Michael Karl Witzel - Barbecue Road Trip: Recipes, Restaurants, & Pitmasters from Americas Great Barbecue Regions

RECIPES, RESTAURANTS, & PITMASTERS
FROM AMERICAS GREAT BARBECUE

Michael Karl Witzel

To the men and women who have raised barbecue to mythical proportions: Americas pitmasters. For our culinary enjoyment, they spend countless hours toiling and sweating over smoking hot pits and stoking wood-fired ovens, lovingly tending to pork shoulders, butts, brisket, chicken, ribs, mutton, and more, nurturing them to a level of tenderness and smoky flavor unmatched by any other food consumed by man. Through a fusion of hard-learned cooking techniques, culinary intuition, and personal artistry, they transform what would otherwise be ordinary cuts of meat into extraordinary fare, providing the aficionado and casual diner alike with one of the tastiest genres of American food: Bar-B-Q.

Chapter One
TEXAS: PRIDE OF THE LONE STAR PITMASTERS

Chapter Two
KANSAS CITY: BRAGGING OF BARBECUE BIG AND BOLD

Chapter Three
MEMPHIS: SLOW-SMOKED AND BASTED WITH BLUES

Chapter Four
NORTH CAROLINA: PERFECTING THE ART OF PIG PICKIN

Appendix
BARBECUE RESTAURANT GUIDE

Bridges Barbecue Lodge, Shelby, North Carolina. 2008 Michael Karl Witzel

WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF THE ESTABLISHMENTS featured in this book, this inside look at Americas four regions of barbecue would not have been possible.

Thank you to all the joints, grease houses, and restaurants who participated: A&R Bar-B-Que, The Bar-B-Q Shop, the Bar-B-Q Center, Arthur Bryants Barbecue, Blacks BBQ, Bridges Barbecue Lodge, Carolina Bar-B-Q, CDs Pit Bar-B-Q, Corkys Ribs & BBQ, Fiorellas Jack Stack Barbecue, Gates Bar-B-Q, Haywards Pit Bar B Que, Interstate Bar-B-Que, Kreuz Market, Lazy-T Bar-B-Q, Leonards Pit Barbecue, Lexington Barbecue, Little Pigs of America Barbecue, Luling City Market, Marlowes Ribs & Restaurant, Pappas World Famous Bar-B-Q, Parkers Barbecue, Paynes Bar-BQ, Railroad B-B-Q, Charles Vergos Rendezvous, Roadhouse B-B-Q, Ronnies B-B-Q, Rosedale Bar-B-Q, Rudys Country Store & Bar-B-Q, The Salt Lick, Sammies Bar-B-Q, Smittys Market, The Smoke Shack Bar-B-Q, Spring Creek Barbeque, the Skylight Inn, Tarheel Q, Three Little Pigs Bar-B-Q, Tops Bar-B-Q, and Wilbers Barbecue.

