AirBraaiday: How to meat a spare rib challenge — in the air fryer

How to phrase this while avoiding naming the brand just yet? Three packs of pork braai ribs of varying descriptions were escorted to my front door by a nice man driving a courier vehicle…

The KwaZulu-Natal based pork specialists — pork bangers, bacon, polony, ham, and pork spare ribs — are in fact based in Estcourt, which is sometimes referred to as the Gateway to the Drakensberg.

Eskort, the company, began as the Farmers’ Co-operative Bacon Company Ltd in 1917, after a group of nine people met at the Plough Hotel in Estcourt to consider the idea of forming a bacon curing factory. Two years later, the first bacon exports headed for the UK.

A perusal of its website suggests that Eskort is on a serious expansion drive into its own line of butcheries which they claim they will bring to “every corner” of South Africa. While success should not be sniffed at, let’s hope that this kind of growth is not at the expense of our local butcheries, which are already having to face off competition from the giant grocers.

If you care about this, please use your local butchery. A butcher who is approached for advice and help is a butcher who feels respected. They will be delighted to advise, and to saw through those bones for you. Good butchers also know their meat cuts — you can ask them if the cut in your hand needs slow or long cooking, and they may even have a favourite recipe to suggest for it.

This marketing campaign is undeniably colourful. On Thursdays for the next few weeks, you may find an Eskort “Rib Rack Shack” in your ’hood, or not, depending on where you live. There are 30 of these pop-ups, promising fall-off-the-bone ribs. “The best ribs everrrrr” is the pledge, give or take the number of rrrrrs. Well, that’s for you to decide. Other than that, they want you to leave messier(rrrrr) than when you arrived, which seems likely. Maybe take a bib.

Anyway, what are they like? We braaied some, and I crisped others in an air fryer, after cutting them into portions to fit. (A whole rack is unlikely to squeeze in.)

Verdict: they’re tender and undeniably delicious, and the marketing speak is correct in the claim that the marinade is sweet but tangy, and some of them were really meaty, others not quite so much. But the animal’s ribs are what they are, so we can hardly complain about that.

Do I prefer my own ribs to these? I do, not as a boast, but because when we make our own marinade we can add the things we love to taste. My way is to simmer them in a pan of flavourful stock in the oven until tender, drain, let them dry, and finish them on the coals later. The pan liquid can be reduced to thicken and intensify all the flavours, and this can be used as a baste.

Meanwhile, the chiller weather has arrived, so either make pork ribs from scratch to my recipe, or acquire a pack of one of the Eskort products and follow the air fryer instructions.

Tony’s sticky spare ribs

Tony Jackman’s twice-cooked sticky pork ribs. (Photo: Tony Jackman)