Montgomery Inn Barbecue

Oy. I love food samples. I love trying new things that might not be on my radar.

The downside to food samples is that sometimes it takes me a while to do the sampling. I hate wasting food, and there's only so much that I can eat every day.

So when I got an amazing box of samples from Mongomery Inn, it took me a while to get through all the goodies.

Everything came frozen (well, except the sauce, which was just chilled from keeping company with the frozen goods) so it was safe for eating soon or for tucking into the freezer for later.

First, there was barbecue sauce in several flavors. Then, pre-cooked racks of ribs that just needed to be heated. A container of pulled pork arrived, too, as well as some baked beans.

I started with the ribs. They're seriously fall-off-the-bone, to the point where if I heated them and tried to cut them into individual ribs, they didn't hang onto the bones at all. Then I figured out that if I wanted to eat ribs on the bone, I could cut them while cold, then heat them to serving temp. The meat still fell right off the bone, but it was finger food rather than fork food.

I thought the rub was a little salty for my taste, but not terribly so. I slathered the ribs with the sauce before I heated them up, but I'm sure they would have been fine with just the rub. Yum!

The pulled pork was great for easy dinners, since all I had to do was heat it up and throw it on a bun. Since I like sauce ... I added more sauce to the top (did I mention that they sent me sauce? Yeah, they did). The meat was perfect for those sandwiches, and cooked to tenderness, but not dry or stringy. Seriously, all you need is buns and you're ready to go.

Last was the beans. I wasn't expecting much, but I was sooooo wrong. The beans said they included brisket, which had me imagining some dry shredded meat, but instead there were pieces of super-tender brisket along with some porky goodness as well. These were sweet with just a little kick. These are the beans that you order in bulk and bring to every potluck, where you tell people it's an old family recipe that you can't divulge. Seriously. These were insanely good.

The Montgomery Inn Barbecue Sauces are also available on Amazon, if you're looking for a new sauce to try for your own ribs, chicken, pork, whatever. But those beans ... so freaking good.