Beak & Sons BBQ Pork Ribs - Hickory product reviews

Both Ribs and hickory sauce are absolute favourites of mine. BBQ sauce isn't the same if it isn't smokey. As far as I am concerned, smokey is the only way to go! When I saw that these ribs were up for review, I was really excited. I have got to say that I wasn't 100% sure about the fact they were already cooked and all I would have to do is reheat them on the BBQ or in the oven. I wondered if they would be dry or lack some of the quality I would expect if I were to cook ribs from fresh myself. I was more than pleasantly impressed when I served the ribs onto the plates and the meat was just about falling off the bone. Not a hint of dryness to be found.

My husband took great joy in starting up the BBQ to cook the ribs. Spring was just about to hit so it was a great way to begin the BBQ season! We did decide that it could get rather messy, so he chose to cook them on the plate part of the BBQ. After cooking them, he decided that he would prefer to cook them on a tray on the BBQ in the future so that he doesn't lose any of the tasty sauce. Even though he felt that he lost some of the sauce during cooking, we believe that there was still plenty of sauce to enjoy the ribs.

Before cooking the ribs, I weighed them in the silver bag with the ribs inside. They weighed 1063 grams. After we had eaten every scrap of meat off the bones, I re-weighed the bones and silver bag. The total waste was 279 grams (57 grams of which was the bag). I have always wondered how much meat you actually get when you buy ribs. I had assumed that there was a huge amount of waste. After my weighing experiment, I found that we actually had around 789 grams of delicious meat for our family to enjoy (to be fair it would have been a bit less as some of the sauce and water content would most likely have been left on the BBQ after cooking - but you get the picture). The packaging says that there are four 165 gram servings and I think we well and truly achieved that for our meal.


I could taste a bit of a spicy flavour to the sauce, but the kids reckoned there was no spice at all. This is unusual as they would usually find spice in anything! Both kids demolished their share and wanted more. We all felt that the meat fell off the bone really easily and the meat was really tender and easy to eat. Mr Eight even loved the BBQ sauce. He will never eat BBQ sauce so obviously the ribs were a big enough draw card for him to just get in there and enjoy the entire meal. in fact, he actually said that he really enjoyed the sauce.

The whole family simply loved these ribs and I actually found myself checking them out in the supermarket a couple of days after we had the first lot. I was interested in what the cost would be if we were to buy some more in our local Countdown. I found that the boxes were individually weighed and priced. I wasn't expecting that. Usually boxed items come with one price. I did feel, however, that it gave the consumer the chance to opt for a slightly heavier or lighter box and pay accordingly.

I believe that we will purchase these ribs again for a special family meal. If we had guests over for dinner, we would need a second pack and that would make the meal a bit pricey. We did think that it could still be worth it as it would appear to the guests as though we had spent hours in the kitchen preparing the meal, when it only took about 10 minutes on the BBQ!

First thing to say is that we don't eat ribs that much in this family but the packaging was appealing and BBQ Pork Hickory flavour sounded very tempting. The other thing that is appealing is that as they are already slow cooked, heating is really easy and makes for a quick week night meal. The serving size was also good, it was only my partner and I eating them but I think if we'd had my two kids with us, it would have been a satisfying meal between the four of us.

When it came to prepping and heating them, I did find them very messy. It's best to rip open the entire packet, it's probably the easiest way to get the ribs out and scrape all the sauce out. To actually slice them apart was easy enough but I found I had sauce going everywhere which I'm not really a fan of. I heated them up in the fry pan with the remaining sauce poured/scraped/squeezed over them. The glaze was added on near the end.

Taste wise they had a smokey taste to them with a bit of a spicy tang to them, I suspect it would have been a little much for the kids who prefer milder flavours but my partner and I enjoyed it. The flavour is quite rich and satisfying. The meat was very tender and most of it just fell off the bones. The one thing we found and probably why we don't often have ribs, is the feeling like there is a lot more bone than meat. It would be for this reason that we wouldn't be likely to buy them in the future unless maybe they were on special.

My family, particularly my partner and his brother love BBQ Pork Ribs and these are almost always what they order when we go out to a restaurant for dinner if they're on the menu. Several times now I have bought pre-packaged ribs to cook at home from supermarkets, but have always been left disappointed by the quality of these compared to those which we get at restaurants as they tend to be very dry, and they lack in both flavour and meat and for the amount which we tend to pay for this special treat type meal it's a bit of a let down.

When requesting these ribs for review I decided to go with the hickory BBQ pork ribs as these tend to be the flavour we are most used to. My partner was rather excited when I got home and showed him what I had to review asking if we were having them for dinner right then and then, he was left feeling broken hearted when I told him that they were for the following night! Finally, the night came where we were to have the ribs for dinner along with 2 side dishes, one of coleslaw and the other of wedges. I was very impressed to see the leakproof packaging that has been used by Beak & Sons as inside the cardboard box there was a foil packaged which contained the ribs, and much to my happiness the ribs were actually the length of the box itself (not something that happens much these days). The foil package was easy to open as it had a small slit in the top of it to pull open, the hardest part was actually removing the ribs from them as they rather stuck due to all of the yummy sauce they were coated in.

