Anybody who complains about the horror that is American food has not eaten enough ribs. Sure, the food system that supports the whole enterprise is broken but it has managed to produce enough pork to sustain the world's most regionally diverse barbecuing styles.

American barbecue verges on a religion with ribs as a minor or major deity depending on your state of origin.

Memphis-style barbecue is divided by "wet" and "dry" with dry ribs cooked in a dry rub; and wet ribs with a tomato-y sauce. Carolina-style barbecue is split into Eastern and Western North Carolina with vinegar sauces to the east and tomato based sauce to the west. In Kansas, meat is marinated with a dry rub then smoked with a thick and sweet sauce on the side.

Texas has at least three distinct regional styles (East, Central, and West) and there is some contention as to whether the South Texas style that is borrowed from Mexico constitutes a separate American style. Aficionados will argue that individual cities have spawned their own distinct variations.

In California, Santa Maria offers up the most austere of the American barbecue traditions, with thick cuts of beef slow cooked over coals, seasoned with naught but salt, pepper and garlic.

Last week's Food Safari USA rib recipe was the scant pretense that I needed to spend hours cooking up some barbecue ribs (despite my mention a few weeks ago that I should try some recipes that contain vegetable matter).

Although I'd eaten ribs aplenty in the US, I got hooked on cooking ribs while living in Cambodia. My house there, like most Southeast Asian houses, lacked an oven. To suffice, I bought a TurboOven, a device that looks like a hairdryer attached to fishbowl and is equally effective as said hairdryer contraption for baking. It could however hold its temperature at about 70oC which is ideal for cooking meats extremely slowly. I could play with cooking ribs for 15 hours to my heart's content. At my local market, ribs were cheap.

I'd start dinner at 6 in the morning just to see whether meat could hold its form or fall into a gelatinous mess. For reference, in the TurboOven, the ideal cooking time for ribs was between six and ten hours; and then finishing them with a quick sear over hot coals to develop some crusty bits.

As for the Food Safari ribs, I absolutely failed at even following the recipe. I bought the ribs and the rub ingredients but then recalled a recipe in a book by US barbecuing legend, Steve Raichlen that I'd been meaning to try and I can't keep my own prejudices about regional American barbecue to myself. I love dry ribs. The meatiness and complex smoke flavours that develop from slow-smoking a cut of meat for hours on end can only come to the fore when the ribs are not coated in a sticky barbecue sauce. Serve the sauce on the side and let the diner make up their mind.

Regardless of sauce intolerance, all good ribs are about striking a balance between the meat gripping the bone but still remaining tender. Anyone can cook meat until it falls off the bone; it's a simple matter of cooking it as slowly and as long as possible. The real trick is to develop that falling-off-the-bone tenderness while keeping the meat firmly attached. It's a problem that drives a real barbecue pitmaster mad but one that is well worth exploring.