Why big-city barbecue is suddenly better than ever
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> With gas-assisted smokers, pitmasters can load their machines with meat (likely briskets and pork shoulders) at the end of service, add a few logs, and sleep soundly without fear the fire will die during the night. This high-tech approach typically eats up less wood and requires fewer employees to watch over the smoker, two significant pluses in a competitive urban marketplace where skilled pitmasters can be hard to find.
This aside makes me suspect that an equally significant contributor to better quality might simply be the increased human attention. If you've cooked with any degree of rigor, you have probably witnessed the variation in outcomes with the exact same technique. The way to reduce that variation and maintain quality is to pay close attention to the raw materials and adjust the cooking process continuously.
A way to test this hypothesis would be have the same number of people tending a gas-supplemented smoker as well as a traditional one and see how wide the delta is in the meat.
Yes, propane and natural gas have lots of hydrogens to combine with atmospheric oxygen to make water.
Me? I grew up in, one word -- WaPo sit down for this one -- Memphis. That's right, the King of chopped, picnic pork shoulder BBQ from a smoky pit, of iron plates, etc., right, from the town that gave the world the King (aka, Elvis).
Ribs? They were only for the tourists. Beef? Never happened, not in Memphis -- that's a Texas thing.
A month? I left Memphis after I graduated from college -- we're talking age 5-22 eating chopped, picnic pork shoulder BBQ, with sauce, coleslaw, on a soft white bread bun, 1-4 times a week for nearly all those years. In the later years, often with a beer or two. And the better places had some BBQ beans -- they were really good, and never had anything close ever again. And commonly with desert of chocolate ice box pie -- a dark, chocolate custard pie with nice whipped cream on top, pretty good.
Memphis was wall to wall with BBQ joints, all very similar in technique and quality.
But, my brother moved to Knoxpatch (Knoxville), and they do a good version of Memphis BBQ. They also do Carolina BBQ, and it's significantly different -- e.g., it's cooked to a somewhat higher temperature and 'pulled' while Memphis BBQ is chopped into chunks. The Carolina sauce has more vinegar and less of whatever else the Memphis BBQ sauce had.
And the WaPo's gonna tell me what's "better" BBQ? I don't think so!
I also spent the early part of my career around DC, i.e., WaPo land. Got some good grape juice from between Macon and Dijon, some more from Tuscany, a lot of semi-soft cheese, a lot of good French food, some terrific high end Italian food, a lot of US East Coast seafood, and a lot of red-white table cloth red-sauce Italian food. A lot of DC area food. BBQ? Never!
Memphis BBQ -- it was good stuff, was unique, likely still is. WaPo: Tough to tell me about "better" BBQ with just words. Instead need the BBQ!
I have never been to Memphis.
(1) You've never been to Memphis!
(2) BBQ is so good that even done poorly, it's darned good.
(3) Actually (secret, don't tell the others) BBQ, at least the Memphis kind that I know, is not very difficult to do well!
Why is it so good? Well, it's warm, soft, and moist (succulent) and is big on salt, black and/or hot red pepper, sweet, sour, fat, smoke, and the Malliard reaction. So, it hits really hard on nearly all the elements as in:
Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, 'The Elements of Taste'.
For the secret, one of the pillars has been explained by some food chemistry -- keep the proteins in the meat fibers below 185 F. Do most of the cooking with the meat at about 160 F for melting the collagen. Then you do have food safety.
Overheat the meat fibers with the proteins, and they will shrink, get rid of their water, and become not good.
The long cooking times at relatively low temperatures are to melt the collagen without overheating and, thus, ruining the proteins. Supposedly the proteins are always tender; only the collagen is tough. So, melt out the collagen without ruining the proteins. The melted collagen helps make the meat moist and succulent.
I don't know about beef brisket BBQ -- it's a Texas thing. I was in Texas only once, did have some of their beef BBQ, and it was good. But I don't know how they do it. On that trip to Texas, the story went that some early immigrants were German butchers, and they worked out how to BBQ brisket, no doubt, as a way to have people able to like that cut of meat.
For ribs, which I also don't know about, maybe the smoke plays a really important role, e.g., for a smoke ring.
But for Memphis BBQ, picnic pork shoulder, I long suspected that all the smoke was mostly just advertising smoke to attract downwind customers and, really, not very important to the final meat as served. One reason is that about half the shoulder was still covered by the skin. Another reason was that for the rest of the meat, the ratio of surface area exposed to the smoke to meat volume was relatively small.
