Simple Is Good

One of the greatest appeals to me about barbecue is its simplicity. I have, for as long as I can remember, been a fan of simple. I still am. When it comes to cooking, it is harder to get simpler than barbecue. You need a hunk of meat, some spices, a heat source, a cooking vessel and some time. If you want the opposite of this, find the steps for properly doing a long, brown braise. Don't get me wrong, I would willingly sit down and eat a large plate of braised meat. I'll even from time to time go through the time and effort to cook like this. I like to cook. A lot. But it's this sort of thing that intimidates people that say "I don't know how to cook". So let's talk for a few minutes about the things that simple buys you, in addition to some delicious food.

• Simple is easy to learn. Most people like to feel a sense of accomplishment when they undertake something. This feeling provides positive reinforcement and will often spur further learning.
• Simple is easy to teach. I like to share what I learn if I think other people can make use of it. I like doing things with my kids. I like seeing others succeed. I've always found the best measure of whether I really know something is if I can teach it to others.
• Simple is repeatable. How many times have you sat down to a fancy meal at a restaurant, enjoyed it thoroughly and then tried to recreate it at home, only to be sorely disappointed? Or maybe you made something once that came out fantastic, but have been unable to repeat the experience? My own personal experience with this is an orange sauce I made years and years ago for a homemade orange beef. The sauce was great. I don't know what the hell I did, though, because I've been unable to recreate that particular sauce since.
• Simple is usually economical. The ingredients for simple things tend to be cheap. The materials used are often few and easily available. And there is usually little waste. On the surface simple and complex dishes may appear similar in cost, but if you total up all the effort required from purchase to prep to cooking to cleanup, simple will almost always be a win here, as well.

So to sum it up, simple is cheap, easy and you can get consistently good results. To me it doesn't get much better than that.

Tinker Builder Smoker Guy

One trait that Americans have shared throughout their history is the desire to innovate. To take what is available and to make it better. To mold the land and materials around you into something that is your own. To look at a garbage can and say, "I bet I can cook my dinner in there".

Barbecue not only allows, but strongly encourages, you to tinker. Do a google search for famous barbecue rigs and see what you come up with. Not only big rigs like 18 wheelers, but a wide variety of contraptions that have been built in the never ending quest to quench the unquenchable desire for smokey, meaty goodness.

Another fun one to google is build your own smoker. You will see plans and materials that would fit almost any budget, from the humble upright drum smoker to behemoths that might be able to hold an entire cow. You can even go really old school and just use a shovel, some wood and a pile of rocks. Yes, to do barbecue right you need nothing more than a hole in the ground, some things you can find in your backyard and time. Can you say Luau?

Even recipes put on display a culture the values tinkering and tweaking. How many ways, really, can you mix up ketchup, vinegar, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and perhaps a handful of other spices? Hundreds of ways apparently, judging by the number of recipes one can find for barbecue sauce. And some people would rather do time for murder than willingly part with their particular concoction of paprika, salt, cumin, brown sugar, onion powder, garlic powder and crushed red pepper.

So if you have a desire to build and a love for meat, give barbecue a try if you haven't already. You will be joining a large group of folks that value hard work, creativity, innovation and self-reliance. You will also get some tasty grub out of it and possibly and handful of hungry and appreciative friends to share a delicious meal.

Build it, and they will come.

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.

BBQ on the road

I was in Atlanta on business last week. While there one of our dinner stops was a place called Fat Matt's Rib Shack. It was quite awesome. I had a 1/2 rack of ribs, rum baked beans and a side of cole slaw. It was, in a word, amazing.

Besides the great food and good live music, they had a Christmas pig. It was all lit up with Christmas lights and decked out for the Holidays. This picture is kind of crappy. You gotta see it to believe it.

If you are ever in Atlanta and want some GREAT barbecue (this is the sort of stuff I aspire to cook), you need to stop by this place. It is fantastic.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope you all did too. Sadly all the turkey is gone, but we still have a big pile of mashed potatoes and some wild rice leftovers. Back ribs were on sale at the local grocery, so the smoker is fired up and we are having a couple of slabs of ribs to go with those wonderful Thanksgiving leftovers.

Simple Is Good

One of the things that has attracted me to BBQ as a style of cuisine is that it is simple. I've talked with folks about this off and on over the years. The most recent discussion along these lines I had was with my Dad when he and my Mom and youngest brother were in town a couple of weeks ago. We had my inlaws over as well to celebrate my daughter's birthday and her requests for birthday dinner were hot dogs and pulled pork.

So as I was getting the pork shoulder ready to go in the smoker my Dad and I were talking about food (one of his favorite topics along with stocks, gas prices and the weather) and he made an off handed comment about people overly complicating food. I that is one of the things I loved about barbecue. It's simple and really just requires patience and time.

This got me to thinking a bit more about food in general. Most of the things I REALLY like are not too high up on the food complexity scale. I'll usually take spaghetti and meatballs over scampi, fried chicken over coq au vin or scrambled eggs over Eggs Benedict. It's not that I don't like or appreciate the latter dishes in each pairing, but generally speaking I prefer the simpler dishes. I think this is mostly driven by the joy I find in preparing food for myself and others. The chances of me ever making anything that involves things like wine reduction or truffle oil are close to zero. Meanwhile every piece of fried chicken I ingest I not only get to enjoy, but I get to figure out what parts I really like and apply them to my own preparation. I guess it's a delicious bonus that keeps on giving!

Sometimes I even wonder if the people that say they want and like the fancy, exotic, off-the-wall stuff are being honest, or if they are trying to show off in some way by telling the world what an exquisite palate they have. I have seen this behavior most consistently when we order pizza as a group at any job I've been at. I'm a big fan of the cheese pizza, or something with one or two toppings, like pepperoni, or sausage, or maybe some feta or mushrooms. Pretty simple, straightforward, tasty stuff. And with just one or two items I get to enjoy the flavors I'm in the mood for without having a cacophony in my mouth.

Meanwhile a lot of my co-workers head straight for the specialty or gourmet section of the pizza menu. So we usually end up with 1 or at most 2 of the more mundane run of the mill pizzas and 3 or 4 or more or the fancy pants foo-foo pizza.

Now, and I don't mean to go off on a rant here, but this wouldn't bug me so much if the people that ordered the fancy crap actually ate the fancy crap. But NOOOOOOOOOOO, the pretentious cocksuckers head right for the pepperoni pizza and all grab a couple of slices of that and, maybe, grab one piece of the stuff off the gourmet side of the menu. So by the time the folks that wanted a nice, simple, tasty pizza get to the table, the chances of them getting what they asked for are right around zero. However, there seems to be plenty of the pizza left that is topped with wilted yak penis sauteed in a white wine reduction and a hint of snail entrails.

Somewhere along the way eating, like almost everything else we as a society do, has become as much about image and advertising what a wonderful, complex, complete and fully functioning individual you are as it is about fueling your body and enjoying something delicious with people you care about. If you really like the yak penis and snail entrails, by all means order them and enjoy them. But for all you folks that say you like the exotic stuff but look like a kid taking cough medicine while you eat it, take a good look at what you really like. It's OK to like simple food. Really.

Simple is good.