Myron Mixon - Smokin with Myron Mixon: Recipes Made Simple, from the Winningest Man in Barbecue Winningest Man in Barbecue

Copyright 2011 by Myron Mixon

Foreword copyright 2011 by Paula H. Deen

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Photographs on are by Tom Rankin, copyright by Tom Rankin. Used by permission.

Photographs are from the authors collection and are reprinted here courtesy of Myron Mixon. All remaining photographs are by Alex Martinez, copyright 2011 by Alex Martinez. Used by permission.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52854-4

www.ballantinebooks.com

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I dedicate this book to my dad, Jack Mixon, for teaching me how to do a lot of things, including barbecuing; and to Pat Burke, for showing me how to be a champion.

D o yall recall what its like to meet a kindred spirit? Im talking about someone you feel an instant connection to even though you dont really know each othersomeone who has walked down the same path you have and lived to tell the tale, so to speak.

Thats sorta how I feel about Myron Mixon. Now, I like a man who has the guts to call himself the winningest son-of-a-bitch in barbecue, but theres more to Myron than his bad-boy attitude. Yes, Myron and I both make a living in the culinary arts, and we both laugh a lot, thats true, too.

When it comes to Myron Mixon, what really pulls at me is the fact that hes pure Georgia-born and Georgia-bred, through and through, just like me. He and I both know what its like to breathe in that sweet Georgia air, scented with magnolias on a perfect springtime day. I grew up in Albany, Georgia, due southwest from Myrons birthplace of Vienna. My best times growing up were at River Bend, my grandmother and granddaddys little motel. It was there that I learned about food, where I fell in love with it and came to understand that food means something beyond the eating of itits an expression of friendship and comfort. People from Georgia like me and Myron get that.

In the South, were all about traditions, and our traditions have their origins in the cooking pots and the recipes we pass down from generation to generation, like a good cast-iron skillet. I hold these recipes close to my heart. And thats what I like best about Myron Mixon: He learned how to barbecue at his own daddys knee. He is steeped in these Southern food traditions as thoroughly as I am, and they mean everything to him. There isnt a recipe in this book that isnt a part of his life, a part of his heart, and thats the mark of a truly good cook.

So, what Im telling yall is that if you like good barbecue, and I mean the kind of barbecue that you can learn how to make only if you know how to live it, youve come to the right place. And you know the thing about Myron that I like best of all? Like me, he knows that life aint all about cookin. Its about enjoying good food with good friends and having a good time. So fire up your smoker, grab a glass of sweet tea, and go make you some of Myrons cue.

P AULA D EEN

W HO IS M YRON M IXON ?

Heres what you need to know: I am Myron Mixon, from Unadilla, Georgia, and I am the baddest barbecuing bastard there has ever been. As a three-time world barbecue champion, Ive been dubbed The King, The Best Hog Cooker in the World, The Man in Black, and more nicknames than I can countsome nice and some downright vicious. No matter what you call me, theres no denying the fact that Im a fierce competitor and the winningest man in barbecue.

Jack Mixon at his fire pits. In the football jersey is my best friend from school, John Evans, and thats me on the left. ()

I wasnt always top dog. Not by a long shot. I started out as a small-town operator working at my dads sawmill and moving from one hard-ass job to another. But I had been raised by Jack Mixon, which, if youre from one of the ten counties that make up middle Georgia, means one thing: barbecue. Folks who knew my dad when he was young remember his shiny black hair and his take-no-prisoners attitude; he got noticed when he went places because he was tall and tough and he always drove the fastest cars (which I later found out was to stay ahead of the revenuers, but thats a story for another book). Primarily, what my dad did was own a barbecue take-out business in my hometown, Vienna (pronounced VI-anna). Now, my ancestors may have come to this country in the 1600s, but my dad was about as salt-of-the-earth, as honest, and as hardworking a man as youre ever likely to meet.

Im just a simple country boy:
one mama, one daddy.

He was also tough as nails. When I was about ten years old, he had me doing grunt work around his barbecue pits: toting wood, firing up pits, loading fire barrels, and so on. I did stuff that most younguns never got asked to do. Jack worked me and my brother Tracy like the free labor we were. I once asked to get paid for my work and Daddy said, You do, you put your feet under my dinner table and sleep under my roof. When other kids were going swimming and having fun, I was stoking fire pits.

This is the building that actually housed the pits for Jacks Old South. It was built around 1986. ()

Heres one day Ill never forget: I was just about twelve or so, and my dad had me and my brother Tracy in the yard with him. He had these two big old fire barrels that had to be kept filled with coals, which would be used to heat the barbecue pit. It was as much a job to keep those fire barrels filled as it was to shovel the coals into the pit. Every so often, my father would get off of the five-gallon bucket he was sitting on and he would walk up to the sheets of tin that we had placed across the top of the pits. He would run his handno probes or thermometers, just his bare handacross the tin and then he would tell us to get off our asses and fire those pits. There were three big sections and we had to tend to them about every twenty minutes, or less. The shovels we used were about ten feet long and had steel handles. When they slid into the fire barrel, theyd get so damn hot. The heat was something fierce. My brother and I were trying to do our job, but we were mostly trying to keep ourselves from burning up. It sure wasnt pleasant work, and we did it over and over, all day.