Burlington Ribfest

Billed as the largest Ribfest in Canada, the Burlington Ribfest seemed worth checking out. We headed out early to avoid the awful traffic on the 403/QEW overlap and we indeed managed to avoid the worst of it.

As we drove down towards the lake in Burlington, I was somewhat surprised that it actually seemed nice. Janice, who frequents the industrial wasteland portion of Burlington/Hamilton, agreed that it was nice although it wasn't a surprise for her as she ribfested here last year.

Now, in terms of the ribs, there were a lot of ribbers. An overwhelming number in fact. We recognized some from earlier ribbings but we wanted to try something different. We spied Bibb's which Janice recognized from chowhound discussions. Their claim to fame here is that they have the only baby back ribs in the park. As a result they charge $1 more. Janice and I may like ribs but we're certainly not rib experts. Despite the dollar we figured we'd try out these "baby back" ribs. After getting over the initial disappointment that you seem to get fewer ribs in a baby back rib rack, we found that the ribs were very meaty. There was possibly a little too much fat for our liking but overall the sauce was good, the ribs tasty and we enjoyed the rack. The sides (beans and 'slaw) were also good and the slaw was fridge-cold which is always nice from a food poisoning-prevention perspective.

Anyway, this is probably the last ribfest for us this year. Will we back to Burlington ribfest next year? Maybe, the ribs were decent and given the selection, it seems like there are other up and coming ribbers that we need to check out.

BBQ Ribs @ Home

$20 at Costco will get you two full racks of pork side ribs! A pretty good value when you consider that half that will cost you $25 at most restaurants.

I put on a rub of paprika, brown sugar & cumin, wrapped in foil and baked for 3 hours at 275 in the oven. Then rested for about 15 and onto the bbq for about 15 min with sauce for the last few minutes. Yummy!

Famous Dave's BBQ

This place is seriously tasty! I guess that's why it's taken over the US in the form of either franchises or chains??

$25 including tax, tip and a Sam Adams beer at the Duluth location got me:

- 1/2 rack of ribs. About 7 fall off the bone ribs with delicious bbq sauce. Perfectly cooked and lots of flavor
- 1/3 cob of overcooked corn
- tasty cornbread muffin - so moist that butter not required
- Creamy coleslaw...mmm
- BBQ beans - real meaty chunks in there with some chipotle flavor
- My choice of 4 bbq sauces on the side. The "regular" sauce was best, but I also tried out the sweet and the texas style.

Here's the web-site.

Bofinger (Montreal)

I am 2/3 at Bofinger, so I thought those odds were good enough to warrant a repeat visit. See my previous post on the 1/3 day.

Today was moderately tasty, although a bit pricey. $11.50 purchased:

• 2 tasty although small-ish & fatty pork ribs. Texas bbq sauce recommended. Probably only a couple of ounces of actual edible meat on there
• 1 awesome piece of garlicky Texas toast
• large heaping of vinegary cole slaw
• small fountain pop

We Eat Toronto Goes Southern US

I actually followed up on vague weekend plans and made some slow cooker pulled pork. I went to the Internet for help and ended up using a Canadian Living Recipe. But thanks to the Crockpot Lady for inspiration!

Procurement of the pork shoulder proved to be difficult in Toronto, although as the KP commented in the previous post, it seems pork shoulder procurement in Sarnia is far easier.

No luck at the No Frills, so I walked over to St. Lawrence market. Even there, I did not see anything labelled as pork shoulder. I asked a couple meat vendors and not much help. Finally, I saw a $2/lb item marked as "pork roast". I bought the smallest one I could find ($6 all together) and came home. I figured worst case scenario would be sliced bbq flavored pork roast item?

The second real dilemma proved to be dealing with the thick layer of fat surrounding the meat. The Canadian Living recipe did not provide much guidance here, so I got out a couple of knives and tried to de-fat the thing. After 5 min and 1/10 done, I packed it in and went onto the searing step. I am sure the fat would make things yummier, but I thought some incremental tastiness is probably not worth a heart attack and/or chubbiness.

Fat removal proved to be much, much easier after searing the meat. After brewing up the tomato sauce, it was crockpot time.


Cooking time was about 8 hours on low. In the end, I did appear to have actually purchased "pork shoulder" because the meat pulled apart beautifully! Note to self - all pork roasts are actually shoulders!