Additional thanks go out to all of the individuals connected with these barbecue restaurants, including Gary Adams, Sharon Albright, Robert Mr. Shotgun Anderson, Michael Aycock, Bobby Battle, Gary Berbiglia, Richard Berrier, Edgar Black, Norma Black, Terry Black, Lyntoy Brandon, Debbie Bridges-Webb, Elliot Brooks, Dan Brown, Darrell Buchanan, Joe Capello, James Capo, Namon Carlton, Travis Carpenter, Pete Castillo, Rudy Castillo, Brian Channel, Melissa Missy Coleman, Cecil Conrad, Michael Conrad, Nancy Conrad, Sonny Conrad, Alan Cooper, Russ Craver, Sergio Darcia, Monique Davis, Pat Donohue, Case Dorman, David Dunn, Eddie Echols, Efrem Echols, Lisa Elliott, Aaron Ellis, Bobby Ellis, Vince Franz, John Fullilove, Gay Gaillard, Arzelia Gates, Ollie Gates, Paul Gattuso, Jay Gibbs, James Goodwin, Gerri Grady, J. J. Grady, Steve Grady, Robert Green, John Guerrero, Chris Hammond, Stacey Haywood, Dale Hipson, James Hokes, Diann Holiday, Jeremy Hollin, Ella Hope, James Howell, Tina Jennings, Bruce Jones, Jeff Jones, Pete Jones, Samuel Jones, Rita Kersey, John Kitchen, Tommy Kupczyk, Kevin Lamm, Clarence Lewis, Eric Lippard, Pedro Galvan Lopez, Claude Mann, Juan Martinez, Don Mclemore, Gene Medlin, Linda Medlin, Karen Miller, Nancy Monk, Rick Monk, Wayne Monk, Julie Monk Lopp, Henry Morris, Robert Moye, Angie Murdock, Jim Neely, Kenneth Neely, Kenneth Nickle, Chris Nielson, Anita Patrick, Barry Pelts, Donald Pelts, Roy Perez, Charles Perry, Bonnie Phifer, Eddie Radford, Michelle Ramos, Chase Ramsey, Natalie Ramsey, Parker Ramsey, Kelly Rhea, Terry Rhea, Tammy Rhodes, Scott Roberts, Charlie Robertson, Frankie Rodriquez, Roy Rosser, Jeff Rousselo, Jesse Salas, Lupe Salazar, Phillip Schenck, Keith Schmidt, Rick Schmidt, Jim Sells, Nina Sells, Kelly Shepard, Wilber Shirley, Marisha Smith, Wanda Smith, Hattie Spears, Hayward Spears, Steve Stolks, Marie Taylor, John Tetter, Ella Townes, Connie Trent, Ignacio Vaca, John Vergos, Nick Vergos, Eric Vernon, Frank Vernon, Hazelteen Vernon, Caylen Wall, Shannon Walsh, Curtis Waycaster, Bill Wendt, Cara Weston, Lyndell Whitmore, Edward Wicks, Donald Williams, Keith Wright, Kelly Wright, and Gorkem Yamandag.

Finally, a personal thank you to everyone else who assisted locally and behind the scenes, namely, office assistant Christina McKinney, photographer Nicole Mlakar-Livingston, and writer Gyvel Young-Witzel. If anyone was omitted from these acknowledgments, I offer my sincerest apologies. Please know that your assistance was important and your contribution to this effort invaluable. Thank you to all.

WITH THE ADVENT OF TELEVISION NETWORKS devoted to foods and programs geared toward cooking it yourself, todays backyard chefs consider themselves masters of the so-called barbecue arts. Unfortunately, clothed in their Kiss the Cook apronswith tongs in hand and battery-powered temperature probe at the readythey are ill-prepared when it comes to duplicating real barbecue cooking.

You see, contrary to popular belief, barbecue isnt simply a matter of dousing a bag full of charcoal briquettes with lighter fluid, lighting a match, and then searing a slab of meat on a metal grill suspended above the glowing embers. Really, barbecuing isnt cooking in a sense that we know it at all, but rather a slow-smoking process that takes place over burned hardwoods like hickory or oak. Its the succulent smoke that prepares the meat for consumption and gives it character. And nobarbecue isnt cooking over a propane grill, either.

By all historical accounts, it appears that the confusion began in a land long ago and far away with a Haitian framework of sticks that was used for drying or roasting meat. Supposedly, the explorer Cortez and his happy-go-lucky band of pillagers were cruising the Caribbean when they encountered native Indians preparing fish on these racks of interwoven branches. As seafarers are apt to be, the band was very hungry and lavished praise and approval upon this curious method of meat preparation as their stomachs filled.

Consequently, they took the technique and the word to describe it with them. While their exploration skills were nonpareil, linguists they were not. As often happens, the pronunciation of their newly learned word changed gradually. In the Spanish tongue, the racks and the method of cooking came to be known by the word barbacoa. After some further dilution over the passage of time, the word barbecue surfaced in English.

Unfortunately, the term did not distinguish the nuances involved in the cooking process and was soon adopted by anyone and everyone who cooked meat on a grill raised over a flaming heat source. By the time the backyard barbecue emerged as an American icon during the 1950s, people assumed that quickly cooking meat on a grill was barbecue. Soon, everything was fair barbecue game, including hamburgers, hot dogs, steakseven sliced pineapple. By golly, if you could slap it on the grill and cook it without having it fall through the thin wire mesh and burn to a crisp, it was barbecue.