Note: The first three steps of this recipe should ideally be completed several hours before the ribs are to be cooked. The uncooked ribs should be refrigerated overnight after coating them in the rub.

1. Prepare the rub the night before you plan to cook the ribs: Combine all ingredients in a large mixing bowl and stir well until completely combined.
2. Afterwards, coat the ribs as follows: Take the spare ribs out of the package. Clean them by rinsing them, then pat them dry. Remove any extra fat attached to the ribs. It’s advised that you chop the ribs in half to make them simpler to handle (simply slice into the middle of two ribs to get this done). Apply the rub to the two sides of the ribs using your hands, focus on the meatier side during this process. You should use a minimum of ¼ cup of the rub, although more can be used if desired.
3. Put the ribs inside a sturdy food-storage bag (freezer bags work well for this), push out enough air (as much as possible), and close the bag tightly. Refrigerate the ribs this way for at least one night.
4. Heat up your oven to 225 degrees F, do this before you begin to cook the ribs, but ensure that you have taken the ribs out of the refrigerator half an hour before this time.
5. Enclose the ribs within aluminum foil to keep them warm. Place the ribs with the bony side facing downwards (and the meaty side up) on a sheet pan, then leave them to bake in the preheated oven. Make sure your timer is set for three hours.
6. Take the sheet pan containing the ribs out of the oven as soon as the timer beeps. Pull a portion of the foil gently aside, then place an instant-read thermometer’s probe between two bones in the meaty area of the ribcage (make sure to avoid contact between the bone and the probe; the bone will typically register a hotter temperature than the meat).
7. Continue with the next step if the thermometer registers 170 degrees F. If not, then you need to rewrap the ribs and put them back into the oven if they aren’t done yet. In a half-hour or so, double-check them. (Choose how much additional time to leave the ribs in the oven based on your own discretion).  If the ribs have reached 165 degrees, then you’ll know that they will require significantly less additional time compared to being at 150 degrees.)
8. Turn down the oven’s temperature to 180 degrees F and set  2 or 3 hours on your timer once the ribs have reached 170 degrees F. (At this point, the ribs are “done,” but additional cooking removes more of the cartilage component, resulting in more tender ribs).
9. Take the ribs out of the oven once the timer goes off. Preheat the oven to broil mode. Take the aluminum foil off the ribs (do this carefully — there will be liquids), brush the ribs with a thin layer of barbecue sauce, and broil them till the barbecue sauce just starts to burn, about 10 minutes. If you enjoy burnt ribs, you might want to cook the ribs a little longer.
10. Take the ribs out of the oven, then cut them into single servings on a cutting board (at this point, the meat will have a fall-off-the-bone quality, so the cutting process should be easy).  Serve the ribs with barbeque sauce on the side.

The entire cooking time for this oven-baked rib recipe is 5 to 6 hours, excluding the prep time. This may seem like a lengthy period but the best results with oven-baked rib recipes come from cooking them low and slow.

If you’d like to see more recipe ideas for ribs in the oven, then we recommend checking out this video recipe.