Tag: Barbecue

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

186. Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue p.479

I can’t find a copy of this recipe online.

Barbecue is one of those things I would dearly love to know a whole lot more about. But living in Montreal means that I’m unlikely to stumble across BBQ competitions, and there are very few pit masters looking to take on an apprentice. My lack of a back yard, or even a charcoal grill makes the situation even worse. This recipe was designed for us city dwellers who want to give apartment barbecue a try. This recipe comes as close as possible to making real barbecue without access to an open flame. It’s basically braised pork shoulder flavoured with cider vinegar, carrot, celery, onion, garlic, and peppercorns. The braised pork is doused in cider vinegar and roasted in the oven for an hour. The pork is then chopped, and mixed with Tomato Barbecue Sauce and warmed through. It’s supposed to be served with white rolls and coleslaw, but it went well with swiss chard and sweet potatoes.

The Good: The real plus of this recipe is that it kinda tastes like barbecue, and you can do it in the kitchen at any time of the year. The pork was moist with a nicely crisped exterior, and the long braise got a lot of flavour into the meat. I’m always a fan of using pork shoulder, because it’s very very inexpensive, and wonderfully flavourful. I think it’s got the best dollar to flavour ratio of any cut of meat out there.

The Bad: Vinegar. The Tomato Barbecue Sauce was too heavy on the vinegar all on it’s own, but the pork was braised in vinegar, then roasted and basted with vinegar before being mixed with a vinegar barbecue sauce. Everyone felt a little bit pickled after dinner.

The Verdict: Overall this was a fairly successful technique for barbecue without a barbecue. It utterly failed to recreate the smoky goodness of outdoor grilling, but sometimes you take what you can get. I know barbecue purists look down on liquid smoke, but I’d consider adding a few dashes when they’re not looking. The flavours in this dish were generally good, and the meat was wonderfully falling apart tender, but the acid was just too much for me to fully get behind.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

185. Tomato Barbecue Sauce p.479

There’s no recipe for this one on Epicurious.

This barbecue sauce is meant to accompany Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue, which we’ll get to next time. It’s apparently the style of barbecue sauce popular in Lillie’s part of North Carolina, and is best served slathered over chopped pork barbecue. It probably works well on most grilled meats though. This sauce is unlike most of the barbecue sauces I’ve known. It’s very vinegary, and fairly sweet, without a whole lot of heat, and not a lot of depth.

The recipe has a fair list of ingredients, but since you just stir them together and simmer for five minutes it’s not too much trouble. You just combine tomato purée, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, apple juice, pineapple juice, brown sugar, dry mustard, salt, chili powder, Tabasco, cayenne, celery seed, and cinnamon in a saucepan, simmer, and apply to the protein of your choice.

The recipe is really heavy on the vinegar, 3/4 of a cup compared to 1 cup of tomato purée. The rest of the ingredients are in tablespoons and teaspoons, so this ratio really sets the tone of the recipe. Cider vinegar is a little sweeter, and less acidic than many other vinegars, but that’s still makes for a very sharply flavoured sauce. The recipe describes this as a particularly sweet sauce, but compared to the BBQ sauces available on grocery store shelves it’s certainly not pushing the boundaries of sugar content. It’s a sauce to be applied near the end of cooking, or over offset heat, it will burn quickly if exposed to direct flame, but it’s by no means a candied glaze.

My main issue with this sauce was a lack of depth. The ingredients mostly contributed to sweetness, acidity, or heat, precious few give the sauce body, richness, or complexity. Specifically many of my favourite BBQ sauces have a slow simmered tomato base, or include smoked peppers, and more spices. The recipe is counting on Worcestershire sauce to cover most of those bases, and while it’s a wonderful product, it just wasnt quite able to do the job on it’s own.

This sauce was by no means bad, the identically named Tomato Barbecue Sauce, and Coffee Bourbon Barbecue Sacues on page 898 seem much more promising. I made a hybrid of those two recipes a couple of weeks ago to great results. If lots of vinegar, moderate sugar, and modest heat is your ideal BBQ sauce, then this is a perfectly decent way to go. It’s just not my personal preference.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

99. Chinese-Hawaiian “Barbecued” Ribs p.491

The recipe

I wasn’t sure I was going to like these ribs, but I was pleasantly surprised. These are racks of ribs marinated in soy, sugar, ketchup, sherry, salt, garlic and ginger. They’re then baked at 325 for 1 3/4 hours, basting with the marinade every 20 minutes. Everything about the title is confusing, I get the Chinese part of the name, soy + ginger + garlic = Chinese, fine. But Hawaiian? Is it the ketchup that makes it Hawaiian? The blurb says the recipe came from a Hawaiian restaurant, but if they’d come from a Sweedish restaurant would they be Chinese-Sweedish ribs? Chinese-Hawaiian doesn’t really tell me a lot about what they’re going to taste like. “Barbecued” is another misnomer, quotation marks don’t turn barbecue into baking. Yes they’re low and slow, but where there’s no smoke there’s no barbecue.

I’m usually pretty relaxed about health and safety standards when I’m cooking. I’m happy to eat raw eggs, tartars and carpaccios, and if some leftovers have sat out longer than they should have I’m probably still going to eat them for lunch the next day. One aspect of this recipe gave me pause though. The ribs are marinated, then the marinade is used to baste the ribs while they’re in the oven. Using a marinade as a basting liquid or a glaze is often a delicious way of making the most of your marinade. Usually the marinade is brought to a boil before it does double duty as a glaze though. Not here, the only safety precaution the recipe mentions is to apply the last coating of glaze 10 minutes before you take it out of the oven. Maybe 10 minutes at 325 is enough to kill any nasties that have been growing in the raw meat juice marinade sitting out for nearly two hours… maybe. I followed the directions, and nothing bad happened. But it seems like bringing the marinade to a boil for a few minutes would make the whole operation a lot safer and not take a lot more effort.

The ribs themselves were surprisingly good. I was only able to marinade them for about 1 1/2 hours, instead of 3, but that didn’t seem to hurt anything. All the sugar in the marinade made for a thick caramelized coating, and the long cooking time almost gave them the falling off the bone tender texture of real barbecue. The glaze was thick enough to seal all the juices inside the ribs, so they stayed nice and moist. The glaze was a bit intense for my taste, it was really really salty and sweet. It could have used something to cut that. Normally some acid would be added to give the glaze some tang, or some chilies would spice things up. I find those flavours can balance the salty-sweet, whereas the ginger and garlic here weren’t really able to get the job done. I thought they were tasty, but too intense and unbalanced. My first few bites were delicious but after a couple of ribs it was getting to be too much.

I liked the baked and glazed ribs concept a lot. In future I would play around with the glaze, and try to keep the flavours in equilibrium. Low sodium soy might be an improvement, and cutting the sugar wouldn’t be a bad idea. The baking “barbecue” worked out well, it’s a pretty good substitute for those of use who don’t have a pit in the back yard. I’m still unclear how they were Hawaiian, but they were good.