The typical rack of pork spare ribs has a lot more than just the ribs. The actual rib section, what you might get at a restaurant or see in barbecue competitions is a portion of the whole spare rib section. If you get to know your ribs and know how to trim them you will be able to smoke or grill great barbecue ribs without any trouble. The trouble comes from the uneven cooking that this big sheet of meat is going to give you, so you need to know how to trim.
There are three parts of the full spare rib rack. The rib section is what we are most interested in, but you don't want to waste a lot of meat so we are going to find out things to do with the other two parts. These parts consist of the skirt (or skirt meat), or the flap that sits in the middle of the rack on the back side. This will burn and cause the ribs to cook unevenly if you leave it here. The last section is the riblets that lay on the bottom edge of the rack. This is basically the base of what would be the pork brisket. There is a lot of cartilage here as well as the sternum which will make this section cook differently than the rack and will make cutting the ribs more difficult so it too needs to go.
The first step is to take a good look at the full rack of ribs. The top side of the rack is the side with the meat. The back side of the rack is the side where you can see the bones and where all the work is going to take place. But before you flip this rack over get a feel for the length of the bones and the point where the ribs stop.
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