“You got your recipes, and you got your tips. The tips are just as important as the recipe. People don’t listen to the tips, don’t matter what recipe they got.” Desiree Robinson, Cozy Corner (Memphis)

Bullshit and beer fuel the competition barbecue circuit as much as hickory and hardwood charcoal. Barbecue cookoff legend Mike Mills and daughter Amy Mills Tunnicliffe take us inside a subculture of swarthy, smoke-burnished bubbas and self styled good ol’ boys and lift the curtain on the wizards of barbecue.

The reader is taken along on a road trip across America to meet dozens of colorful personalities who share a beer or two, eat some `cue, and swap lies. Through that knowing banter of been-there, burned-that, took-home-a-trophy competition pitmaster patois, we’re bathed in the smoky haze of valuable tips from expert cooks who rightfully take pride in making America’s most beloved culinary legacy.

The authors persuaded highly secretive pitmasters to part with their closely guarded recipes for this project. The book’s subtitle, “recipes, secrets, tall tales, and outright lies from the legends of barbecue” reveals the incomplete recipes, the half-truths and conveniently forgotten instructions that barbecue cooks share with each other. Mills claims the hardest part of this book was to tinker with these recipes that had never been written down by their creators to begin with, and reverse engineer them to resemble the original.

The smoky back room stories all entertain, but deciding whose advice to take is a much more personal matter. Mills takes a hard line against the evils of liquid smoke flavoring, yet concocts a recipe using it that’s similar to the world famous sauce from Gates in Kansas City. It’s not the specific recipe that matters as much as the reader’s own experiences as a barbecue connoisseur. Your preferences will guide you through the sometimes conflicting advice from the assembled cast of characters. Call it your culinary compass; your BS detector; it’s what homes in on your own personal definitions of delicious or disgusting.

There are as many different denominations in the church of barbecue as there are flavors of Baptists across the Bible belt. By documenting so many practitioners, the authors show the tapestry of real barbecue is not just one shade of spice rub brown. Various regional preparations are explored in detail: recipes for the sweet tomato based sauces favored in Kansas City; Memphis style dry rubs; minimally seasoned (salt & pepper only) Texas brisket; a replica of Maurice Bessinger’s famous South Carolina mustard sauce; the original recipe for Big Bob Gibson’s white mayonnaise based sauce, a style found only in a narrow swath of Alabama.

In addition to the expected array of dry rubs and meat preparations, many side dishes, desserts, and even drink recipes are presented. With names like “Pink Pull Your Panties Down Punch,” and “Strip and Go Naked Punch,” the adult beverages served during the long nights of cooking at big barbecue contests makes me wonder what I may have missed as a daytime visitor to the Memphis in May world championships.

In summary, this is not a beginner’s barbecue book that holds the reader’s hand through the steps of operating a smoker. Rather, it’s an insider’s view of the competition barbecue circuit and an introduction to the diverse range of people who live and breathe hardwood smoke every day of their lives. Some, like Mills, were born into the culture. Others adopted the lifestyle later in life, like the classicly trained chefs at the upscale New York restaurant Blue Smoke. Some pitmasters earn a princely wage at rib burn-offs. Others do just well enough to keep their family traditions alive for another month, another year, another decade. While the authors’ most engaged narratives and recipes draw from their own family’s history, they also compose an oustanding “class photo” with others that documents America’s most delicious food culture.

* * * * * *

Epilogue January 11, 2006: My interview with Mike Mills is posted. For those who linked in to my site, the interview is located here.

January 2007: Q Magazine, the trade journal of the National Barbecue Assocation, ran this book review in its inaugural Winter 2007 issue.

I’ll be a better baker in 2006. Some people resolve to lose weight over the New Year, or clean out the garage, or be more financially responsible. I’m going to bake good bagels.

I’m also going to bake good baguettes, croissants, and maybe even pastries. The sweets don’t interest me as much as the bread side of the baking world, but I’ll dabble with it here and there. I’ve been making a pretty mean pizza for ten years now, and I’m overdue for learning about other kinds of breads. So I’ll be baking something three or four times a week, over the course of next year. If practice doesn’t make perfect, at least the family won’t starve.

The home made pizzas came about because I got sick of eating half assed pizza in California. My definition of good pizza, like everyone else’s, goes back to the pizza of my youth. If you’re from Chicago or New Haven, you have certain criteria that defines good from dreck. I grew up near New York City. That also explains my bagel mission. I’m not gonna be an East coast bagel whiner. I will control my own bagel destiny, mwaaa ha ha ha….. ha!!

[Insert sound of crickets chirping]

Sooo… that’s a really high bar to set for myself. But I’m off to a decent start. I’ve been using Peter Reinhart’s Crust and Crumb for guidance. The crust didn’t come out as crisp as I wanted, nor did I get thousands of tiny blisters on the surface. I shaped these too tall to start with, but that’s an easy problem to fix. The interior had a nice, toothy pull and chewed with a firm resistance from the high gluten flour I used. This was an ok first attempt, but can I ever nail it, with no stand mixer, and a crappy gas oven in a rental home? It might never happen, but I’m gonna keep tilting at windmills.

