
Why big-city barbecue is suddenly better than ever - forloop
http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-20-diner-takes-a-smoke-break-to-find-washingtons-best-barbecue/2015/05/21/085f35f8-fb42-11e4-a13c-193b1241d51a_story.html
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L_Rahman
Stories about the resurgence of cooking techniques that eschew modern
technology have me wondering how much of the flavor and taste improvement is
actually because of the technique itself.

> With gas-assisted smokers, pitmasters can load their machines with meat
> (likely briskets and pork shoulders) at the end of service, add a few logs,
> and sleep soundly without fear the fire will die during the night. This
> high-tech approach typically eats up less wood and requires fewer employees
> to watch over the smoker, two significant pluses in a competitive urban
> marketplace where skilled pitmasters can be hard to find.

This aside makes me suspect that an equally significant contributor to better
quality might simply be the increased human attention. If you've cooked with
any degree of rigor, you have probably witnessed the variation in outcomes
with the exact same technique. The way to reduce that variation and maintain
quality is to pay close attention to the raw materials and adjust the cooking
process continuously.

A way to test this hypothesis would be have the same number of people tending
a gas-supplemented smoker as well as a traditional one and see how wide the
delta is in the meat.

~~~
joshu
I seem to recall that burning propane generates a lot of water, which is
detrimental to barbecue.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Well doesn't burning wood also generate water? In addition, doesn't seasoned
firewood consist of 10-20% straight up water that boils when the log is
burned? Propane doesn't contain water.

~~~
anderiv
Water is one of the by-products of the combustion reaction, regardless of what
fuel is used.

~~~
brilee
Not unless the fuel contains only carbon - as charcoal does.

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graycat
Me! Someone from the WaPo's gonna talk to _me_ about BBQ! Moi? Gee, the WaPo
wrote an article, did some research, maybe ate some samples for a day, a week,
maybe a month. Gee, a month.

Me? I grew up in, one word -- WaPo sit down for this one -- Memphis. That's
right, the King of chopped, picnic pork shoulder BBQ from a smoky pit, of iron
plates, etc., right, from the town that gave the world the King (aka, Elvis).

Ribs? They were only for the tourists. Beef? Never happened, not in Memphis --
that's a Texas thing.

A month? I left Memphis after I graduated from college -- we're talking age
5-22 eating chopped, picnic pork shoulder BBQ, with sauce, coleslaw, on a soft
white bread bun, 1-4 times a week for nearly all those years. In the later
years, often with a beer or two. And the better places had some BBQ beans --
they were really good, and never had anything close ever again. And commonly
with desert of chocolate ice box pie -- a dark, chocolate custard pie with
nice whipped cream on top, pretty good.

Memphis was wall to wall with BBQ joints, all very similar in technique and
quality.

But, my brother moved to Knoxpatch (Knoxville), and they do a good version of
Memphis BBQ. They also do Carolina BBQ, and it's significantly different --
e.g., it's cooked to a somewhat higher temperature and 'pulled' while Memphis
BBQ is chopped into chunks. The Carolina sauce has more vinegar and less of
whatever else the Memphis BBQ sauce had.

And the WaPo's gonna tell me what's "better" BBQ? I don't think so!

I also spent the early part of my career around DC, i.e., WaPo land. Got some
good grape juice from between Macon and Dijon, some more from Tuscany, a lot
of semi-soft cheese, a lot of good French food, some terrific high end Italian
food, a lot of US East Coast seafood, and a lot of red-white table cloth red-
sauce Italian food. A lot of DC area food. BBQ? Never!

Memphis BBQ -- it was good stuff, was unique, likely still is. WaPo: Tough to
tell me about "better" BBQ with just words. Instead need the BBQ!

~~~
blhack
I hope it doesn't make you upset, but I went to one of the places mentioned in
the article this afternoon and had a great time there, with really good food.

