North Carolina BBQ's secret menu - Outside Brown

Who doesn't love a secret menu? In it lies treasures reserved for the elect. Meals bespoked for regulars rather than the usual hum-drum fare dished out with all the passion that a cog in the machine can muster.

In the Piedmont region of North Carolina where Lexington style BBQ reigns this secret menu item is "Outside brown". Outside Brown refers to the meat that's exposed to the smoke.

The apex of stupid comments on Carolina BBQ is that the meat doesn't get smokey because we use wood coals rather than raw wood in cooking our meat. If you stood next to some glowing wood ember for a few minutes your shirt will smell like smoke for a month. Imagine then a pork shoulder spending almost 12 hours over these cinders?

So where does this reputation for not being very smokey come from in North Carolina BBQ? The first culprit is that the vast majority of Carolina joints cook with gas or electricity while still advertising their baked pork roast as BBQ. The second issue is that even people who do smoke with wood leave the brown stuff to the side!!!

This is largely because many older folk prefer the inside white meat which is leaner and softer. So when you order a plate of BBQ in Lexington or Winston-Salem, you're getting inside meat not the good stuff.

If you want that deep dark meat. The ones where the smoke is embedded it hits the most primal nerve in your brain. You'll order outside brown. This term exists only in North Carolina. The rest of the country refers to it as bark, where the maillard reaction of meat changes the texture of that calls to mind caramel.

North Carolina Banana Pudding

Banana pudding is North Carolina's most iconic dessert. Unfortunately of us Carolina stylists it's also one of the world's dullest looking dessert. It also happens to be the very best way you can end a hog picking meal. When she's at her best it's warm vanilla pudding, flecked with vanilla seeds, coating slices of banana and vanilla wafers topped with a fluffy meringue.

'Nana puddin' suffers due to it's simplicity. Desserts which are simple are often victims to indifference. Take for example strudels, flaky rolled pastries found in Germany & Austria. There's nothing fancy about them. They're basically thin dough wrapping a fruit filling served with side of whipped cream. But when done right, strudels possess a dignity unrivaled by any confection in the world. Too bad cuz most of them suck. Even when I was traveling in Vienna, the strudels weren't just bad, they were awful. Most looked like soggy rags and had a texture that came pretty close to their aesthetics.

The same goes for the humble banana pudding down in tarheel country. Now I haven't had any that tasted bad in my travels. But many of them came with shock that someone who have the audacity to charge me money for what was basically instant pudding mix.

Even in the authoritative North Carolina BBQ book Holy Smoke, out of like 5 generations old recipes for banana pudding only one didn't require an instant mix. Even the legendary Mama Dip uses a packaged mix!

Now I'm not one of those folk who believe that you need to make everything from scratch. I think people making their own in-house ketchup just got too much time on their hands. But for something that's so stupidly simple it seems absurdly lazy to just use a prepacked mix. What's even dumber is that this crap is actually quoted as part of people's "secret family recipe". That's equivalent to me holding with pride that my grandma's legendary lasagna was made with Prego pasta sauce.

The second problem we encounter is the meringue itself. Many people don't even bother with the meringue - appalling. Some folk actually substitute the meringue for whipping cream/whipped "topping". The latter being just as sacrilegious as substituting Coors Light for the wine at a Catholic Mass.

Along with serving the dish warm, the meringue is what makes banana pudding a distinctly Southern dessert. To either omit or substitute it we might as well call it Yankee Pudding. In the war of custards the 1865 white flag is waved every time this humble dessert is served either naked or with whipped cream.

I wouldn't go as far as Alton Brown and make the vanilla wafers (recipe below). His rationale being that manufacturers have started cutting corners with the cookies themselves and have started making artificial "nilla wafers" which contain no vanilla. I think they're just fine. And rather than put in that extra effort just spend a bit more money and use REAL VANILLA PODS in the custard itself. It will add both explosive flavor as well beautifully contrast the yellow.