Call me Don Quixote de la Bagel.

Salt bagel

Onion and sesame bagels

Get in a deep horse stance in front of a hot, open, oven door. Breathe out… breathe in. Grip wads of paper towels in both hands, and lift the unwieldy, 20 pound ball of 350 degree grease off a searing hot roasting rack. Lift with the legs, not the back. Rotate the hot grease ball a quarter turn to ensure evenly browned, crisp skin. Repeat at least four times, or until the medicine ball is cooked through.

I avoided this oven roasted turkey ritual this year by smoking my main course outdoors in a Weber Smokey Mountain cooker. And forget turkey. Even brined, butter slathered, free range, never frozen, organic, heritage birds aren’t as flavorful as a beefy prime rib. So as with my cranberry sauce recipe, I continue to stomp on tradition with my entree.

I’ve owned this smoker for about a year, and I’m confident enough now to cook my family’s Thanksgiving meal in it and not spoil an expensive hunk of meat in the process. There are several schools of thought on cooking prime rib, including these two:
1) The traditional English method: Start in a very hot oven to sear the outside of the roast, then lower the temperature to a moderate 350F degrees to finish cooking.
2) The low and slow: cook at 200 degrees for a longer period, then finish in a 500 degree oven to brown the outside.

Both methods will produce a rosy medium rare at the very center of the roast, but by using a gentler heat of method #2, more of that rosy pink is preserved closer to the surface. If you want to read more about the theory behind the methods, check out Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food, one of the books I’ll write up for my Required Reading list.

These principles apply to both indoor ovens and outdoor cooking over live fire. My friend Russ turns his prime ribs on an outdoor rotisserie using method #1, reportedly with great results. Since my Weber smoker is an outdoor oven that can hold temperatures in the 200-250 F degree range, it’s perfect for roasting a prime rib with the low and slow method. And if I say so myself, the result was fabulous. It’ll be long time before I roast another turkey in November.

He said “wood.”	Holding steady at 240	“Dam” fine pumpkin pie!

One tradition I chose not to stomp on this year is the pumpkin pie from the Filling Station Cafe, Orange County’s foremost pie bakers and my default purveyor of holiday desserts. Sure, I can bake my own, but for $20, I’d rather buy one that’s far better than one I can ever make myself. Note the height of the pie in the clickable photo. All their pies are singularly massive. A substantially thick, slightly sweet short dough crust acts like Hoover Dam and retains enough pumpkin to fill Lake Mead, yet crumbles under your fork like a Lorna Doone cookie. Baking this much pumpkin custard takes more time than pies of lesser size, yet it’s always perfectly done: never too loose, and never dried out. It’s flavored with just enough familiar spices to imagine your mama baked it, that is, if your mama got mad pie skillz.

Every year, they limit holiday pre-orders because demand is that high. When I picked mine up, I learned they stopped taking orders seven days before Thanksgiving. If you want one for Christmanukah, I suggest you call today. The caramel apple pie is my other favorite choice. Walnuts anchored by a hardened slurry of brown sugar “caramel” cascades like magma down the top crust of this massive, peaked, apple chunk volcano. The coating isn’t technically caramel but rather a sandy textured, dark brown sugar frosting. It’s a minor quibble with an otherwise damn fine pie.

Filling Station
This is their original location where the baking is done. Breakfast and lunch only.
201 N. Glassell St.
Orange, CA 92866
714-289-9714
and
195 Center Street Promenade
This location is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and has a small, well chosen list of interesting beers and wines.
Anaheim, CA 92805
714-535-2800

Ever wanted to order off of the specials menu hand-written in Chinese in a restaurant where nobody else is speaking English? The serious food enthusiast should order a copy of James D McCawley’s The Eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters.

McCawley’s a linguistics professor teaching the written language found on menus, complete with pratice exercises. He doesn’t attempt to teach any of the spoken dialects, which is a whole different ballgame. My resolution for this year is to understand at least half of the specials menu in the local restaurants that cater to the Chinese community here in Irvine.

Almost every herb and spice used in European and Asian cuisines is well photographed and described in Jill Norman’s Herbs and Spices: The Cook’s Reference. Publishing color photos on every page of a book is terribly expensive, so I hope Norman sells enough copies to keep this volume in print!

This culinary encylopedia illustrates hundreds of herbal ingredients both common and unusual. I recently purchased Vietnamese corn tea, which contains pandan leaf. What’s that? Norman’s got it covered. If you’re an eggheaded type like me, then this book’s for you.

Oh - for disclosure’s sake - I am now pimping Amazon, or they are pimping me. I’m recommending these books because I sincerely like them, not because I want the nickel I earn from you clicking through and buying stuff from them. So though I feel a tad whorish, I bought these books from Amazon, and I feel good about sending you there too.