Instant Pot Baby Back Ribs: A Warning To My Panicked Past Self

Dear Tom of six months ago.

You're currently standing in the meat aisle of the Tesco on Cromwell Road, holding a massive, bloody slab of pork while one of your twin daughters screams because she dropped a slightly damp rice cake on the linoleum, and the other is attempting to unbuckle her pram harness with the terrifying dexterity of a miniature Houdini. You're staring at the baby back ribs because some aggressively cheerful influencer on Instagram claimed that handing a six-month-old a massive bone is the pinnacle of modern parenting. You're sweating through your jumper. You feel completely unhinged.

Put the rice cake in the bin, buy the ribs, and go home.

I know you think you're about to commit a massive parenting error, but I'm writing to you from the future to tell you that these ribs, cooked in that dust-gathering pressure cooker on the kitchen counter, will actually become your saving grace. It just requires surviving a few incredibly stressful meals where you'll stare at your children’s mouths with the intensity of a bomb disposal expert.

Why on earth are we giving them bones

When our health visitor, a lovely woman named Sarah who always looks slightly disappointed in me, casually mentioned that gnawing on a bone is a phenomenal 'resistive teether,' I assumed I had misheard her. Page 82 of the weaning book on our bedside table suggests you simply trust the baby's innate ability to process complex solids, which I found deeply unhelpful while watching one of my daughters swallow a piece of banana whole like a pelican on a documentary.

But apparently, giving them a large, mostly bare rib bone helps them figure out where the back of their mouth is, theoretically pushing the gag reflex further back and strengthening the jaw muscles they'll eventually use to shout at you in public. The logic is sort of beautiful in a primal way. You hand them a prehistoric-looking object, and they just instinctively know they should gnaw the absolute life out of it.

We use the Instant Pot because we've twins, we both work, and we only don't have four hours to lovingly smoke a rack of pork over hickory chips while drinking a craft ale. The pressure cooker absolutely obliterates the connective tissue in about forty-five minutes, leaving you with meat that falls apart if you look at it too aggressively.

The membrane situation is genuinely appalling

Before you do anything else, you've to peel the silver skin off the back of the ribs.

I can't stress enough how viscerally upsetting this task is. It's a thin, translucent layer of connective tissue that looks like something out of a science fiction horror film, and if you leave it on, it turns into a chewy, choking hazard that will ruin your entire week. The trick, which took me three ruined dinners to figure out, is to slide a butter knife under the edge of the membrane on the end bone to loosen it, and then grip the slippery little flap with a piece of paper towel.

When you pull it, it makes a hideous ripping sound that makes my teeth itch, and it requires a surprising amount of upper body strength. Sometimes it comes off in one glorious, satisfying sheet, and you feel like a culinary genius. More often, it shreds into tiny, frustrating strips, and you end up furiously scraping at the bone with your fingernails while muttering curses under your breath as the dog watches you with quiet judgment. Just get it off. All of it.

Salt is the enemy but flavor is not

The recipes you'll find online for pressure-cooker pork will demand massive quantities of brown sugar, liquid smoke, and salt. You have to ignore absolutely all of them.

Our GP, Dr. Evans, cheerfully informed me during our six-month checkup that infant kidneys process high salt loads about as well as I process a hangover at age thirty-five, which is to say, completely disastrously. So the salt is out. The sugar is out. And I’m fairly certain the NHS leaflet I skim-read in the waiting room said something about honey causing infant botulism, which sounds medieval and terrifying, so absolutely zero store-bought barbecue sauce for the babies.

Instead, you’re going to cover the meat in a dry rub of smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, and a tiny bit of black pepper. The smoked paprika does the heavy lifting here, making it taste like it spent the afternoon in a smoker rather than half an hour inside a loud metal cylinder. Pour a cup of low-sodium bone broth and a splash of apple cider vinegar into the bottom of the pot—the vinegar supposedly tenderizes the meat, though honestly, under that much pressure, I think a leather shoe would come out tender.

The terrifying difference between gagging and choking

Here's the part where you'll lose a few years off your life.

The Instant Pot makes the meat incredibly soft, which is brilliant, but you still have to inspect every single piece before you hand it over. Pork ribs have these tiny, brittle pieces of bone and random chunks of unchewable cartilage floating around, and you must hunt them down with your fingers like you’re searching for a lost contact lens on a shaggy rug. Remove the big chunks of fat, pull off the tiny shards of bone, and either shred the soft meat onto their tray or hand them one of the massive bones with just a little bit of meat left on it.

When they put it in their mouths, they're going to gag. They will go red in the face, their eyes will water, and they'll make a sound like a dying seal.

Instead of hovering over their highchairs, ripping the meat out of their greasy little hands at the first cough, and having a minor coronary event, just sit on your hands, take a breath, and let them figure out their own mouths. If they're making noise and going red, they're fine, but if they go completely silent and blue, that's when you panic and intervene, though thankfully the tenderized pressure-cooked pork mostly just dissolves into mush.