The custard is essentially a traditional Creme Patissierie. Making your own custard is slower than the box mix BUT you get jazz her up a lot more. By boiling the milk with the scrapped vanilla pods you get a deeper layer of flavor that you simply can't do with the mix. You can cheeky with the custard and add either a rum-based banana liqueur like BOLS or just your favorite rum. Rum trading being very historically significant in Southern BBQ history as well.

For the meringue I substituted the traditional baked meringue for an Italian meringue. This gives you the added benefit of not having to pop the pudding into a stove to brown it. Italian meringues are made by beating hot syrups into egg whites which a pinch of constarch. They are silkier, more stable, freeze nicely, just all around more awesome. All it took was a few seconds with my trusty blow torch and we got the effect you see at the shot above.

In tray you see above I also added layers of peanut butter crumble over half the pudding. So half traditional half peanut butter. Peanut butter and banana being such perfect partners.

Banana pudding - Nilla wafers, Custard, Bananas, Meringue. Simple. Better to adorn a beautiful woman with the finest of lipsticks than to mar her face with the entire cheap makeup kit from Walgreens.

Alton Brown's Vanilla Wafers 

Ingredients 7 ounces all-purpose flour 3/4 teaspoon aluminum free baking powder 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 4 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature 3 1/2 ounces vanilla sugar 1 large egg 4 teaspoons vanilla extract 1 tablespoon whole milk

Directions Position 1 oven rack in the top third of the oven and another in the bottom third. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl and set aside. Cream the butter and vanilla sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer on medium speed for 2 minutes, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl after 1 minute. Add the egg and incorporate on medium speed for 30 seconds. Scrape down the sides of the mixer bowl. Add the vanilla extract and milk and blend on low speed for 15 seconds. Add the flour mixture and mix on low speed just to incorporate. Chill the batter in the refrigerator for at least 10 minutes before scooping.

Scoop the batter in teaspoon-sized balls and arrange them on 2 parchment paper-lined half sheet pans, approximately 35 cookies per pan. Use the heel of your hand to slightly flatten each ball. Bake, 2 pans at a time, rotating the pans halfway through the baking, until golden brown, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove the pans to a cooling rack to cool completely before removing the cookies from the pan.

BBQ ROADTRIP!!! : B's Barbecue - Greenville, NC

 

More photos below!!

Complimenting a barbecue joint's chicken is akin to trying to pair a smoking hot girl with your ugly friend by telling her "he got a great personality".

As far as I know there's only only two major joints in the country whose chicken shares place of pride - Big Bob Gibson's in Decatur, AL & B's Barbecue in Greenville, NC. Big Bob's largely because of it's unique practice of dunking the entire finished bird in their trademark white sauce.

B's is a well known fixture in the whole hog world. They clear through an average of 40 hogs a week cooking all night over charcoal. They make a very tasty hog. But interesting enough many many people have high praises for their chicken!

So what is the deal with this chicken? I wasn't even planning on ordering it because, quite frankly, who cares about chicken?? My gluttonous friends on the other hand had to have it, so we got a spread of corn sticks, hog, slaw, and chicken.

Taking a bite I finally got what people were saying about the chicken. It was crispy, toasted, juicy and very very well seasoned. But there's something else there. A secret ingredient. An edge. I took another bite and didn't sense anything unusual in terms of spices. But then I sniffed the bird. AAAAAAH. That's it! The secret. The single reason why everyone loves B's chicken. That little extra something that no one could articulate. It's HOG FAT!!!!!!!

You see, the chicken goes on in the morning after the hogs come off the pits. These hog have been sitting over glowing coal all night dripping juice and grease into the ashes. So when they fire up new coal to cook the chicken, they're smoking up the residual hog grease back up into the birds giving them a porky aroma!!

Well there you go. I just gave you the secret recipe to B's chicken. Step 1 smoke a few hogs.... Anyone want to steal that?

B's cornsticks are the single best in North Carolina. I'm not normally a fan of corn sticks as they're normally dense and hard. These were fried to flaky shattering work of art. I still won't order cornsticks when I visit other BBQ joints but if you don't get them here at B's you're missing out.