Cooking the ribs couldn't be simpler, there were instructions both on the box and the foil packaging for how to do so using either your oven grill or BBQ. The instructions said for best results to cut the ribs into individual pieces before cooking so this is exactly what I did, I ended up with 13 individual ribs (a good ammount) which I then placed on an oven tray lined with baking paper for ease of cleaning up. Being precooked meant that these just needed to be heated through until nice and hot. As the instructions don't state what temperature to cook these at other than at a hot heat I choose to turn my oven up as hot as possible, I placed the ribs in and kept a close eye on them for the first 5 minutes of cooking, where I then removed them and drizzle over the extra pouch of a sweet sticky glaze and placed them back in the oven for a further 5 minutes to finish off.

The results were very impressive, and after 10 minutes they were just perfect. I can't tell you just how happy my family and I were to eat these ribs which were by far the best ribs we have ever purchased and cooked at home, they meat were succulent and juicy and fell right off the bones and Miss 5 was more than happy to eat them. The sauce was lovely with a nice BBQ taste to it with just a touch of spice. These are definitely going to be going into our supermarket trolley one day soon, and I am happy to have just spotted them at New World this morning so I know where I can find them. The price is more than I'd usually pay for a nights worth of meat for the family but , they are cheaper and much better for us that if we were to buy takeaways so worthwhile for a yummy quick and easy meal, and being NZ made makes it good to know I'm able to support our country by doing so.

I have recently moved house so this product proved difficult to prepare. My BBQ was in need of a clean and I'd misplaced all of my BBQ tools in the move, so that was out of the questions, and the oven in the new house was an old gas oven, and I had yet to learn how to work anything but the stovetop. So that is what I used. I didn't want to butcher the product by heating it in the microwave, so I chucked them in a frying pan and heated them up that way, frequently turning the meat and basting with the sauce.

Now the slightly bowed shape did make it a teeny bit difficult to heat them evenly, but the frequent turning of the meat did the job sufficiently. The sauce thickened quite quickly on the pan and certainly would work better under the grill, as it began to stick. Despite the stickiness of the glaze, it was significantly thinner than the Chinese BBQ variety and proved more difficult to keep it on the meat.

As with the other Beak & Sons products, the ribs came in an aesthetically pleasing cardboard box, with instructions on two different ways to heat the product. Inside the box, was a vacuum-sealed foil pack that gives the ribs a very long shelf-life, but it still very easy to open. As the glaze and meat are all in the same pack, you do have to deal with trying to get all of the glaze out of the pack, by either ripping the pack open completely and scraping it out or rolling it up like a giant toothpaste tube.

Even though I was making up my cooking method on the fly, it is difficult to screw it up. Beak & Sons have done all the hard work, and all I am doing is reheating it, doing 5-10 minutes of heating compared to their several hours of cooking. An incredibly convenient option for cooking, once completed, the meat fell off of the bones with ease. Some ribs I could just wiggle the bone and the meat would slide off like a large sock coming off of a small foot.

The product had no gristle, and the ribs were large. The bones were quite large, some as thick as my thumb, and longer than my fingers, but they had a good layer of meat all the way around. The amount of meat present meant it was very easy to slice the ribs apart without hitting a bone; the whole process was very easy. Flavour-wise, the glaze had a heavy BBQ flavour, with a smokiness, and a slight bit of heat. Tasty, but a very strong flavour glaze, that can be overpowering if you eat too many ribs in one go, so following the recommended serving size.

I found myself in a rut this weekend and without anything really jumping out and interesting my kids and I for lunch and then I remembered that I had this in the fridge, and since my kids had enjoyed the Chinese BBQ Pork, I knew they'd be keen to give these a good go. The box is missing some information that one typically expects, the first being a general weight for the product and the second being what temperature is expected for the oven to be heated at, a key bit of information if this isn't your usual cut of meat. Opening it up, there's one very big foil packet which has the meat inside and a small sauce pouch for using once the meat has cooked for a little while.

Pulling this out is a bit difficult as there is only so much you want to open up the foil packet without risking loosing the sauce everywhere while you cut the ribs up. Once cut, I placed the ribs in an oven proof dish and covered with the remaining sauce from the foil packet overtop before popping in the oven which I had preheated at 180 degrees celceis. I cooked them for slightly more than the initial five minutes stated on the box and then poured on the glaze before popping it back in the oven. There wasn't an outpouring of nice smell from this food but I wasn't too worried about that, and so I served it out to two very excited kids and myself.

The ingredients list spices in the initial sauce and chilli in the sticky glaze, my nine and ten year olds both said they found it spicy but that the flavour of the meat was so nice that they ate it anyways. I found that there was no spice except for two mouthfuls, beyond that, it tasted like a very nice BBQ sauce but not one that I would crave again and again. My kids both stated they liked it and would want to eat it again but preferred the other as there was no spice to it. I'm not sure if we will but this in the future as it didn't have us craving more but it was certainly a nice, easy meal.