  Left: Owings Mills architect Brad Hammond, proud member of the Porkitects competition barbecue team, brandishes a flavor injector. Right: Andy Nelson Jr., left, with his dad, the former Baltimore Colt and barbecue master. |
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| where there's smoke | burning questions | ||
| By David
Dudley Photography by David Colwell |
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Few things in life should be simpler than cooking raw meat over burning wood. This is caveman stuff, after all, as elemental as fire itself. But barbecue, as its myriad spellings and innumerable regional variations might suggest—and its legions of doctrinaire practitioners will insist on telling you—is a complicated and serious business.
Barbecue cooking is the premier indigenous cuisine of the American South, and, like many Southern obsessions, it inspires some vigorous debate. From the etymology of the word itself (is it from the West Indian barbacoa, for spit-roasting, or the French barbe a queue, for “from head to tail”?) to the more arcane questions of baby backs versus spare ribs or briquettes versus hardwood lump charcoal, the field is filled with contentious issues, vaguely understood principles, and sheer mysteries. Few can even agree on what barbecue is. Outside the deep South’s “barbecue belt” (defined roughly as the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and parts of a few other states), barbecue is that thing you cook the burgers on. Or the company cook-out. Or that red sauce that comes with your chicken fingers. Here in Baltimore, barbecue often means pit beef, which is a hunk of cow liberally charred, thinly sliced, and served on a bun, ideally a few yards off Route 40. It has its unsubtle charms, but it’s not barbecue. Chances are, neither are the ribs you inhale down at your local sports bar: Most restaurants that serve “barbecue” ribs parboil or bake the meat before giving a turn on the grill. Tastes fine, but it ain’t the real thing. So let’s define our terms: Barbecue is not grilling. It’s a smoking process, a method of slow-cooking tough cuts of meat like pork ribs or shoulders over (or near) a low fire until the strange voodoo of smoke and time turns them into sweet, tender desire. You need real wood, lots of smoke, and several hours to kill. In its more cosmic sense, barbecue is a culture, a lifestyle, an obsession, an American icon.
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| Do you know the muffin man? Famous Dave’s manager Jim Lenchner with a rack of fresh baked corn muffins. |
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| Barbecue is perhaps the slowest of slow foods—properly smoking a pork shoulder or beef brisket for dinner means starting your fire at dawn, then methodically tending the embers for the remainder of the daylight hours. It’s also unapologetically labor-intensive, vegetarian-rankling, probably ozone-depleting, and neither cholesterol- nor cruelty-free. The stuff, in other words, is bad, in both the literal and the Shaft sense. In our microwave age, a burnished slow-smoked slab of spare ribs is sin itself made flesh, sweet and smoky as Satan’s candy. This is the barbecue that I missed entirely when I so wrongly stewed a rack of ribs. And it is the barbecue I have flirted with ever since, smoking rack after rack with mixed success. Some were tough as leather, some were bitter, some were burnt. Some were undercooked and had to be finished, humiliatingly, in the oven. But such is the animal allure of the perfect rib that I returned to the riddle, again and again, always with fresh hope and a new trick or two. What I needed was some intensive research. With summer coming on and a new Weber kettle grill (an imperfect but acceptable barbecuing device) in the backyard, it was again time to burn. |
It’s also a booming business. With savvy eaters showing a renewed interest
in America’s indigenous cuisines, it is now possible to find reasonably authentic
barbecue purveyors all across the country—along with patrons who know the difference.
What was once the no-frills populist fare of the rural South is increasingly the province
of suburban hobbyists who deploy a sophisticated arsenal of outdoor-cooking gadgetry to
simulate the primal flavor of a pig cooked in a big smoldering hole in the ground.