I have never been to Memphis.

~~~
graycat
Right away I can think of three reasons you thought that you had "really good
food":

(1) You've never been to Memphis!

(2) BBQ is so good that even done poorly, it's darned good.

(3) Actually (secret, don't tell the others) BBQ, at least the Memphis kind
that I know, is not very difficult to do well!

Why is it so good? Well, it's warm, soft, and moist ( _succulent_ ) and is big
on salt, black and/or hot red pepper, sweet, sour, fat, smoke, and the
Malliard reaction. So, it hits really hard on nearly all the _elements_ as in:

Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, 'The Elements of Taste'.

For the _secret_ , one of the pillars has been explained by some _food
chemistry_ \-- keep the proteins in the meat fibers below 185 F. Do most of
the cooking with the meat at about 160 F for melting the collagen. Then you do
have _food safety_.

Overheat the meat fibers with the proteins, and they will shrink, get rid of
their water, and become not good.

The long cooking times at relatively low temperatures are to _melt_ the
collagen without overheating and, thus, ruining the proteins. Supposedly the
proteins are always tender; only the collagen is tough. So, melt out the
collagen without ruining the proteins. The melted collagen helps make the meat
moist and _succulent_.

I don't know about beef brisket BBQ -- it's a Texas thing. I was in Texas only
once, did have some of their beef BBQ, and it was good. But I don't know how
they do it. On that trip to Texas, the story went that some early immigrants
were German butchers, and they worked out how to BBQ brisket, no doubt, as a
way to have people able to like that cut of meat.

For ribs, which I also don't know about, maybe the smoke plays a really
important role, e.g., for a _smoke ring_.

But for Memphis BBQ, picnic pork shoulder, I long suspected that all the smoke
was mostly just advertising _smoke_ to attract downwind customers and, really,
not very important to the final meat as served. One reason is that about half
the shoulder was still covered by the skin. Another reason was that for the
rest of the meat, the ratio of surface area exposed to the smoke to meat
volume was relatively small.

Another big secret (definitely don't tell anyone this one!): Actually, get a
good oven thermometer and carefully adjust your oven to hold about 220 F. Not
much higher than 220 F and maybe a little lower (don't want the meat to get
over 185 F).

Get a roasting pan and a roasting rack. Put a picnic pork shoulder, say, skin
side down, on the rack, with a dry rub on the exposed meat surface if you
want, although I doubt that it will contribute to the final product as served,
place it in the oven with a meat thermometer deep in the meat but not next to
a bone (that might give a misleading reading).

Cook to an internal temperature of 185 F, maybe a little less, not much more,
for maybe 16 hours.

Will get a lot of fat and melted collagen in the bottom of the roasting pan.

Place on a cutting board, remove the skin, remove the meat from the bones (the
arm bone and the shoulder joint), remove as much fat as you wish, and coarsely
chop the rest.

Add favorite red BBQ sauce, likely one with smoke flavor.

Place, likely with some salt and hot sauce, on a white bread bun and top with
a simple white coleslaw.

It's good.

Refrigerate what's left; it reheats well in a microwave oven.

For the coleslaw, my quick guess at what Memphis has been doing is to take a
head of ordinary _green_ cabbage, quarter it by cutting through the root, and
cut out the solid, stiff stem parts. Thinly slice the rest. Add ordinary Ranch
dressing and mix. Done.

Last time I bought about 9 pounds of cabbage and used 127 ounces of shredded
cabbage and 13.2 cups of dressing. Might cut that back to, say, 12 cups. Got
eight quarts.

No doubt Memphis was not using Ranch dressing, but with my guess the results
are not too far off. I got the Ranch dressing idea from the back of a package
of shredded cabbage for coleslaw.

So, here I've described hated _ersatz_ _oven-Q_. It's also surprisingly good.

For doing BBQ, picnic pork shoulder is forgiving, from all I've seen much
easier than beef or chicken. Should get good results if even roughly follow
what I outlined. Even with pork, the shoulder is likely much more forgiving
than ribs.

I have no desire to return to Memphis!

If my business does well and I retire, I want to go to, say, New Hampshire,
enjoy challenging the winters with a 4 wheel drive car with a lot of road
clearance and big, aggressive snow tires, attend operas, concerts, and
lectures on mathematical physics in Boston, feast on New England seafood and
maybe French, Italian, German, and Chinese food, and, maybe, sometimes BBQ a
pork shoulder!

Memphis? Naw.

For the business, as of yesterday, I got all the planned software running.
That was a good day. I have a few revisions in mind and then on to my critical
review, alpha and beta test, version 1.0, and going live!

------
hippich
for what it worth - we had investors coming, and ordered bbq from franklin.
brisket was just like any other brisket from numerous trailers in austin.
sausage actually made several people sick next day...

looking at what going on with food in austin, i certainly can say, it is not
that much about flavour (it was good, but nothing really special,) but rather
hype and ability to spin up hype quickly.

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imissmyjuno
a man cooks food in one place. a man in another place also cooks food using a
similar technique. both men cook food well. both of the men care about being
better than the other. an article is written.

