Anybody like Bar-B-Que?

[dmccarty]

Neil,

If'n you are still reading this BBQ thread you need to be
careful. Them boys down in Texas or Tejas or however they
want to spell it got it WRONG.

Now I was going to leave this thread alone until HarvDWelder
has to mention a Tejas BBQ Joint using coleslaw on a
sandwich! OBVIOUSLY that is a Culinary Delight stolen from
the Great State of North Carolina! I think there might be
some trouble over this! /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

See, in NC they make a BBQ out of chopped pork and the
sauce is vinegar based. When I first moved up here and
ordered a BBQ sandwich, they asked me if I wanted coleslaw?
Sure said I. What they did not tell me is that the slaw is
ON the sandwich. I was just a bit suprised. But it sure is
good. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Just in time for this discussion I went out to lunch to a
pretty good southern place that has some really good fried
chicken, fixens but especially slaw and NC BBQ. I'm kinda
piggish right now. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

I better get the NC Pig Picken Tradition on the TBN record
before them Texas Boys try to take credit for it as well.
/w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif Around Her'n many a family has a pig cooker. Its
just a glorified grill but its big enough to cook a hog. You
heat up the Barbee as you DownUnderFolks seem to call it
but not too hot and put on the hog. It has to cook slow. Its
an all day thing. Its called a pig picken because it takes
so long to cook that after a few hours people start picken at
the cooked pieces to get something to eat. YUM YUM!!!!

Once its done you just grab a hunk of pork or wait until its
chopped up to go with your slaw, fixen, and sweat tea. I'm
starting to get hungry again. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Now my mom in law fries hot dogs. I don't understand this
method of cooking an already cooked product but she does.
I don't eat much at her house. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif BUT she makes the
worlds best dang coleslaw. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif The slaw I had for lunch
was almost as good as ma in laws.

Then I come back from lunch and see them Texas Boys steal'n
our slaw ideas...... Hmmmm... As my little girl says, "Thats
not nice!"

/w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Later,
Dan FromTheLandOfTRUEBBQ McCarty

PS. I'm also ducking and running for cover! /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[Chuck52]

BBQ, cole slaw, fried okra is another really good side with BBQ....and I think this is pizza night /w3tcompact/icons/sad.gif.

However, we're going to Springfield, MO tomorrow to drop off the last kid at college, which is part of why this is pizza night. I hear there are some decent BBQ places there. Live for the future!

Chuck

 

[Ozarker]

Don't forget to check out Bass Pro while you're there. They recently opened a new aquarium. I haven't seen it yet but my friends who have say it is great.

 

[smilingreen]

Chuck,
It is a bought job. I have had it for 8 years and it is very well built. Made of #10 steel.

 

[njrqs]

Our BBQ means a flat steel plate, or sometimes a steel grille over a flame. Meat on top, fire underneath.

That's it.

No fancy stuff.

Just beer and meat !!!!

 

[Bird]

dmmcarty:

Vinegar based BBQ sauce? It's supposed to have a little vinegar in it, but too much will sure ruin it./w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif

smilingreen:

No beef brisket? Can't call that a barbecue./w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif I do enjoy barbecued pork ribs, but barbecue is usually beef brisket. I've only found one or two places with beef ribs that were any good, but the worst barbecue I ever found was in a very popular restaurant in Williamsburg, VA; so sweet with a syrupy sauce that it was practically inedible.

Now your method of cooking it is right, if you're going to have a big barbecue instead of just a couple of people. Neighbors behind us have been having an annual July 4 barbecue and party every year until this year (bad health this year) and I've been helping them with it. They have 2 smokers like you describe and last year we did one pig, one goat, and I don't even remember how much sausage, and how many briskets and chickens. When I was raising rabbits, we usually included a half dozen or so of them.

8NTX:

I probably haven't eaten at Sonny Bryan's more than 20 or 30 times, even had their recipe for their sauce (it was published in the Dallas newspaper years ago), but it's been several years since I was there.

mikim:

Don't guess I've heard of Claude's sauce, and we don't have a Kroger around here; just H.E.B., Brookshires, David's, and Super Wal-Mart and K-Marts.