BBQ ROADTRIP!!! : Bum Restaurant - Ayden, NC

Quick! Name one of the top 3 greatest Heavy-weight boxers in history. You might mention Mike Tyson, or Evander Holyfield, and you'll definitely mention Muhammad Ali. Especially the latter as he spent most of his career calling himself the greatest. Poor Joe Louis. 12 years reigning as world champion. 25 successful title defenses (Ali had a mere 19). To this day there has not been a similar dominance in any weight division.

Unfortunately for Joe he was neither as well spoken or good looking as Ali.  Hence why none of us know about him. I feel the same way about Bum's Restaurant in Ayden, NC.

Ayden is a mecca for whole hog lovers. For decades the Skylight Inn has held the platonic ideal of swine cookery. Their familial cousin Lathan "Bum" Dennis cooks hogs in the exact same fashion and fails to get the same cred for no other reason than Skylight Inn exists in the same town. For God's sake they're not even on the North Carolina BBQ Society Trail!!! This last part is particularly irksome to me because Bum's barbecue is really really good and there's plenty of other joints on the Trail list that taste like ass and are coasting on their reputations.

Aside from my urge to root for the underdog, Bum's really is very good. The pork is not hacked to a tuna fish consistency, juicy, and lightly smokey with lots of little nuggets of crispy skin. Their side dishes are easily the best in the state. No exaggeration there. This is real country eating here filled with soul feeding vegetables. Eastern Carolina corn sticks and pork rinds are available to add just enough crunch.

And the fried chicken. Oh the FRIED CHICKEN! Eastern Carolina whole hog BBQ is usually paired with fried chicken. Traditional giants like Wilbur's, Parker's both serve fried chicken with their hogs. Bum's chicken beats them both. I'm all down for great whole hog, but when you got great whole hog and finger licking fried chicken - oh my....

A proper banana pudding topped with warm southern meringue finishes off the meal.

As you can see I have a particular affection for Bum's. As practitioner of the art and as a traveled eater, I find it an utter travesty that Bum's is never mentioned when talking about top BBQ joints in North Carolina. The NC BBQ Society Trail list is a wonderful tool and there's other sources which basically name the same big name spots. But do yourself a favor, many of those big names are for tourists - Bum's is for those in the know.

Meet My New Smoker!!

As you all remember, my long time smoker was stolen while prepping for a whole hog event. If you're a Carolina whole hog stylist, your smoker is very specific. I've cooked on a whole variety of smokers but none of them will do a proper Carolina whole hog. To do Carolina BBQ you need a specialized Carolina PIT.

My new smoker is designed to take hardwood embers and slowly smoke the meats til tender. While it's direct heat, the coals are very far away from the meat leaving the cooking temperature still very low.

We gave her a test run by getting my buddies to bring over a massive amount of meat as I burn down logs to fire the pit. We had 4 pork shoulders, 2 slabs of ribs, 6 slabs of beef short ribs and 2 chickens! Oh and a handful of rib tips to snack on.

She burned beautifully. Came to temperature with very little effort and held steady between refirings. I had mine specially customized with bar AND diamond grates to make the ultimate Carolina crackling on the pork. If your pit can't make crackling, it might be a good smoker but it ain't North Carolina BBQ.

I'm so happy to have my new member of the BBQ family. My wife and friends named her Fat Sally. Say hi Fat Sally!

My Victim has Arrived!! - Whole Hog BBQ

Not everyday you get a pig the size of an NFL Linebacker delivered to you

Whole Hog BBQ - Tools of the Trade II

Rammstein is a metal band based in Germany and one of my favorite forms of musical entertainment. I like them for their tongue-in-cheek lyrics, storyline rich music videos, heavy jams and their insane feats of pyrotechnics. It is further proof that adding a flamethrower to any situation makes it all that much cooler. I’m confident that if the US Federal government would mandate the use of flame throwers in our children’s math classes, we’re probably have the highest math scores in the world – we’d also need to hold math classes outdoors which wouldn’t be too bad of an idea.

The very first time I ever smoked a pig, I had a secret weapon. I found a massive bottle of Zippo lighter fluid which, due to its utility, has very little in terms of scent. People don’t like smoking anything that tastes like gasoline. I was a GENIUS! I had all the power of lighter fluid with none of the smell!! Well turns out I was an absolute MORON as we hosed down over 80lbs of charcoal with Zippo fluid, had a big poofy fire which lasted as long as a jelly donut at fat kids camp.

