A three-time cheftestant on Bravo’s Top Chef as well as a past competitor on Chopped, Iron Chef America and Knife Fight, Filipino-American chef Dale Talde knows how to handle the heat of the kitchen and the spotlight.
Now presiding over a restaurant inside the Tarrytown House Estate on The Hudson outside of NYC dubbed Goosefeather, Talde has recently been heating things up on All Up In My Grill on Tastemade by dishing out cool cookout recipes with an Asian twist that are meant to be prepared in the backyard.
One of those recipes is for char siu BBQ ribs, a dish rooted in the Chinese-style of barbecue you might find at a Cantonese restaurant. Talde served versions at some of his past restaurants using pork shoulder instead of ribs.
“It’s a pretty straightforward recipe. The technique is basically wrapping something, letting it steam in its own juices and then finishing it with a glaze,” Talde tells InsideHook. You’re not meat probing this. You’re not pulling this out at a certain temperature. We’re just wrapping some ribs and forgetting about it. This is a really basic, basic recipe. If I take a piece of meat that’s tough, wrap it in foil and cook it at a moderate temperature, it’s going to get tender and it’s going to taste good regardless of what I’m putting on it.”
But in this case, it’s the sauce Talde is putting on the ribs that really ties the recipe together.
“The char sui barbecue sauce has always really been the star of this dish,” he says. “You can put that sauce on like a shoe and it’ll taste good. This was inspired by the char siu spare ribs you get at a Chinese restaurant. I think there’s a real art to that style of barbecue. I like something to balance the amount of richness that’s in a pork rib or a short rib or a spare rib or anything like that. Give me some sauce. They’re fatty cuts of meat and they need acidity to cut through it. I like a saucy rib.”
Talde also likes the St. Louis-style ribs he specifically selected to be the base of the BBQ recipe.
“I was trying to make it easy on people. St. Louis-style ribs are almost foolproof,” he says. “They have a lot of richness, are really fast and cook more evenly. They’ve been trimmed. When I go get barbecue, I always get ribs. I like things on the bone. It was important to me to start with something easy and that you’d be successful if you did this recipe. That’s what I wanted.”
Dale Talde’s Char Siu BBQ Ribs
Ingredients for the char siu BBQ sauce
- 1 cup hoisin
- 1/4 cup sherry vinegar
- 1/2 cup honey
- 1 tbsp five-spice powder
- 1/4 cup ketchup
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 2 cloves garlic, smashed
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
Instructions
- Add all ingredients into a bowl and mix well.
Ingredients for the ribs
- 2 racks of St. Louis-style ribs
- Char siu BBQ Sauce
- 1/2 cup peanuts, chopped
- 1/4 cup scallions
- 1/4 cup cilantro
Instructions
- Preheat grill to 300 degrees. Place ribs atop a double layer of foil, then rub both sides with char siu BBQ sauce. Wrap tightly in foil.
- Place on grill and cook for about 2.5 hours, until tender but not quite fall off the bone. Carefully unwrap and glaze with char Siu BBQ sauce.
- Remove ribs from foil and return directly onto the grill for another 10-15 minutes, until sauce is caramelized.
- Transfer ribs to a cutting board and let rest. Cut ribs and garnish with peanuts, scallions and cilantro.
“All Up In My Grill ” premiered on June 30th on Tastemade. New episodes will air on Tastemade’s streaming network across platforms like YouTube TV, Samsung TV Plus, VIZIO SmartCast TVs, The Roku Channel and Comcast Xfinity X1. It will also be available on-demand on the Tastemade+ app.
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