Big Tent Barbecue

Who doesn't like barbecue? Think about it. It's hard not to like. BBQ's appeal is universal. Just the sound of the word brings back wonderful memories - family get-togethers, sunny summer afternoons in the yard helping Dad start the grill or carry out a cooler of soda and beer. Barbecue is fun. The word itself brings a smile. Barbecue is social. No one barbecues for one. It requires a back yard full of friends or family, casual clothing, and coolers of thirst quenchers. What's not to like?

BBQ Dry Rub

Barbecue Dry Rub

The dry rub that is applied to a meat before it is cooked is possibly the most important component in the BBQ process. The difference between good cooked meat and great barbecue is the rub. Like barbecue sauces there are many variations on the theme, but if you Google barbecue dry rub you will find most if not all of the following ingredients in most recipes. Experiment! Barbecue is not a formal doctrine. It is not a concerto. BBQ is jazz. It should change a little very time you do it. Most of all it should be casual and fun!

Last month's Cook's Illustrated included a recipe for rub. In it the writer stated that they detected little or no difference in the finished product if you applied the rub hours before cooking, or immediately before. To this I say - Horse Feathers! Apply the rub the night before, or at least the morning of your get-together. I can most certainly tell the difference. The following recipe can be prepared in any quantity; the proportions are the same. You can use teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, or your favorite hat. Use five hats of salt for one hat of mustard. (If you do use a hat you might have more rub than you can use in six months and you shouldn't keep spices more than six months.) I buy my spices at Penzey's Spices. A link is provided on the sidebar.

Standard Dry Rub recipe:

5 parts Kosher salt,

3 Parts (each) freshly ground black pepper, light brown sugar, and sweet paprika

1 part (each) dry mustard, onion powder, garlic powder, cumin, cayenne pepper, dried oregano.

With a good rub as a base many BBQ cooks will forgo an additional sauce. Strictly from a flavor standpoint you really don't need one. Some will argue that the sauce adds moisture, and it certainly does, but I encourage you to at least once - Try Going Nekkid! There are numerous advantages to this "Memphis Style" (sauce on the side) BBQ, not the least of which is that your beer bottle will not slip out of your hands so much if they are not covered with sauce.

BBQ Sauce - Tomato Based

People take their barbecue recipes very seriously. People will swear to their own secret recipes, and travel the country on the BBQ circuit trying to show the world that it is worth shouting about. Different regions of the county will favor various ingredients - some focus on vinegar, or molasses, or honey. Tomato based sauces are very adaptable to different dishes. You can utilize this recipe for ribs, or chicken, or pulled pork or brisket. If you Google BBQ sauce recipes you will find a hundred variations on this theme. I encourage you to experiment with the recipe and play with your own variations. I tweak the ingredients depending upon who is showing up, and how it will be utilized. I"ll use more cayenne pepper in a sauce or a rub that will be blended with a pulled pork and less pepper for a spare rib. Every bite of a rib will bring a fresh mouthful of seasonings and too much pepper can be overwhelming. Don't follow this to the letter, but vary the proportions according to your own personal preferences, and your audience.

Basic recipe for a tomato based barbecue sauce:

Sauté one large chopped onion and four cloves of garlic in olive oil.
Off the flame add one cup bourbon and cook off alcohol for a minute.

Add:

1 cup tomato sauce

1 cup ketchup

1 cup cider vinegar

½ cup course grain mustard
Two tablespoons hoisin sauce (or molasses)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire
1 tablespoon Tabasco
1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon (each), pepper, thyme, oregano

This sauce, and most barbecue sauces, will contain lots of sugar, which means they can burn easily. In addition to the brown sugar, molasses or hoisin and ketchup all contain more sugar. If the sauce is used directly over an open flame, you will burn the meat. You cannot use any sauce like this directly over the flame. Cook indirectly by placing the wood or charcoal on the opposite side of your grill, or in a gas grill, place the meat over unlit burners, and light the burners on the opposite side of the grill. When grilling chicken or ribs, the sauce should only be applied at the very end of the cooking process - literally the last five or ten minutes .

Types of BBQ "Smokers"

Nothing says summer like BBQ – with platters of smoked ribs, and sliced brisket, and pulled pork. Traditionally, real BBQ meant s l o w c o o k i n g - hours and hours of very low heat, usually at 200 degrees or slightly less. I prefer a wood fired cooker. Over the years I have tried them all. I started many years ago with a small Brinkman “smoker”. Wet wood chips were added over burning charcoal. The chips provided the smoke. The coals provided the heat. The issue with this type of cooker is that the fire must be tended to constantly to provide a steady temperature. Some larger pieces of meat, like a pork butt or brisket, would require up to ten hours of cooking, and a half dozen changes of charcoal, and constant additions of wood chips. Air vents in the box would allow for a certain degree of control over the temperature.