So we gave in and rushed to the deli for a jug of regular charcoal lighter fluid. Lighter fluid isn’t necessary a bad thing. I know it’s BBQ orthodoxy to hate on it, but plenty of the top cookers in the world use it to start their coal. I guarantee if I had you taste their food you wouldn’t taste the fluid. Plus I like the smell of burning lighter fluid on a small scale – reminds me of childhood summers (along with burnt chicken).

But burning that much coal with that much lighter fluid is not pleasant at all. Someone suggested one time I use chimney starters. Have you ever had to start 80lbs of charcoal with chimney starters? We’d probably spend the next 3 hours just lighting coal!

So in comes the solution – a baby FLAMETHROWER!!

More specifically it’s a Lincoln Electric Inferno Propane Torch.

Like everything with whole hog BBQ it’s a great crowd pleaser. The most popular photos people take are

#1 Them standing in front of my smoker

#2 Them holding a pig’s head

#3 Them shooting flames out of my baby flamethrower.

In the annuals of badassness, this tool ranks pretty high up there. When fired up it shoots out a jet stream of fire and will get your coal lit in almost no time. It’s actually kinda disappointing sometimes how effective it is as I’d love to just burn some more stuff. It even sounds like a jet! Make no mistake, it’s loud. The first time I had my buddy work it, he darn near wet himself. And my buddy’s a tough guy! Tatted up, big muscles, bald head – scary. I swear when that fire busted out he was ready run home to his mommy. You've been warned.

Whole Hog BBQ - Tools of the Trade I

I guess if there was one definite difference between North Carolina BBQ and our cousins in Texas and Kansas city, it's our tools.

When I used to cook fancier cuisine, your tools would come from pricey culinary outfitters or restaurant supply shops. My straight carbon steel knives were forged in France and German. We used a mess of different tools from Japan to make plants look like little footballs, chocolate look like snowmen, etc. I even have a pair of scissors whose sole job is to snip the top off a quail egg - to garnish a jewel-like plate of tuna tartar of course.

The funniest part of the Carolina tool kit is that most of it comes from hardware stores! So I'll be writing a series of various different tools you can pick up for whole hog cooking.

THIS is no good

The most intimidating thing about cooking a whole hog is getting it prepped for cooking. Even the smallest pig I have ever cooked is larger than most people's ovens. Even highly  trained French chefs have difficulty handling the entire animal as my highly talented friends will attest. 

To prep a whole hog for smoking you need to get the back split, the collar bone removed, and the breast bone cut off. Now this will be a completely separate post where I'll explain how to do that. You essentially want your pig looking like this

As you can see the top half is cleanly split, the collar covering the shoulders are removed and there's no breastbone. After this we split the lower half a little just flatten the hog out.

Now the tool of choice here is the reciprocating saw. I use a Sawzall which is made by Milwaukee Tools. If you never seen a bunch of grown men try and split the hog's backbone without the saw, you're in for all manner of funny. The use of the tool was taught to me by some good ole southern folks down in Georgia and it has made my life INFINITY better.

A pig is a powerful animal. It has lots of predators out there looking to eat it and it's hell bent on not becoming chow. Hence the tusks and tightly compact body. So if you're looking to butcher a hog for BBQ, it would be worth your while to stop by the local Lowes or Home Depot. Trust me, nothing will get your more frustrated than trying to split bone.

It's also great in removing the forearms and feet as well. Again if you're really into seeing a hilariously macabre show, give a 240lb strong dude a cleaver and ask him to chop off the feet. You'd be surprise how little strength will help you here. Those tendons and sinew do their job really well. There is indeed a trick to cutting all 4 of them off in less than 3 mins but it requires a lot of practice. Unless you're looking to cook as many pigs as I do, it's not likely you'll get too much practice - stick with the saw.

Tomorrow we'll talk about shovels.

aPORKalypse NOW 2013 - Whole Hog BBQ!!

See ALL the Photos and food porn of aPORKalyspe HERE.

