POSTED: Friday, June 22, 2012 – 8:00pm

UPDATED: Friday, June 22, 2012 – 8:14pm

Barbecue Digest: Don’t whitewash BBQ

Editor’s note: All summer long, the Southern Foodways Alliance – a member-supported organization of more than 800 chefs, academics, writers and eaters devoted to the documentation, study, and celebration the diverse food cultures of the changing American South – will be delving deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. As a loud, proud SFA member, I’m pleased to say that Eatocracy will be partnering with them to share some of their stories. Dig in. – Kat Kinsman, Managing Editor

(CNN) — The coming and passing of National Barbecue Month (commonly called “May” by others) tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth. It’s the month when a lot of media outlets (magazines, newspapers, and television) remind us that barbecue season has officially begun. They mark the occasion by profiling notable pitmasters, sharing recipes and tips, and, as a bonus, providing a roundup of the best barbecue joints in your area or in the entire country.

What’s regularly missing in these features are shout-outs to African Americans. Such omissions are troubling given the overwhelming contribution that African Americans have made, and continue to make, to the American barbecue tradition. Like good barbecue, my annoyance over this subject has been burning like a slow fire, and it hit a flashpoint last year.

The Food Network aired Best in Smoke – a barbecue competition show that featured six contestants, six assistants, one host, three judges…and no black people. Think I’m hypersensitive? Then imagine watching a country music special that only featured interviews with Charley Pride and Darius Rucker. Wouldn’t you think there was something wrong with that picture?

In contrast to mass media outlets like the Food Network, the SFA’s oral history and documentary film initiatives have paid homage to many African-American pitmasters. Check out CUT/CHOP/COOK, a film by Joe York about Rodney Scott of Hemingway, South Carolina. And explore the oral history interviews on the Southern BBQ Trail. Many of them feature African American subjects, from Helen Turner of Tennessee to Gerri and Stephen Grady of North Carolina (and over a dozen more).

Today’s installment comes courtesy of Adrian Miller, a culinary historian, certified barbecue judge and author of an upcoming book about soul food. Follow him on Twitter at @soulfoodscholar.

Delve into more barbecue goodness from the Southern Foodways Alliance blog (http://southernfoodways.blogspot.com/)

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Your Weekly Treat: The Best Barbecue Sauce? Look For The Mustard

The endless arguments over the world’s best barbecue sauce—Texas vs. Memphis vs. North Carolina, vinegar-based versus tomato-based, on and on—often neglect a key alternative: None of the Above. The sauce that is disappearing around my house—on ribs, hot dogs, pork loin, basically on any excuse for food—is Bone Suckin Sweet Hot Mustard Sauce ($7 per 12oz). It is made in the Lexington Dip-style stronghold of western North Carolina, but the inspiration is pure south of the (North Carolina) border.

South Carolina-style mustard-based barbecue sauce can be news even to professionals. “I went to college in Charleston,” remembers Patrick Ford, who serves as marketing director (“and dock hand and truck loader”) for his family’s gourmet food enterprise, which includes the Bone Suckin label. “When I was first there I ordered a barbecue sandwich and it came out yellow. I couldn’t believe it! I sent it back. The owner of the place came out and said ‘You’re not from down here, are you boy?’”

It was the beginning of a culinary love affair. While the Fords’ more traditional tomato-inflected Bone Suckin Sauce has garnered most of the praise and awards, the Sweet Hot Mustard version has become Pat Ford’s personal favorite—“When I say I put it on everything, I mean potato salad, devilled eggs. Everything.”

It is easy to get hooked. The Bone Suckin barbecue sauces are very natural-tasting, like something your Southern grandmother might have put up in a jar next to the pickle relish if she’d been visited by a blinding inspiration. Intriguingly lively and sweet on entry—from molasses and brown sugar—the Sweet Hot Mustard sauce finishes with a crisp, fresh kick from chopped jalapenos that seem to cleanse your palate and prime you for the next bite. Combined with any remotely smoky meat it takes your mouth on a multi-stop journey. And travel can be so broadening…just ask Pat Ford.

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Barbecue: a baptism of fire and smoke

Like your first slippery oyster or hit of white truffle, your first true American barbecue will always stay with you. Mine was at a simple Formica-tabled joint on West 23rd St in New York called Righteous Urban BBQ – Rub for short – back in the middle of the last decade. I remember looking up from my plastic tray of sweet-sticky St Louis style ribs, with a side of pulled pork and a few meaty rib tips, to see the TV chef Mario Batali sitting across the room. I had interviewed him the day before but had not mentioned I was coming here. Now he summoned me over and we sat chatting over our trays of long cooked pork. I told him that I had always wanted to try real US barbecue, and that it was all as good as I’d hoped: that glorious calculus of meat and crisped fat and sauce and smoke was making me very happy indeed. He nodded slowly. “My friend,” he said. “You have come to the right place.”