Managing the inevitable biohazard zone

Pork grease is going to get everywhere. It will get in their hair, in their ears, under their fingernails, and somehow, inexplicably, on the ceiling.

Don't bother trying to wipe their faces with a damp cloth while they eat; just accept the filth and march them straight to the bath afterward.

To survive the transition from the highchair to the bathroom without ruining the carpet, I've started laying down a massive Pink Cactus Organic Cotton Baby Blanket right in the hallway. It sounds ridiculous to use a lovely blanket as a floor shield, but it's 100% GOTS certified organic cotton, completely breathable, and somehow durable enough to withstand the greasy, chaotic shuffling of two slippery toddlers. It washes out perfectly every single time, getting softer with each wash, and the little blue and green cacti pattern distracts them just long enough for me to wrestle their stained onesies over their heads.

If you're looking for incredibly soft things to protect your sanity (and your floors) from the realities of weaning, you should probably browse the Kianao baby blankets collection.

My mother-in-law, bless her, bought us the Bamboo Colorful Leaves Blanket for the nursery. It’s absolutely gorgeous, incredibly silky, and naturally adapts to their body temperature—but honestly, it’s a bit too pretty and visually busy to risk bringing downstairs anywhere near a barbecue dinner. Keep that one safely in the cot.

Once the chaos is over, the babies are clean, and they’ve collapsed into their cots completely exhausted from wrestling with pig cartilage, I usually wrap them in the Mono Rainbow Bamboo Baby Blanket. The terracotta arches give the nursery a nice minimalist vibe, but more importantly, the earth-toned pattern expertly hides any phantom barbecue sauce stains I inevitably missed during the scrub down.

The pressure cooking specifics because I know you'll forget

Put the trivet in the pot so the meat doesn't boil in its own juices. Place the ribs inside, curling them around the edges like a meaty crown. Lock the lid. Set it to High Pressure for 25 to 30 minutes.

When the alarm goes off, don't immediately flip the valve to let the steam out. You have to let it sit there for about 10 to 15 minutes doing a Natural Pressure Release, which allows the meat fibers to relax. If you quick-release it, the pork seizes up and becomes tough, defeating the entire purpose of this anxiety-inducing exercise.

Pork needs to reach 145°F to be safe, but the Instant Pot basically blasts it with steam at the temperature of the sun, so undercooking is genuinely the least of your worries here.

For your own portion (because you deserve a reward for surviving this), brush the adult ribs with the most sugar-filled, obnoxious barbecue sauce you can find and throw them under the oven broiler for five minutes to get sticky.

It’s messy, it’s loud, and the dog will probably gain three kilos just from sitting under the highchairs. But when you see your tiny humans happily gnawing on a bone like little cave-babies, building the jaw strength they’ll use to articulate exactly why they hate your cooking in ten years, you’ll realize it was totally worth the trouble.

Before you attempt this pork-based madness, make sure your house is properly equipped. Stock up on organic baby essentials so you aren't caught off guard by the sheer volume of mess.

Messy, Honest FAQs About Ribs and Babies

Can I just scrape the store-bought BBQ sauce off the meat before giving it to them?

I tried this once and spent twenty minutes furiously rubbing a piece of pork with a paper towel while the twins screamed at me. It doesn't work. The salt and sugar cook right into the meat fibers under pressure. Plus, if the sauce has honey in it, you're rolling the dice on botulism, which is a stress you easily don't need on a Tuesday evening. Make it plain, sauce your own later.

What if they break off a piece of the bone and swallow it?

This was my exact nightmare. The good news is that large pork rib bones are incredibly dense. Once you've manually picked off the loose, brittle shards during your paranoid inspection phase, the main bone is very hard for a baby with no molars to crack. If they do somehow snap a piece, try to remain calm, hook your finger in the side of their cheek, and fish it out before they figure out what's happening.

Why does my Instant Pot hiss and spit water everywhere when I release the valve?

Because you filled it too high or didn't wait for the natural release. The first time I made this, I impatiently flicked the valve immediately after the timer stopped, and a geyser of pork-scented steam shot directly onto the ceiling, terrifying the dog and setting off the smoke alarm. Give it 15 minutes to cool down internally before you open the vent.

Is it actually safe to give meat this soft to a baby without teeth?

Ironically, it's safer than giving them something hard. My health visitor explained that babies have incredibly hard gums that easily mash up soft foods. Because the pressure cooker destroys the connective tissues, the pork practically dissolves when they mush it against the roof of their mouths. It's actually brilliant for early eaters.

Can I cook them from frozen if I forgot to take them out of the fridge?

You can, but it's deeply annoying. You have to add about 10-15 extra minutes to the cooking time, and the dry spice rub doesn't stick to the frozen block of meat at all, so it just washes off into the water at the bottom of the pot. Just set an alarm on your phone to defrost the pork the night before like a responsible adult.