Real Barbecue Events

Your First OOEE Challenge (Get This One Right!)

Photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash

The “real” barbecue events that this chapter title refers to requires an awareness of the definition of barbecuing versus grilling[1].  This chapter is predominantly focused on cooking with smoke and indirect heat, as real barbecue dictates, but I also have thrown in the grilling of chickens as a related OOEE because you may want to combine real barbecued foods with grilled chicken. This is very popular across North America. You can find my section on the grilling of chicken at the end of this chapter. This section briefly covers the concepts of large/high volume chicken barbecues, above ground chicken cooking pit building, Hawaiian Huli Huli chicken roasting[2] and building your own “flipper racks” for an above ground pit.

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Real barbecue has widespread popularity across North America. It also holds significant importance, regionally, due to varying regional barbecue methods and recipes that have grown up over the last one hundred years or more.  Real barbecue involves a wide variety flavor enhancers which are added in layers. For instance, a chef may brine the meat, use a spice rub after a brining, select one or more woods to smoke the meat, apply a thin mop sauce to maintain a level of humidity as well as flavor, while the meat is being smoked, adding a barbecue sauce towards the end of the cooking process and perhaps providing a final grilling over a direct heat source like embers or charcoal to crisp the surface of the meat or skin. What a myriad of combinations!

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The tagline phrase, “low and slow” is the hallmark of good barbecue and this chapter is dedicated to the tradition of real barbecue. We’ll concentrate on pork ribs, pulled pork (based on the pork blade shoulder cut, the Boston butt or the Picnic cut[3]) and beef brisket. But I also will include the grilling of the broiler-fryer chicken to round out this type of OOEE to give you a major barbecue/chicken grilling extravaganza. I will concentrate on these four regional favorites that have the potential to create a world-class OOEE for you. You have the final decision on whether to serve all four of these menu items, but based on my own experience, they seem to create the right type of real barbecue OOEE experience which this chapter is devoted to.