It says much for the cult of serious barbecue that lots of people will now be shouting at the page: no you hadn’t. You were in entirely the wrong place. It can’t be the real thing on Manhattan Island. Real barbecue has to be eaten next to a smoking pit being fretted over by an old guy called Charcoal Joe or Sauceman Mackenzie, off a dusty road in Texas. It has to be eaten at one of the huge competitions such as the American Royal in Kansas City or the Jack Daniel’s Invitational in Lynchburg, Tennessee, where big men in denim dungarees smoke and grill tons of prime pig and cow across a weekend. And yes, they would have a point. It is country food, not city food, though it can be found there. It has its own subculture and code; but all you really need to know is this. It has almost nothing in common with the shameful things the British do to sausages in seven minutes flat any weekend the sun shows itself. American barbecue is not about fire. It is about indirect heat. It is about smoke. It is about spice rubs and sauces made to secret recipes applied and applied again. Most of all it is about slow. Cooking times are measured in hours and sometimes in days, which results in flavour burrowing deep into tender flesh.

The good news is that I no longer need to go to West 23rd to eat it, for the cult has found disciples in Britain. The small chain Bodeans does a creditable job of knocking out proper pulled pork and ribs (and rather good beef ribs too). There are the Pitt Cue boys, Tom Adams and Jamie Berger, who first plied their trade last summer from a street food van on the banks of the Thames and who now have a permanent site behind Carnaby Street. Jamie Oliver has backed US barbecue star Adam Perry Lang at Barbecoa in the City, Anthony Flinn has opened a rib place in Leeds and the Rib Man is a regular at street food conventions. And in Brighton there’s the BBQ Shack at the grungy World’s End pub, run by British barbecue champion John Critchley. The summer calendar is also full of barbecue contests including Grillstock in Bristol (30 June – 1 July) or the Big BBQ Festival on 23 June at Canvey Island in Essex. It has a top prize of £10,000, the largest ever in the UK. When the big money piles in, you know it’s getting serious.

The appeal of US barbecue, says Tom Adams of Pitt Cue, is simple: “It’s hands on and it’s dirty. There’s an intensity to it that you don’t come across in food very often.” Adams grew up in Hampshire where he built his own smoker on the banks of the local river to cure the local fishermen’s catch. “Soon I was doing pork too.” Then he met Jamie Berger, whose mother is from the southern US state of Georgia. “That’s when it all came together. It’s a satisfying way to cook. You put the meat into the smoker as one thing and 12 hours later it comes out as something else.”

Can anyone do this? Can we all become barbecue pit masters at home? Yes, says Adam Perry Lang of Barbecoa. He is not a classic barbecue boy. He was a restaurant chef in New York who tired of the controlling nature of the kitchens he worked in. “When I first started cooking with fire and smoke it was like meeting this unruly thing.” And yes, he says, people will lecture you on what’s right and what’s wrong. “A lot of these guys from specific areas of America are very loyal to them. But it’s more political than anything else.” Don’t be hidebound by all that, he says. It hasn’t hurt Perry Lang; his pulled pork – long and slow cooked shoulder, properly sauced – has won the Royal. “What matters when cooking low and slow is consistency of temperature. You need to cook at about 120C. And you need to keep your nerve. People worry it’s taking too long. It isn’t.”

In short it is one for the nerds. It’s about multiple processes, endless temperature checks, decisions about types of wood to use, marinades to make, rubs to grind. Which probably explains why it is mostly a male pursuit. The day I first came across John Critchley, at a barbecue competition, almost all of those taking part were burly blokes. There were beards. Lots of them. But Critchley, a big melon-bellied chap with a broad Wigan accent, stood out. He trained as a restaurant chef in the 70s, before heading off across America to DJ with 90s ravers Spiral Tribe. Which was how he found himself in Texas without a job. He went to work in a restaurant and that’s where he learned about barbecue.

I meet him at the World’s End, which is about as close as we can come in this country to a roadside shack. He tells me he’s been up since 3am to get that day’s ribs sorted. I express disbelief. “That’s what it takes,” he says. Outside the kitchen is one of the professional smokers, a big shiny metal cupboard called the Fast Eddie by Cookshack, which can take 45kg of meat. It automatically feeds wood pellets into the oven to keep the level of smoke even and constantly monitors temperature. It costs about £5,000. I ask if you need a piece of kit like this to do the job properly. “No, not at all. It just helps when you’re doing large volume. I do about 120kg of ribs a week, 120kg of pork shoulders and 90kg of brisket.” That amounts to a third of a tonne of meat every seven days. “That’s why I need one of these. But it’s all very doable at home. You just need patience.”

