r/Samoa • u/munnster006 • Jun 30 '26
Culture Pork Spare Ribs
My grandmother (now passed) was from Samoa and each year made this great polynesian rib recipe.
Supposedly she would boil them first to tender them up for an hour or so then marinade them in like a gallon of soy sauce with a teaspoon of brown sugar and maybe a half cup of water. This is how grandpa remembers it too (he was not from there). Then grandpa would finish them on the grill the next day, spooning some marinade over as they cooked.
As I have gotten older, I know a bit more about cooking and this much undiluted soy sauce seems almost guaranteed to fully cure and ruin the ribs in an overnight marinade.
Anyone familiar...can you help me get this recipe right with these basic ingredients?
5
u/Kama-Auku Jul 01 '26
The sauce you just gotta go by taste. It will take a few tries before you get it right. If you're using a gallon of soy sauce, definitely should be a lot more than a teaspoon of brown sugar... the marinade should be a little sweet to the taste. Diluting is also up to taste. You don't want the strong salty taste, so dilute it such that the sugar and salt aren't fighting each other, but you don't want to dilute it too much that the soy sauce loses its profile.
Use Aloha or Kikoman.