Mother's Day

My mother in law requested baby back ribs for Mother's Day, so I smoke a couple of racks of those. In addition I got 4 racks of spare ribs and did those as well. I cut them into St. Louis ribs and smoked the ribs and the rib ends together. Everybody was pleased with the outcome. One of the folks at dinner said he didn't usually like ribs. He proceeded to have 4 serviings.

If you're interested in how to trim a rack of spare ribs, check this out.

Having a good knife is key to getting this done. And that membrane can be tough to pull off.

Who Are You?

Barbecue allows, nay, encourages, you to announce your presence with authority.

The only other food that has more cook offs that I can think of is chili. Barbecue has several shows on various food channels (That we, as a society, have several TV channels devoted to the preparation and consumption of food is something to ponder) where they follow folks around the country that participate in barbecue cook offs  Contestants from around the nation descend on a spot and set up camp, often times cooking over an entire weekend. Various cuts of meat are combined with what has to be an infinite combination of few spices and are cooked on a wide variety of contraptions for judges to taste and figure out who the winner is. Based on what I've seen the chefs themselves are as varied as the dishes they prepare.

Every barbecue place has its own secret sauce or rub that seems to adorn almost everything that gets served to their eager customers. I've lost count of the books, magazine articles and TV shows where somebody asks a pit master or chef what is in their sauce or rub, only to be given some version of the response "If I told you I would have to kill you." These things are closely guarded secrets. In some cases the recipes have been handed down for generations.

So when you barbecue, make an effort to put a stamp on your cooking that is uniquely you. After you do a few basic, successful dishes, search for an inspiration. You like citrus? Add some orange zest or orange juice to your sauce. You like spicy? Add a pile of cayenne to your rub. Got a sweet tooth? Try using honey, coke or some other sweet liquid in your sauce. Small tweaks go a long way in barbecue. Find one that is you and incorporate it into your next dish.

BBQ Is Social

I may not like "people", but I care deeply for my friends. And I like to cook. And there is no such things, from what I have seen, as a small amount of barbecue. A small pork shoulder is 8 pounds. A small brisket is still a few pounds of meat.  And who in their right mind would just want one rib?

So most of the things you would smoke come in large quantities. So what do you do with all of that food? You could have pork shoulder every meal for a week and a half. Or, better yet, you can invite some friends over.

There are two main reasons why barbecue, more than most methods of cooking, are conducive to social gatherings

1. As stated above, prime barbecue food involves mass quantities. It's not uncommon for me to have over 20 pounds of meat in the smoker at any one time.
2. The cooking method is about as close to set it and forget it as you can get. Load up the fuel, light it, put the meat on when the fire is ready, then come back in 3 to 12 hours (depending on what you are cooking) when it is done.

Most days when I'm cooking for friends it goes something like this:

1. Get up early and start the fire.
2. Fire is ready, put the meat on.
3. Go take a nap for an hour or two.
4. Get up again and clean the house, get the other food ready, run out to forget the 3 things that everybody always seems to forget when they are having guests over.
5. Guests come over. Do whatever it is you do with your guests that is fun.
6. Pull food off the smoker.
7. Eat.
8. Go do more fun stuff.
9. Eat some more.
10. Guests leave.
11. Look at the pile of dishes and say screw it, they aren't going anywhere, I'll clean them tomorrow.

As much as I love grilling, grilling takes time away from your guests because you have to be there tending the food. Other than removing the food from the fire and pulling the pork, cutting the brisket, etc. the time away from your guests is minimal. Hell, a nap is usually part of the cooking process!

I love having my friends over. I love that they enjoy what I cook. And I love that I can hang out with them while the meal is being prepared. It doesn't get any better than that!

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.