My younger brother used to live in Ellensburg, WA, and told me about his favorite BBQ sauce (forgot the name) and he couldn't find it in Texas. So a few years ago, we went up there and went to a grocery store and he bought all the bottles of it they had on the shelf. I looked at the label and it was from New Jersey./w3tcompact/icons/shocked.gif I never tried any of it, but told him I could understand why he never found it in Texas./w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

 

[dgood1]

Just gotta throw some more confusion into this thread.

Pit cooked overnight while playing cards and drinking beer is the way I like it. Meat falls off of that ole porker.

Here in SC we have ketchup and mustard based sauces. We only have about a 25 to 1 ratio of churches to BBQ places and we have lots of churches around here.

Y'all have fun now hear.

 

[DavidInNH]

<font color=blue>Actually Texas is king in bar b que.

Period.

Paragraph.

Page.

End of chapter, story, close the book.</font color=blue>

Amen to that.

It is the 21st century and we can finally buy beef brisket here in NH without special ordering it.
I spent 10 days in Texas this summer and ate nothing but barbecue, mexican food and boiled gulf shrimp. Dang, I'm hungry now.

 

[wroughtn_harv]

<font color=blue>Our BBQ means a flat steel plate, or sometimes a steel grille over a flame. Meat on top, fire underneath.

That's it.

No fancy stuff.

Just beer and meat !!!!</font color=blue>

No wonder ya'll's rabbits are all legs and bigger than most dogs./w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

Beer and meat????? You are talking about a fish fry right? You take some Bisquick. Add some spices. And then beer until it's between pasty and poury. You have beer batter for a fish fry, beer and meat.

Now a real bar b que starts at least the day before the actual event.

The brisket is stabbed here and there. Just a deep cut like you were inspecting it for bones and inch or so in. In this cut you put garlic in some, brown sugar in others, and for me even a jalopena or three. No real rhyme or reason to the cutting and or placing of the cuts beyond having a hole in the meat big enough to put in the goody and then folding the meat back.

The brisket is wrapped in aluminum foil and put in the smoker twelve to sixteen hours before the event at or about a hundred and sixty degrees constant with good smoke. Chicken parts are also put in the smoker in aluminum foil after being prepared with sauce. Now some folks like to bake the bird stuff with the skin as it's protective cover for the meat with lots of basting. I personally liked it baked in sauce and not having the heavy smoke taste. Chicken is cooked six to eight hours in the smoker.

You also take some whole heads of cabbage. Take your knife and cut out the top so the piece you're lifting off looks like a funnel without a spout. Once you have that off do a little core thingy like the head of cabbage is an apple, not all the way through though.

In this hole--core thingy in the head of cabbage you put brown sugar, some garlic, and lots of butter. Then you put the top back on and wrap it in aluminum foil. Sorta like they wrap candy apples in sparkly paper. You put the cabbage in the middle of the piece of aluminum and then bring all the ends up and do a twist or three.

You repeat this same process with a big sweet yellow onion. Down here in the real world we have a variety called the ten fifteen. There's just enough onion in the taste to keep you from eating them like apples until you can't walk. But you do this onion just like the cabbage.

The onions and heads of cabbage go into the smoker for about three hours. Figure about one of each for every two adults. They might wrinkle up their noses a bit until they bite into one or tother or both. After a taste you will have their hearts and if you work it right at least one promissary note on the vacation home.

It's all right to let the women folks do all the casseroles and prepare the potatoes, sweet, new in milk, and others. They are also perfectly capable of handling the cobblers and pies and even a cake or two. If the smoker is of the right size most of this can be done in it with the stuff needing the extra heat being closer to the fire box and watched carefully.

Now this part you need to take notes on cause there will be a test later. You need a pit. What they do in east tejas is you make a thing that looks like an insert for a fireplace, big fire place but not a gigantic one. A good one will have a hearth, steel or brick and a back and two sides with an angled roof. This only has to twelve to sixteen inches deep. But you don't have a place for the smoke to escape. It's just a cave you might say, one way in and one way out.

In front of the pit you put a drip pan, say three by four. Yup, three feet by four feet with about an inch lip all the way around.

Now above and in front of the pit you put a piece of barn door track or unistrut track. In this track you put a carriage that rolls back and forth. Hanging down from this carriage you have a chain. This chain is hooked to the track via a bolt that passes through a bearing. What you're wanting is the chain to be able to spin with the weight of the chain being carried by the bearing.

