Before Your Ribs Hit The Grill, Embrace Ina Garten's 'Dirty Little Secret'

Ina Garten, successful cookbook author and culinary icon, is always ready to share her best tried and tested tips that can help your cooking game by taking your dishes from great to outstanding with a few simple changes. Garten's tip for juicy and succulent ribs is no different. In an episode of "Barefoot Contessa" on the Food Network, the culinary icon gets upfront and honest with her top trick for achieving the best barbecue ribs — put them in the oven first.

Because ribs are a naturally tough cut of meat, it is often necessary to cook them for a long time to get them to that beautifully tender and juicy stage. However, if you just cook them on the grill for around an hour and a half, you risk ending up with overly dry and burnt meat. According to Garten, when she "stopped incinerating ribs on the grill and started roasting them first and then barbecuing them, there [was] no going back." So, how can you use the Barefoot Contessa's dirty little secret to make your own fall-off-the-bone barbecue ribs?

Like many other great chefs, including Guy Fieri, Ina Garten recommends using St.Louis-style ribs (also called spare ribs) because they are a good size and have more meat in each segment when compared to baby back ribs. Once you've chosen your rack of ribs, prepare them for the oven by placing them on an aluminum-foil-covered pan, seasoning them with salt and pepper, and coating them with your own easy and fast homemade BBQ sauce.

Then, simply pop them in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour and 45 minutes, or until the meat easily pulls away from the bone with a fork. Cooking the ribs at a low temperature for a longer time helps create steam inside the oven, which tenderizes the meat while keeping it juicy and flavorful. Once the ribs are out of the oven, slather them in another serving of barbecue sauce and then either store them in the fridge to grill later or head outside to the grill to finish them up.

According to Ina Garten, one of her favorite aspects of this barbecue ribs method is that it allows her to do most of the work ahead of time and then simply pop the ribs on the grill right before serving them. Because the ribs will already be almost completely cooked and tender by the time they hit the flames, you only need to grill them covered for about five minutes on each side and then let them rest for 10 minutes before serving. The goal of the grilling step is not necessarily to cook them but instead to add that classic barbecue charred meat flavor.

Now that you have the perfect ribs for your next backyard cookout or family gathering, all you have left to do is make the sides. For this step, you can take another page from Garten's book and make her Instagram-recommended maple baked beans and vegetable coleslaw. Or, since you just cooked a great rack of ribs for everyone, simply assign the rest of your family to worry about bringing sides.