When I started to get serious about slow cooking, I graduated to the first of a few electric cookers. The singular advantage of this type of smoker is that the heat can be regulated by a thermostat, so your cooking temperature is more consistent. My last unit was the size of a small bar refrigerator, and had two components. The cook box cabinet contained the heat element which could be regulated. A companion smoke generator was attached to the heat chamber. The smoke generator used hockey puck size discs of compressed wood chips, which you could buy from the manufacturer. The wood chip “pucks” were loaded, a dozen at a time, in a chimney column server, which fed in a fresh puck every half hour or so. With this system you could disappear for hours at a time, since the device pretty much took care of itself. It did however have one problem. The heating element sits in the bottom of the cooking chamber. The meat sits above it in the cabinet. A few pork butts weigh approximately twenty pounds, much of which is fat that is rendered out during the cooking process. The fat drips down on the heating element. Did I mention I had a fire? Actually I had a few fires, the last one almost taking out the garage. It did take out the wiring in the smoker which now sits in my friend Bunny’s garage, waiting for new switches and wiring.

My next adventure was to have a wood fired smoker built. The problem with wood smokers is that you have to feed the fire and pay attention, but if you build one big enough, the fire will keep going for hours at a time. My new cooker has two components. The meat cooking chamber is made from a 300 gallon propane gas tank. The attached firebox / smoke chamber is cut from a 100 pound gas tank. The firewood chamber is basically a woodstove, which is attached by a horizontal chimney to the cooking chamber . I pick out the wild cherry from my annual deliveries of firewood. This wood is common in the Adirondacks. Donations of pruned apple branches from friends with apple orchards make up the balance. I use the apple for smoking fish. Wild cherry adds a wonderful flavor to pork or beef. The total unit is on wheels, allowing for the BBQ to come to you if you can’t come to the BBQ. It’s big enough to do eight pork butts or briskets in one set, and small enough to tow behind the truck. I am told that the portable smoker is considered a “tool”, like a wood chipper, so no brake lights or licensing were required. I’ll keep you posted on that rules interpretation. My friend Scott Clark, who built the smoker, assures me of this. I suspect that someone in a funny hat might see things differently at some point.

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Horseradish BBQ Sauce and an apple cider baste.

Last weekend Farmer Mike left me a pint of freshly made horseradish. He left it with the bartender at Flanagan's. For some reason he felt that It would get delivered to me if he did that, and as luck would have it, I stopped in for a sarsaparilla. Mike grows horseradish in his garden, or as he puts it - he planted it in his garden and it now grows wherever it wants to. The roots have a bad habit of spreading beyond the spot you had expected them to stay in.

Freshly made horseradish is very potent stuff. I recall the first time I made it - using a food processor and a root that I had dug up from my yard. When I took the lid off the food processor and took a whiff I almost hurt myself. If it's possible to burn your nostrils using only a vegetable I think I did it.

Mike's container spent a week in my refrigerator without me even making a bloody Mary to put some to use. On Saturday morning I was putting the finishing touches on a BBQ sauce I intended to use on some pulled pork, and I decided to add the horseradish to the mix. It was surprisingly good, adding a little bite, a discernible horseradish flavor, without adding too much more heat. I think I will add it to my standard recipe in the future.

Last weekend I also experimented with the ribs that I was cooking up for the same party. Cooks Illustrated showed up in my mail, and contained an article on how to try and make barbecue ribs, without actually making them in a BBQ cooker. Their test kitchen used a combination of grill time and oven time to try and duplicate the "fall off the bone" texture of real BBQ. What I found interesting was the apple cider baste that they used on the ribs during the process.

Rib aficionados are firmly divided into two camps - sauce and no sauce. Some wimp out and do the sauce on the side. I come down on the side of no sauce, which is traditionally known as a Memphis style rib. I think that a properly prepared rib should stand on its own, with out any help from additional sauce. The dry rub's seasonings and the essence of wild cherry wood from the smoker is more than enough for me. A sweet BBQ sauce, traditially made with ketchup and vinegar and molasses, would only mask those wonderful flavors. But this recipe was different. It called only for three parts apple cider and one part cider vinegar. Nothing else. No overwhelming sticky stuff. I have used variations on this theme - adding apple juice or apple cider in a sealed aluminum foil pan to cut down on the cooking time and to add some moisture to the ribs during cooking. It is know on the BBQ "circuit" as the Texas Crutch. Not actually cheating, just moving things along a bit. Traditional Texas BBQ uses beef brisket, not pork, and beef tends to dry out more quickly than pork while cooking. It's easy to see how a crutch would become popular down there.

The true test of a perfectly cooked rib is getting it to the point where it is just about "fall off the bone" tender, but not so tender that it is mushy. We don't want overcooked pot roast. The texture should be firm, but still tender. Covering a pan of ribs using a Texas Crutch it is easy to go overboard and miss that point of "but still firm" texture. Basting the ribs every hour with apple cider involved more work, but the results were quite impressive.

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