Smoking baby back ribs is a long-winded, full-day-by-the-barbecue project. To prepare for it, you’ll need to assemble a long-billed cap, folding chairs and your favorite podcasts and people — a couple of friends willing to brave the heat, praise the smoking meat and bring you cold beverages (read: beer). It will be a hard (read: relaxing and fun) day in the sun, but your dedication will be rewarded!

Here we use the 2:2:1 method: Basically, you smoke the ribs for 2 hours, wrap them in heavy aluminum foil and cook them for another 2 hours, and then finish them unwrapped for 1 hour. You’ll want to keep the smoker at 250 F throughout the whole process.

After cooking in smoke and low heat for several hours, the ribs emerge fork-tender, chewy and intensely flavorful. All that smoke, spice and tangy-sweet barbecue sauce permeates the meat right down to the bone. We love how crispy the ribs get in the smoker, too. In part, that’s because we slather them in barbecue sauce while they’re cooking (rather than after), so it bakes on to the ribs. Side benefit: these ribs are a little less messy than most, which is great because you’re going to want to gnaw the meat off the bone.

Tip: Take the number of servings this recipe yields with a grain of salt and just go ahead and make a double batch of ribs. In the L&B Test Kitchen, our tasters gobbled up every single rib — no Minnesota nice here. Would a rack per person be too much? No.