I live in Queens. Now this for a long time marks the complete opposite of hip. Queens doesn’t have the same sex appeal as Williamsburg and definitely doesn't have gentrified air of Park Slope in Brooklyn. What I have found lately is the massive booming food communities of Astoria and Long Island City (LIC). People are extremely passionate about their neighborhood  With Village Voice awarding #1 BBQ status to John Brown Smokehouse and the charcuterie savant Ian Kapitan cooking at Alobar, Queens might just give Brooklyn some competition for coolness.

This year’s aPORKalypse Now was featured at Alewife NYC – voted #1 craft beer bar in NYC by ratebeer.com. I’m no expert on cool but I gotta say, this had to have been one of the coolest bars I have ever been to. The place was MASSIVE! High ceilings would be an understatement. It was like a renaissance chapel built for the devotion to sacred suds. Two floors, thick sofas, AND a patio. Breath taking.

The mission was simple – three 100lb pigs were at my disposal to smoke and produce North Carolina BBQ. John Brown Smokehouse was given the call to provide BBQ and as the joint’s resident whole hog expert, my pit pulled up the night before the event ready go. In order to get 300lbs of meat into my smoker we sectioned 2 of the pigs into 6's – loins, shoulders, hams. This allowed me to jigsaw puzzle them into my pit. The last one I left whole and simply cut in half for show.

4:00 AM me and my partner, Angel Mercado, loaded the hogs into my truck and arrived at Alewife to fire up my pit with charcoal and thick oak logs. This took longer than I liked but as it was really early in the morning I didn’t want to wake up the neighbors with my flamethrower. If you have never heard my flamethrower before, it sounds like a jet exhaust. A perfect recipe for cops being called on me at 5AM. By 5 the hogs were on and the first cigar of the day with a much needed cup of coffee was at hand.

Maintaining the heat was royal chore! First off it was really really cold. So cold I heard the polar bears at Central Park actually called in sick. So I was firing up the pit 3 times my usual rate. Thanks to my trusty burn pit and shovel this wasn’t a problem. The one interesting thing about cooking hog is that more of your equipment actually comes from Home Depot than restaurant supply stores.

By 2:30 we pulled our first half pig off in order to feed the people from Session I. A bit of a miscommunication as I didn’t realized we were cooking for 2 sessions. It would have also been a logistical nightmare as I literally had 2.5 hours worth of sleep just to try and finish this pig for the evening session.

In the meanwhile my massive black pit provided lots of photo foder for my fellow New Yorkers who are not used to seeing a smoker the size of a small car.

By 4 all the hogs were done and we keep the process exactly as my teacher, Ed Mitchell, taught me. Picked the meat off the bones, chopped them, dressed with my vinegar pepper sauce and topped off the with crispy skin. Unlike other BBQ styles, I can’t just slice something and serve it on a plate. Cooking hog requires that you taste a lot of it. Adjusting seasoning as I go. So often times you’ll see me not eat a plate because I’m so full from tasting all that hog. With 3 hogs smoked, that’s a lot of pig I had to taste.

Our line was nonstop! We chopped a half hog at a time to keep feeding the hungry crowd. Most of the people there had never had North Carolina BBQ before. How much the crowd loved it was voting with their wallets. As part of their tickets, guests got a few drink tasting and food tasting vouchers. More tickets to me meant less option to taste someone else’s food. People came back for 3rds and 4ths! One gentleman loved us so much he placed his entire voucher supply on our table saying he didn't care to eat anything else for the evening but our hog!

As part of the gag I browned one of the pig heads in my firebox and placed it on the table as a center piece. I swear my pit and this pig’s head get more loving from the ladies than I could ever hope for. It was passed around, posed for photos, kissed etc. At the end of the evening a guy asked to take it home with I gladly gifted as it meant less cleanup for me. The missing pig head distressed a group of women though. Apparently they wanted to take the head home as well. I gave away the remaining two (raw) pig heads sitting at the back of truck. I never realized that women were so fond of raw pig heads. That’s some wife material right there.

aPORKalypse NOW 2013 was an amazing event. So happy to see so many people enjoy my BBQ and a great way to kick off a 2013 filled with BBQ events.