Another big secret (definitely don't tell anyone this one!): Actually, get a good oven thermometer and carefully adjust your oven to hold about 220 F. Not much higher than 220 F and maybe a little lower (don't want the meat to get over 185 F).
Get a roasting pan and a roasting rack. Put a picnic pork shoulder, say, skin side down, on the rack, with a dry rub on the exposed meat surface if you want, although I doubt that it will contribute to the final product as served, place it in the oven with a meat thermometer deep in the meat but not next to a bone (that might give a misleading reading).
Cook to an internal temperature of 185 F, maybe a little less, not much more, for maybe 16 hours.
Will get a lot of fat and melted collagen in the bottom of the roasting pan.
Place on a cutting board, remove the skin, remove the meat from the bones (the arm bone and the shoulder joint), remove as much fat as you wish, and coarsely chop the rest.
Add favorite red BBQ sauce, likely one with smoke flavor.
Place, likely with some salt and hot sauce, on a white bread bun and top with a simple white coleslaw.
It's good.
Refrigerate what's left; it reheats well in a microwave oven.
For the coleslaw, my quick guess at what Memphis has been doing is to take a head of ordinary green cabbage, quarter it by cutting through the root, and cut out the solid, stiff stem parts. Thinly slice the rest. Add ordinary Ranch dressing and mix. Done.
Last time I bought about 9 pounds of cabbage and used 127 ounces of shredded cabbage and 13.2 cups of dressing. Might cut that back to, say, 12 cups. Got eight quarts.
No doubt Memphis was not using Ranch dressing, but with my guess the results are not too far off. I got the Ranch dressing idea from the back of a package of shredded cabbage for coleslaw.
So, here I've described hated ersatz oven-Q. It's also surprisingly good.
For doing BBQ, picnic pork shoulder is forgiving, from all I've seen much easier than beef or chicken. Should get good results if even roughly follow what I outlined. Even with pork, the shoulder is likely much more forgiving than ribs.
I have no desire to return to Memphis!
If my business does well and I retire, I want to go to, say, New Hampshire, enjoy challenging the winters with a 4 wheel drive car with a lot of road clearance and big, aggressive snow tires, attend operas, concerts, and lectures on mathematical physics in Boston, feast on New England seafood and maybe French, Italian, German, and Chinese food, and, maybe, sometimes BBQ a pork shoulder!
Memphis? Naw.
For the business, as of yesterday, I got all the planned software running. That was a good day. I have a few revisions in mind and then on to my critical review, alpha and beta test, version 1.0, and going live!
looking at what going on with food in austin, i certainly can say, it is not that much about flavour (it was good, but nothing really special,) but rather hype and ability to spin up hype quickly.
I mean, sure, it's content-free, but much like the article, it's content-free in a way that I find entertaining; it doesn't at all leave me with the unpleasant feelings I get after reading a puff-piece about money or business and then reading some trite truism in the comments.
why is that? is it that while I do enjoy BBQ, I don't read about it much, so it seems fresh when writing of the same quality about money or business would seem stale?
You can "low and slow" ribs in a smoker for 12 hours and get a beautiful outcome, or you can do them in a regular oven or even better a pressure cooker and finish in a BBQ or smoker and get the same result. You may be able to produce a superior result in a "legit" setup, but how do you deliver the consistency of that at a reasonable price with unpredictable demand? You can't.
They do, that's how the major BBQ competitions are judged.
They even have techniques to prevent bias or judges recognizing the source of the meat (overlapping panels, hundreds of entrants, randomized category assignment).
When I was a judge, you'd get a lot of 7 and 8s. Those were competition ready samples, definitely great BBQ. But there was a power curve. One or two entrants would hit a 9 or 10, and they were obvious to every judge at the table.
The crews that win are usually strong contenders several years in a row. Luck's going to have a role, like with anything, but the real contenders are there for a reason.
Edit: what I meant by this comment was to emphasize a key distinction between country bbq and city bbq that was neglected by the article: country bbq is by definition distant from the large bbq-loving population. So there may be equally good city bbq joints, but there are a number of (individual) parties in whose interest it is to keep them secret.
Do this a few times and you maybe start to get wise to the idea that raving about your new hangout isn't very smart if you want to continue going there on a regular basis.