Peter Kaminsky - Charred & Scruffed

Adam Perry Lang

with Peter Kaminsky

ARTISAN

This book is dedicated to a chef and a place. The chef is Daniel Boulud, and the place is his restaurant, Daniel. Daniel gave mea foundation on how to approach not only cooking, but also life: work hard, work smart, do your best, never underestimate your abilities, and then work even harder. His passion and drive for our craft is a shining example and a valuable practical lesson. I was lucky to have been part of Daniels team. The lessons stay with me for a lifetime. Chef, I am grateful.

Contents

Barbecue: The Next Step

People love barbecue. The combination of fire, smoke, salt, and meat is probably the first recipe that humans ever discovered. Even vegetarians are programmed to love meat prepared this way: they choose not to eat it, which just leaves more for the rest of us.

This is a new and different kind of barbecue book because it is about invention, not tradition. Most collections of barbecue recipes try to help the home grillmaster achieve the same results as a beloved old-time barbecue stand on a little-traveled country road: the kind of place that has a hand-lettered sign promising a plate of satisfying ribs, pulled pork, Brunswick stew, creamed corn, coleslaw, and mac and cheese.

You could think of these classic joints as the food version of folk music: pure, memorable, and unchanging. To continue the folk music analogy, in the 1960s new and original artistssupreme among them, Bob Dylanadded a modern sensibility to the heritage of mountain ballads, delta blues, and field hollers. Weve been waiting for someone like that to come along in the world of barbecue: a chef who understands the subtlety of modern gastronomy yet appreciates the pure flavor power of the American barbecue tradition.

Enter Adam Perry Lang.

Rather than simply trying to duplicate the flavor that a blue-ribbon pitmaster learned from his daddy and his granddaddy, Adam Perry Lang has devoted a trained chefs palate and sensibility to answering the question How can I take this great legacy and make something new out of it?

Adam was trained in some of the hautest haute cuisine restaurants in America and France, but when he felt he had reached the point in his career where he wanted to follow his own path, he turned to the indigenous American barbecue tradition and set out to refine, concentrate, and reassemble the flavors and textures on the barbecue plate.

Like all truly original chefs, he developed his own language of heat, flavor, and technique. Adam is, in his own words, an active griller. As you will see in this book, when he grills, he treats meat, fish, and poultry like a hot potato, flipping, then instantly basting while the main ingredient is still sizzling and hot. In this way Adam slowly develops a crisp, chewy, savory crust with layer upon layer of flavor.

He is not afraid to fly in the face of the conventional barbecue dogma of low and slow. For big cuts of meat, he creates a strong fire but then places the meat far away from the coals (see High and Slow, pages ) cooks relatively slowly, when its fat and juices hit the coals, they vaporize and flavor the meat in a way that cooking over a low fire never can.

On the other hand, when he cooks low, he cooks really low, actually placing meat directly on the hot coals so that it crusts immediately and cooks through just as quickly. It was nothing short of a revelation to me to see lamb chops cooked over hot coals yet with absolutely no flame or acrid smoke (see ). Your friends and family will not believe this is possible, but when they see you do it, theyll respond the way one does to a masterly magic trick.

A true postmodernist, Adam deconstructs traditional barbecue and then reassembles it to more powerful effect. His Finishing Salts (pages ), which come into play when you top off a forkful of meat, fish, or poultry just before putting it in your mouth, take the place of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise but serve the same purpose: a condiment that complements and completes the taste experience.

Be sure to try Adams recipes for what he calls Co-Stars (pages ). Surely, beans, coleslaw, and macaroni salad cant exhaust the list of wonderful foods that can complete a meal that features meat on the fire. His side dishes, far from afterthoughts, provide contrast and synergy with mains.

This, then, is a book for the fire worshipper in every cook. If you thought the last word had been written on the subject, you are in for a surprise. With Charred & Scruffed, the next chapter in barbecue is being writtenits all about good ingredients, wood fire, new recipes, and the technique of a world-class chef.

Peter Kaminsky

I have always loved barbecue. While I cant claim that my grandpa was a great pitmaster, I can say that in my case, encountering the deep savory smokiness of barbecued meat was love at first whiff. I came to understand that wood fire, seasoning, and smoke combine in a form of culinary alchemy thatin all its strongly defended regional variationsmakes up the great tradition of American barbecue. What I have tried to do in my cooking, and in this book, is to apply the lessons of classic cuisine to the folkways of barbecue.

Along the way, I read a lot of barbecue cookbooks, but after the first half dozen or so, what was striking to me was how similar they are. Youre sure to find falling-off-the bone ribs, mahogany-hued briskets, manly (i.e., really huge) cuts of steak, and succulent smoked pork shoulders that taste like the distilled essence of Old Dixie. But upon closer reading, and tasting, you may also find that the meat, which is often the most expensive ingredient in the recipe, is relegated to second fiddle for bastes, sauces, spice rubs, and, for good measure, some hot sauce and vinegar at the end.

My aim is to construct a more powerful taste narrative. I always strive to have different layers of flavor and texture come through, one after the other, so that each bite is a story with a beginning, middle, and end. And when the story is told, what should stay with you is the quality of the prime ingredient... the meat. Remember this: meat is the master. Sauce, seasoning, and smoke are its faithful servants.

When I first began to study the craft of barbecue, many of the masters I looked to for inspiration made it a point of pride that you didnt worry over your meat. Once you put something on the grill or in the smoker, the time-honored wisdom was that the less you moved it, touched it, or looked in on it, the better it would come out. They would say, You just got to leave it alone. It was almost as if checking on your steak, chop, or chicken was a sign of personal insecurity that the meat itself could sense and, once it knew about this, it would deliver something dry, tough, and tasteless.