The Cuisine Of The People, By The People, For The People

I like food. Just about all types of food. I haven't met a cuisine I haven't been willing to try. There are a few things I don't care for. Raw meat and fish, for example. This probably makes me a bad New Englander, but I can't stand raw oysters. And my Polish ancestors might be inclined to disown me because I'm not a big fan of ham. But all in all, I'm a big fan of food and its preparation. I like having friends over to share a meal. I like watching cooking shows and reading cook books. I like good kitchen equipment.

For all of the food and food related things I like, I really love barbecue. There are a LOT of people that love barbecue. Just about any place you go in the good ol' U. S. of A. you can find a decent barbecue joint. TV shows and books about barbecue are popular and seem to only be increasing in popularity. Barbecue is a sauce, a cooking method, a type of cuisine and an apparatus for cooking food in. Just about every culture has some sort of method for slow cooking and roasting poorer cuts of meat to turn them into delectable treats fit for a king.

Like most things that can be considered truly American, it is a hodge podge of things picked up and adapted from a variety of other cultures and combined into something wonderful. Hell, you can even spell it barbecue, barbeque, bar-b-q or BBQ. They're all good. Very, very good indeed. A history of barbecue is outside the scope of what I want to talk about here. What I am going to write about over the next few blog entries are my thoughts as to why barbecue as a cuisine instills a love that is both deep and wide.

BBQ's Greatest Flaw

Anybody that knows me knows that I love barbecue. They also know that I like to pull things apart, point out the negatives, etc. This doesn't mean that I don't like you, or that I think something is crap. It means that I am simply willing to acknowledge that nothing is perfect. I also firmly believe that you cannot fix a problem until you know what the problem is.

So it is with no shame, nor any diminishment in my love of barbecue, that I can acknowledge that there is a flaw with the cuisine. It struck me a couple of weeks ago as we were doing a nice chuck roast in the crock pot with some potatoes and other veggies on the side. When done, the roast came out in chunks because it couldn't stay together. There was a pile of potatoes swimming in a delicous brown pool of flavor given up by the meat. The potatoes were fished out with a kitchen spider. It was at this point, eyeing the pool of delicious liquid, practically drooling, contemplating the gravy I was about to make and then cover my meal with that a bittersweet thought hit me.

If I had smoked this hunk of beef, THERE WOULD BE NO GRAVY!!

This horrific thought may prompt you to immediately google for "barbecue gravy". Go ahead. I'll be here when you get back.

See? You get recipes where you use barbecue sauce in place of, or mixed with, some sort of stock. Maybe that's barbecue gravy. To me it sounds like just another version of barbecue sauce. Or a way to flavor chicken gravy.

Pondering this conundrum has given me no solution. There are two problems which arise directly from the cooking method. The first is that there is no vessel the food cooks in that will collect the drippings from the meat. The food usually rests on a grate over an open fire. This problem isn't terrible, as you can probably rig up a drip pan below the meat to catch drippings. You will lose a good bit of the crusty bark that a lot of barbecue connoisseurs love, but this is a trade off I would gladly make.

The second problem has to do with all that smoke filling up the cooking chamber. While I love a good hunk of smokey meat, the thought of doing a shot of liquid smoke is vile to me. This is what you would essentially get with any pan of drippings that has been sitting in a smokey chamber for 8 or more hours. If this sounds tasty to you, go ahead. I won't stop you. I certainly won't join you, either.

I'm not looking for a solution here. I don't think it is a problem worth solving. It's just a thought I had as I was plating up my dinner the other night.