then turn them over and bake for another 30 minutes, turning the heat up to 200ºC.

Let cool a bit and then pour sweet chilli sauce (or whatever other sauce you like) on top.