He unwraps some of his brisket from its foil overcoat. It has been cooking since 5pm the previous day, has a deep rub, and a pink tinge from the smoke. I pull at the meat, and slip away quietly to my happy place. He’s also done me ribs, big spares rather than baby backs, glazed with his sauce. Plus there’s a dipping sauce made with tinned peaches and chillies, all blitzed together with a sauce base. I suggest that doesn’t sound very conventional. “I like to experiment. But I think you should know the rules before you break them.”

And there are rules. Critchley takes me through the process for doing his ribs at home. Barbecue takes time and seriousness. There aren’t short cuts. A sausage blackened over burning firelighters on a rainy English summer’s day until it tastes only of petrol is a short cut. This is the real thing. So have a good long read of our recipes, gather your equipment, phone your butcher. And clear a weekend in the diary. Trust me: it’s worth it.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2012

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Barbecue collection boasts 150 sensational recipes

You might not have to cook the same thing twice by following the vision of The Barbecue Collection by the staff at The Canadian Living Test Kitchen.

“Our last barbecue book was a huge seller and we sold over 33,000 copies,” said Tina Anson Mine, executive editor of food and books for Canadian Living, in an interview from the magazine’s offices in Toronto.

“We decided to update and give this rendition a new lease on life and there are more than 100 new barbecue recipes never seen before in all kinds of international flavours.”

The other 50 are reprinted from other publications that Anson Mine says have been hugely popular as well.

One of the most impressive and varied is the chapter on grilling poultry.

Recipes such as Beer-Can Chicken have variations using Greek spices or Italian herbs.

Home grillers are given the opportunity to serve up an easy weeknight Quick Korean Chicken or Coriander Chicken. These recipes are ideal as they can be prepared the night before, held in the refrigerator and grilled the next night for hungry families.

“We have a whole section on barbecue marinades and rubs which can also be prepared in advance to go straight to the grill for supper,” she says.

As the price of steak, lamb and some other meats rises, Anson Mine says research is showing that people are gravitating toward meats like chicken, turkey and pork burgers.

“And there are a lot of barbecue vegan recipes using grilled vegetables,” she notes. “Some of these are marked as side dishes yet they are good as main dishes as well.”

The Barbecue Collection (Transcontinental/ Random House Canada, $32.95) has recipes and dishes for brochettes and kebabs, skewers, burgers, sandwiches and sausages.

“We have some spectacular sausage recipes,” says Anson Mine. One to try is spicy Merguez Sausage, popular in North Africa. Like the others in that chapter it can be made from scratch.

Rounding out the choices are recipes for fish and seafood such as blackened catfish, a seafood Caesar Salad, grilled shrimp, squid, oysters and clams.

The book also gives its readers The Basics, an in-depth introduction which covers the most up-to-date barbecuing techniques.

Here from the book is a recipe for chicken thighs glazed with marmalade.

Marmalade-Glazed Chicken Thighs

Makes 4 servings

2 tbsp (30 mL) lemon juice

1 tbsp (15 mL) extra-virgin olive oil

2 tsp (10 mL) chopped fresh rosemary

1 clove garlic, minced

1/4 tsp (1 mL) EACH salt and pepper

8 boneless skinless chicken thighs, halved crosswise

2 tbsp (30 mL) marmalade

In a bowl, whisk together lemon juice, oil, rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper; toss with chicken until coated. Marinate for 15 minutes, covered, or refrigerated for up to 8 hours.

Reserving any remaining marinade, thread chicken onto double-pronged bamboo skewers or 8 pairs of soaked wooden skewers; brush with marinade. Grill, covered, on greased grill over medium heat, turning once, until juices run clear when chicken is pierced, 12 to 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, microwave marmalade, covered, on high until melted, about 30 seconds. (Or heat in small saucepan over low heat until melted.) Brush skewers with marmalade; grill, turning once, for 1 minute.

Approximate nutrition per serving: 204 calories, 9 g fat, 22 g protein, 8 g carbohydrates, 0 g fibre

The Canadian Press

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Adam Perry Lang. Photo courtesy of Simon Wheeler.

How To Grill Like A Barbecue Champion

Adam Perry Lang is an anomaly (and an all-star) in the culinary world—he’s both a classically trained chef and a barbecue pit master. After starting his career in fine dining restaurants such as Le Cirque and Daniel, Perry Lang discovered his true love was cooking over a fire. Today, he has his own restaurants—London’s Barbecoa and New York’s famed rib shack Daisy May’s Barbecue USA—and he sources the meat for Mario Batali’s Carnevino in Las Vegas. He’s also the author of three books and a champion of the Kansas City American Royal, a competition known as the “World Series of Barbecue.” Forbes Travel Guide talked with Perry Lang to get his tips on the best summer grilling.