In the meantime, I further boiled down the sauce, adjusted the seasonings (ok I admit to dumping in most of a bottle of purchased bbq sauce and a good amount of chipotles in adobo sauce) and added the pulled pork back in.

I don't think I would go with the Canadian Living recipe next time - tomato paste & sauce was probably overkill and not enough "other" stuff to overcome tomato flavor.

We ate the pork in a sandwich with Ian's home-made whole wheat honey bread, collard greens and corn for a Southern influenced meal.




Anyone want to come over for leftovers? Seriously...we have a lot of leftovers! Pulled pork sandwiches round 2 and tacos are coming up! Awesome value for about ~$8 for pork + sauce items.

Bofinger (Montreal)

This joint is pretty tasty (ribs are ok), pulled pork sandwich #1 good. I went for sandwich #2 this week and basically bit into something really hard and bone like. It did indeed appear to be bone. I spit it out and made a break for it.

I have no idea how that would end up in a pulled pork sandwich. I am now somewhat sad, this place was getting into the regular rotation + it's good value because I sandwich and side for $9 is enough for 2-3 meals!

Baby Back Ribs @ Home

Pretty much the easiest thing. I covered the pan in foil and cooked @ 300 F for 3 hours. Then I put some BBQ sauce on and broiled for about 15! Mmm.

Montana's Tastiness

As part of some airport pick-up action/gift certificate spending mission, we hit up Montana's by the airport.

For a mere $9 including tax & tip, we had a big plate of tasty cheese nachos (double salsa, no sour cream), and a half rack of side ribs with fries and baked beans on the side. Ian also had a cola.

St Louis

Yesterday Ian and I were rather lazy post nap and decided to hit up the St. Louis rib and wing joint basically attached to the building across the street from us. Despite the rather limited menu, the place is always busy..even when the Jays are out of town.

Ian and I both had the half rack of ribs with fries special for $10.95. It was a decent amount of food, although not enough bbq sauce. Ian had a pint of steamwhistle, but felt that due to the shape of the special steam pint glass, he got kinda ripped off.

The mints at the end were tasty and equally delightful were the plentiful hand wipe thingies.

That's about it. Sorry nothing funny to report.

Ribs in the Oven

Ian and I walked over to the St. Lawrence Market yesterday and found some meaty looking pork back ribs for about $4.50/lb. The only problem was, the butcher wouldn't cut in half for us and we didn't want to buy $35 of meat for the two of us for dinner. We walked over to the next meat shop and bought a full rack of baby back for $7.50. Here's the little guys stacked up.




The marinade/rub had some brown sugar, soy sauce, oil, garlic, cilantro and chinese five spice powder...mmmm..








The home-made sauce wasn't so hot, so I ended up doing a blind taste test with Ian. The half home-made, half PC sauce won out!


Here's the final result.

BBQ Rib Showdown

Now that I am carnivorous, I am always searching for tasty bbq ribs. The Americans seem to be hard-core and use the word BBQ as a verb. What the Canadians call bbq is actually a grill.

Anywho, I was in Birmingham last week and went to Dreamland. It is quite the mini-chain down there and anyone who likes BBQ seems to be obsessed with this place. The first thing they bring is a plate of wonderbread and some bbq sauce. I didn't quite know what to do with this, so I dipped some bread into the sauce - it was alright - about as good as you would expect wonder bread to be. Then the 1/2 rack of ribs came out. I was a bit disappointed. The actual rib part of it was ok, but I'm not really sure what the other meat was that was clinging to the ribs. It was a combo of fat and gristle. Good thing I ordered the cole-slaw and banana pudding or I would have walked away hungry. Decent value for about $13 I think??

Then, Ian and I went on a camping adventure in the Adirondacks this weekend and spied the "Tail of the Pup BBQ" joint near Saranac lake. It was quite the monstrosity with about 10 buildings in the log cabin style, 3-4 huge tents, live band etc. I started with a Saranac Lake Pale Ale for $4. I had a full rack of ribs for $16 came with choice of two sides - I went with baked beans and cornbread. Beans were a little cold and cornbread was puny! Ribs were ok, as with dreamland - hardly any meat on them. Again some mystery cartiledy stuff on there.

Ian ordered the "meat lovers" plate - came with a piece of chicken, 1/2 rack of ribs, pulled pork and beef brisket. He ordered corn of the cob and cole-slaw as his sides. A fantastic deal for $19!! He seems to have gotten lucky and got some really good ribs - probably more meat on his half rack than my full.