See all the Photos and food porn of aPORKalyspe HERE.

Best Kept Secret in Lexington-Style BBQ

Peru has over 4,000 varieties of potatoes. Like most of the world, the Peruvians also enjoy fried foods. So in the course of one of the oldest civilizations in the world, how did they never invent the French Fry? It seems like a fairly logical result – Potato + oil = awesomeness.

In Western North Carolina, whole skin-on shoulders are cooked over hardwood embers for hours until the flesh is meltingly tender.  In the process of doing this, skin exposed to the heat continually renders fat and becomes deeply flavored with hickory and soul-echoing crunchy. So how does one serve such a culinary delight? An item that can only be crafted by time and hand fired wood heat? Well they don’t. For the most part the skins go into the trash!!

Now this isn’t the end of the world but it does seem very very odd. It’s like peeling the crust off a pie and throwing it out so that you can eat the filling. Interesting enough, when you head down to South Carolina, skins are definitely a menu item. In certain places in the Palmetto State, there is a limit on how much skin you can take.

The best kept secret when eating BBQ in the Piedmont region (Greensboro/Winston-Salem area) is to ask for some of the crispy skin. It’s not likely that they’ll charge you as it’s going in the trash anyway and you’ll be enjoying perhaps the best thing off the pit.

How to order BBQ in Western North Carolina

One of the more bizarre attributions given to Asian foods is somehow the idea that we like putting oranges in our food. The criminally disgusting “Orange Chicken” found on Chinese takeout dives all over the country would not be consumed by any self-respecting Chinaman. These days any jackass wanting to make something “Asian” will invariably add oranges to the mix. McDonald’s even jumped on the stereotype by placing mandarins into their “Asian” salad.

Fairly similar is the perpetual menu item in generic BBQ places around the country. Carolina pulled pork will always be on the menu. Of course pulled pork is almost nowhere to be seen in North Carolina!! Now I’m sure there has to be some joint somewhere in the state that does a pulled pork sandwich, but I’ve eaten BBQ from Ayden all the way to Lexington and not a single big name joint offers their pork pulled. In Eastern North Carolina you can have your BBQ hog anyway you’d like just so long as it’s finely chopped.

In Western North Carolina located up in the Piedmont Triangle (aka “Lexington Style”) you actually get a number of choices on how you’d like your pork served. Think of Western NC BBQ like espresso drinks. While it’s all the same espresso and milk you can order a doppio, cortado, cappuccino, viennois, au lait or latte and basically receive a different drink. Now here’s my guide to helping you order BBQ like a pro.

THE CHOP – Remember Carolina BBQ is not pulled it’s chopped or sliced.

• Chopped – This will be the default they’ll give you if you can’t decide. The pork is minced fine and dressed with the house dip (Lexington BBQ has “DIP” not sauce). The vast majority of your Carolina brethren have grown up eating this and it’s pretty much the standard order.
• Sliced – If you like your pork white and lean this is your cut. It’s slightly drier and is a favorite among the older folk who don’t want to pay money for fat. It comes from the picnic portion of the shoulder
• Coarse Chopped – As the name implies, the pork is not finely minced and you still get some meat texture. I personally like this one better. More so because by ordering this, you’ll ensure that your meat is freshly chopped. Places that do fine chopped will sometimes put their meat in this blender like machine called a “buffalo chopper”, it’s awful as the meat dries out quickly. To avoid the dreaded buffalo chopper, order the coarse.

BROWN or WHITE?

• White - North Carolinians don’t tend to like their BBQ too smokey. Thus many places will focus on providing the soft interior parts of the smoked meats where the flavor is not intense. If you don’t specify brown or white, you’ll likely get white.
• BROWN (sometimes called outside meat) – This is the “bark” of the meat. The exposed flesh that gets the most amount of love time with those hickory embers. The flavor of this is intense and slightly drier. Not everyone likes it, but if you’re a fan of smoked flavor, this is it.

So best success you’ll want to get  a tray of Course Chopped outside brown. This earns you instant Carolina cred.