The bolt above the bearing is attached to a rotisserie motor like they have in those barbques you see regular folks buy at Wal Mart. When the motor of the rotissere thingy is on it slowly spins the bolt that in turn slowly spins the chain hanging down.

Now you have to do some thinking here as you're building this contraption that's gonna make you a legend in your own time. The power cord has to be attached to the rotissere motor of course. But it can't be allowed to hang down to be in the way of the folks walking around drooling like starved hounds. And there has to be enough slack in the cord for the whole assembly to move about five to six feet on the track. It's best to run the power cord to an on/off switch on the wall out of the way of traffic.

But it is important to keep the power cord up and out of the way. I can't explain it. But folks who love to cook and or be around bar b que sometimes are also inclined to inbibe in alcoholic drinks. I'll leave it up to the experts to decide which came first, the drinking or the eating until you can't drink anymore.

So now you have the pit and about eight feet above the pit you have a track with a rotisserie motor capable of holding up a of hundred pounds or so of ......pig?

You take your whole pig. You break the ribs so you can flatten it out. You put the flattened pig in an oversized thingy similar but bigger to those things you can buy at the store for cooking fish on a grill. A good one can be made out of field fence and some rebar. What's important is the pig is held flat and supported head, er, make that shoulders up. You attach the frame with the pig to the chain on the rotisserie.

Now you do the same thing with the pig that you did with the brisket. You take the knife and cut in deep and insert cloves of garlic here and there, brown sugar here and there, and spices here and there. You might have to put in a small stitch to fold the skin back but if you do it right you won't.

In the pit you build a roaring fire. This isn't one of the them hot coals doing the cooking kind of thingy do's. This is a roaring fire does it just fine thank you much mam events. It's a man thing. This is fire, that is meat, and hand me the that beer miss.

You push pull the pig in the frame to about three, three and a half feet from the fire and turn on the rotisserie motor. You feed the fire and pray there isn't a power outage.

Six or so hours later you can guarantee yourself of a couple of things. One, the only thing you'll have more of hanging on the fence than the neighborhood dogs will be their owners. Two, the women and kids won't be in front of the telly or the X box nor just sitting around in the kitchen talking about thin and great looking that boy from high school is now and that it's such a waste that he turned out to be gay.

No, they'all be right there close like watching that roaring fire and seeing that drip pan just plain covered with good stuff.

Now that the time is here you put some extra wood on the fire and make that thing almost a blow torch. You turn off the rotisserie motor with the back of the pig facing the fire. You and a couple of buds push pull that pig into that inferno back first. You're making cracklin's. And these cracklin's aren't made out of flour and such at some bakery like those you buy at the convenience to give the beer something to stick to as it goes down.

No, this is the real deal Neil.

You pull down the frame with the pig in it and lay it on the table. Undo your wire and expose the meat. Don't be alarmed by the meat sticking to the wire or all the helping hands young and old pulling said meat off the wire. You will find big hands, young hands, girl hands, boy hands, just about all the hands within a city block or two in fact in the way. It's sorta like feeling warm when the sun beats down. Somethings just happen. Hands in the meat is one of those things.

One of the things that will surprise you is how the feeding frenzy calms down after everyone has a bite of that pig. Then the plates come out and those baked beans, tangy coleslaw, gumbo, jalopena beans, smoked cabbage, smoked onions, and all line up there next to that brisket and pig. Then serious eating begins.

One of the things about great about aging is passing on a tradition or making a new one. There's just something how listening to the way a kid can tell about an event and you will not recall all the work you had to put into it.

That's why us'n's down here in tejas are so fond of bar b que. It's not just because it's the best eating available anywhere in the world. But each and every bar b que comes with a story and that story is all about family and tradition.

Losing that is what is the saddest thing about living today. So the next time you run for fast food consider what the kids are missing.

 

[rlk]

Dan is right. Ain't nothing better than Eastern North Carolina Bar-B-Que. Attached is a picture of a pig we cooked last weekend. Pig weighed roughly 110 pounds when dressed. Cooked it for 6 hours on this gas cooker with the skin side up.