All in all pretty decent and I would go back again but this time order the meat lovers plate!

Lone Star

To cheer ourselves up after the EQ3 fiasco, we headed over to Lone star. The free tortilla chips and salsa at the start are fun and they seem to have moderately improved the salsa from last time.

We shared an order of steak and chicken fajitas for $19. It was more food than two people really should eat. Came with fixins - some veggies, rice, beans, guac, tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, sour cream etc. The best part is the home-made tortilla machine! Ian said that if we get a house, he is going to buy a tortilla machine. We'll see....

The Southern 4-fecta

I am really trying to use the word "Tri-fecta" but then I realized that I actually wanted to talk about 4 things. Ian my human dictionary is not here :(

Anyway, I am departing Birmingham this afternoon and am pleased that we managed to hit up the 4 food groups down here.

1. Seafood
2. Steakhouse
3. Mexicain
4. Ribs

We went to "Habanero" Mexicain near the plant where I'm working at. It seems to be a local mini chain type thing. It was extreme cheap eating at it's best. A been burrito, a cheese flatula and a salad with lots of guacomole for a mere $6.25. About the same pricing for all the other stuff too. Reasonably tasty and certainly more authentic than something like the "lone star" and you could even put "sneaky dees" or that mexicain mini-chain in Edmonton in there too (forget the name).

Then it was off for some ribs last night. Forget the name of the place, but it was in the galleria. The place was PACKED! It was crazy! They even had a rib drive through. I guess my vegetarian eating has now officially come to an end as I partook in a half rack of baby back ribs with coleslaw, baked beans and some cornbread. The sides were among the best I've eaten, but the ribs were somewhat dissapointing. Kinda chewy?? The other's didn't really like either.

The other guys all had a full rack. The ribs came on a large plate of their own. Then the side dishes came out on another plate. It was pretty gross. At least my half rack meal was all contained on one plate. One guy ate all his food, a few large glasses of lemonaide, and a piece of lemon meringue pie. That level of food consumption really is impressive!

St. Louis

We live right by a relatively new St. Louis rib and wing place and so far have resisted heading over. They have a rather limited menu, but that doesn't seem to stop the beer/bar food customers from flocking to the place at all hours of the day.


I ended up arriving pretty late last night and was hungry, so we finally decided to give it a try. To start we had pints of mooosehead since they were having a special where you get cute glass moose coaster and a chance to win some sort of bbq.




Ian had chicken fingers and fries. I thought that his sweet and sour sauce was particularly tasty, but then Ian pointed out that is was because it was actually plum sauce.

I had the nachos. First layer was reasonably tasty- had lots of cheese, lettuce, tomato, jalepeno and green pepper. Came with salsa. After eating the top layer, I noticed that I had some kinda gross cheesy sauce on my finger and when I further investigated, it seemed as though they squirted some fake cheese product on the second layer on nachos. Perhaps real cheese doesn't melt down there?? The nastiness factor was pretty high and needless to say I stopped eating. At $35 for 2 beer and so-so food I don't think that we'll be back anytime soon.

Tony Roma's

My group had a Christmas Lunch on Wednesday at Tony Roma's. It started off poorly with a lost reservation for 25, but fortunately we got there somewhat early and they accomodated us. I had the honey bbq salmon with mashed potatoes and cole slaw. Fish was extremely overcooked, but aside from that, meal was ok. Not a great deal for about $16-$20 per entree.

Cookies and Montana's

I went to a distinguished lecture at school in the late afternoon yesterday. The main distinguishing feature of these lectures (or at least this one) are the cookies and milk. Despite our early dinner plans I went a little overboard and ended up having 8 or so cookies. The lesson I took from this lecture was that's too many cookies.

Anyway, after meeting up in Mississauga we decided to to go to Montana's for the annual pre-Ice Dog game dinner. Due to the cookie fiasco, I didn't feel up to a full thing of ribs so I went for the rib tips. They were pretty good. Rib tips really don't get enough credit. The meat to bone ( or equivalently the meat to work ratio) is quite favorable. Janice had the nacho's as usual and they were of usual tastiness. Again as a result of the cookie fiasco we didn't get the mud pie. Possibly a regret. Overall decent food but it didn't come cheap.