~~~
lsc
I can't quite put my finger on why, but I find this down-voted comment to be
quite amusing.

I mean, sure, it's content-free, but much like the article, it's content-free
in a way that I find entertaining; it doesn't at all leave me with the
unpleasant feelings I get after reading a puff-piece about money or business
and then reading some trite truism in the comments.

why is that? is it that while I do enjoy BBQ, I don't read about it much, so
it seems fresh when writing of the same quality about money or business would
seem stale?

~~~
mistermann
It's because BBQ is a cult, if they applied the same blind testing to BBQ as
they've done with wine and wine "experts" in some cases the illusion would be
burst.

You can "low and slow" ribs in a smoker for 12 hours and get a beautiful
outcome, or you can do them in a regular oven or even better a pressure cooker
and finish in a BBQ or smoker and get the same result. You may be able to
produce a superior result in a "legit" setup, but how do you deliver the
consistency of that at a reasonable price with unpredictable demand? You
can't.

~~~
brownbat
> if they applied the same blind testing to BBQ

They do, that's how the major BBQ competitions are judged.

They even have techniques to prevent bias or judges recognizing the source of
the meat (overlapping panels, hundreds of entrants, randomized category
assignment).

When I was a judge, you'd get a lot of 7 and 8s. Those were competition ready
samples, definitely great BBQ. But there was a power curve. One or two
entrants would hit a 9 or 10, and they were obvious to every judge at the
table.

The crews that win are usually strong contenders several years in a row.
Luck's going to have a role, like with anything, but the real contenders are
there for a reason.

~~~
lsc
See, an article about how BBQ competitions are judged... that would be pretty
interesting.

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gkop
I was going to share the best bbq in SF here, but decided not to. The really
good stuff in cities, those who know about it, we keep it a secret.

Edit: what I meant by this comment was to emphasize a key distinction between
country bbq and city bbq that was neglected by the article: country bbq is by
definition distant from the large bbq-loving population. So there may be
equally good city bbq joints, but there are a number of (individual) parties
in whose interest it is to keep them secret.

~~~
Shog9
There's something to this... Good BBQ tends to be very time- and labor-
intensive. Once a place gets popular enough, something has to give - city
joints can't so easily just build another pit and drop a few more picnic
tables out in the parking lot. So whether the price goes up or standards
slide, some of the fans will go looking for a new source.

Do this a few times and you maybe start to get wise to the idea that raving
about your new hangout isn't very smart if you want to continue going there on
a regular basis.

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santaclaus
If anyone knows of some good pulled pork in NYC let me know! You can get some
pretty good Texas brisket, but the vinegar style Carolina BBQ has been a bit
disappointing. I've done Fette Sau, Dinosaur, Mables, BrisketTown, Hill
Country, and some joint in Astoria.

~~~
ironchef
Closest i've found was mighty quinn's. Alchemy, tx (somewhere in queens), blue
smoke, and pride and joy. My bigger issue is finding a traditional NC type
place that's up to par. Most of the NC style places are NC-ish plus either
texas or KC or some such (hyrbid if you will). Good luck:)

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mdekkers
....and now i'm hungry.