In your latest book, Charred Scruffed, you use some impressive barbecue techniques. What’s an easy way to step up our own grilling at home?

It’s not so much what you’re cooking, it’s how you’re handling it. How do you bring out the best qualities that it has? For example, when applying the barbecue sauce, you can put in a touch of water so it reduces down onto the item that you’re cooking. So you can lacquer on flavor and build flavors, as opposed to putting it all on at once. Barbecue is a finished sauce, so how do you make it unfinished? You add a bit of water to it and you cook it down onto the item, so it kind of adheres and creates a crust.

I’ll also season in stages. I’ll season a little bit in the beginning and then toward the end, because sometimes the salt can kind of get dissolved and sometimes you want it to be a bit raw.

What kinds of seasonings are best?

Sometimes elaborate spices are fun to do, but in this case, all you need are four to bring out what you want: salt, garlic salt, black pepper, cayenne.

Does the type of grill you have matter?

I think it does. People ask me all the time which barbecue grill they should get, and I first ask, what would you use the most? That’s first and foremost. Then, spend as much as you can afford—and then spend a little bit more. But also, look for something that has really great heat recovery. I personally like cooking with wood and charcoal. It’s a freight train to get going. You kind of heat it up, as opposed to just turning on a gas or electric grill. But it really holds and retains its heat well. So as a result you have a very responsive grill, and you have the added benefit of the flavor.

How is the flavor different with charcoal?

When the juices drip down and hit the coals, they instantly vaporize and then they find their way back up to the meat. You get some of that from the newer gas grills, which have these metal bars that will heat up underneath and create the same effect. But it’s not the same because there are some other flavor properties that come off smoke and charcoal that give it a distinctive flavor.

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barbecue

Why a barbecue could cost you thousands

We’ve had something of a heat wave in the final two weeks of May, with glorious sunshine sending temperatures soaring towards 30°C.

Although barbecue is a cornerstone of the British summer, they can hit us hard in the pocket. As well as the cost of the grill, charcoal briquettes and firelighters (or gas canisters), there’s also the expense of buying meat, fish, vegetables and various accompaniments.

What’s more, barbecues can be something of a financial hazard, too. In fact, according to a new survey from insurer MORE THN, boozy barbies have caused around £617 million in fire damage to UK homes.

Rolled out across the UK’s 26 million households, this means that over £617 million of fire damage has been caused by “Britain’s boozy grillers”. Overall, nearly 1.5 million households have made a home insurance claim for barbecue-related fire damage in the past two years.

With the barbecue season now in full swing, MORE THN warns that this summer could see as many as 904,000 BBQ fires, leading to a surge in fire-related claims on buildings and contents policies.

A sizzling summer of sport

Of course, many Brits need little encouragement to break out the barbie and beers. At the first sign of sunshine, millions of us get grilling and sizzling. Alas, MORE THN reckons that one in four grillers (25%) is drunk every time the flames are fired up.

As well as being a health hazard, this can also be a very costly financial blunder. Many modern gardens are packed with valuable, yet flammable, items.

With a big summer of sport, coupled with the extra bank holiday for the Diamond Jubilee, there are going to be plenty of excuses for cracking open a bottle alongside a barbecue.

That’s why MORE THN has warned barbecue enthusiasts across the UK to beware of ‘inebriated infernos’ for the next three months. With four-fifths (80%) of BBQ chefs being male, this is a big problem for Britain’s dads and lads. Nevertheless, women grillers cause more damage (£525 each) than males (£383).

Top tips for a safer barbecue

With a sizzling summer ahead of us, follow this safety advice whether you’re a newbie barbecue chef and veteran griller.

1. Never barbecue when drunk. Even if you don’t set your garden alight, your impaired judgment could lead to food poisoning from undercooked meat, or nasty burns to your exposed skin.
2. Watch out for wooden hazards. Keep your barbecue well away from sheds, fences and trees.
3. Never use petrol or other accelerants to ignite a barbecue. Stick to firelighters and coals (or spark-lit gas flames).
4. Disposable barbecues are fires waiting to happen. Always place them on non-flammable surfaces and completely extinguish them before disposal.
5. Brave the smoke: never leave a barbecue unattended while in use.

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Bill & Sheila’s Barbecue

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Recommended Reading

• dessert
• Mixed Grill with Chimichurri
• Barbecue Digest: Don't whitewash BBQ
• Barbecue University Part 2: Three Delicious Days Of Grilling
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• Barbecue: a baptism of fire and smoke
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• Google+1