A ditty about barbecue from the Chapel Hill, NC band Southern Culture on the Skids (h/t)
Happy Friday!
Year: 2013
The Barbecue Bros Holiday Gift Guide!
The holidays are upon us, and if you are looking for a last minute gift for a NC barbecue lover in your life, I can personally recommend the following books. But you don’t have to take my word for it.
-Monk
My favorite of the three NC barbecue books listed here. A comprehensive and oftentimes funny history of barbecue in North Carolina with tons of extra information packed into the sidebars (think fun facts, photos, and graphics). There are also recipes and profiles of several barbecue pitmasters who are cooking barbecue the right way across the state. If his name sounds familiar, John Shelton Reed recently teamed up with the BBQ Jew to to create True ‘Cue.
Bob Garner’s Book of Barbecue: North Carolina’s Favorite Food by Bob Garner
This book is actually two books in one – North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time and Bob Garner’s Guide to North Carolina Barbecue – and is part NC barbecue primer, part recipe book, and part restaurant reviews. All from “the barbecue man” and UNC-TV barbecue personality himself, Bob Garner.
The Best Tar Heel Barbecue: From Manteo to Murphy by Jim Early
This book is a little dated but is a fairly comprehensive listing of barbecue joints from the Outer Banks to the very western corner of the state, even if a handful of the restaurants have closed by now. Jim Early is the founder of the NC Barbecue Society, so he is also another man who definitely knows what he is talking about when it comes to NC barbecue.
What about you? What are your favorite barbecue-related books (NC or otherwise)? Feel free to respond in the comments.
Linkdown: 12/18/13
– This month’s featured barbecue photographer on TMBBQ is Denny Culbert from Lafayette, Louisiana, who has some great photos from his Barbecue Bus project featuring Stamey’s, Scott’s, Skylight Inn, and more NC joints
– Here’s what TMBBQ had to say about the new Texas/Carolina barbecue joint Curly’s Carolina, TX
A big vertical smoker uses pecan for the pork shoulders and ribs. It’s all cooked with wood, but there are no coals. We love our smokers here in Texas, but in the Carolinas the pork shoulders and whole hogs are cooked directly over hickory coals. It creates a flavor similar to the Texas Hill Country style of cooking, but doesn’t taste much like slow smoked pork. I questioned Jay and John about this and Jay hoped to have a direct-heat cooker operational soon and even hinted that whole hogs could be on the horizon. Until then, the meat won’t have much Carolina flavor until you squeeze on the vinegar sauce.
– Although this article has a somewhat unfortunate title – “Private school students start barbecue business” – it’s a cool story about high school kids in Thomasville (just outside the Barbecue Bros hometown of High Point) starting their own barbecue business; check out more on Butch Cassidy Barbecue here (via)
– Fervent Foodie has a review on Elwood’s Barbecue & Burger Bar in Ballantyne
– Ever wonder what it’s like to cook a whole hog with Rodney Scott? Well this gives you a better idea:
It’s nine p.m. at Charles Towne Landing, a six-hundred-acre park just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, and Steven Green is holding a blowtorch to an opening in a repurposed oil drum that is filled to the top with damp pieces of oak. Flecks of rain fall across two cleaned, beheaded, and butterflied pigs sitting on a sheet-metal barbecue pit nearby. Tomorrow, the pigs will feed hundreds of Garden & Gun readers who are in town for the first Jubileefestival. Right now, Green and his boss, pit master Rodney Scott, are just trying to get the fire going.
Throw Back Thursday: Speedy and I at the Charlotte Q-City Championships back in October (miss you, Rudy)
-Monk