The Fiery 4
Barbecue is bliss, we all agree. But which style is utter perfection? Four great locales duke it out.
Texas BBQ
In the Lone Star State, barbecue means beef, and beef means brisket. The largest cuts cook all night, bathing in the warm smoke of a hickory and post oak fire. The best pitmasters season with salt and coarsely ground pepper—that’s it. Sometimes they’ll throw on a few links of sausage and a rack of beef ribs the size of dinosaur bones. Then they’ll head to bed, waking up every so often to make sure the fire burns low and slow. Everybody knows the ’cue won’t be ready until the following day, when the brisket’s dark, crackly bark gives way to meat as soft as pudding. In the Texas Hill Country, BBQ is served on butcher paper and accompanied by slices of white bread, but rarely any sauce. “No real Texan asks for sauce,” says one pitmaster. “That’s like requesting more wine at communion.”
Memphis BBQ
This is the promised land for pork, wet-mopped or dry-rubbed—the entire city celebrates the hog. Pitmasters slowly smoke pork ribs and shoulders over hickory and oak, then serve the meat showered with a heavy hand of spice rub or slathered with a sweet, tangy, tomato-based sauce—or sometimes both. You’d be hard-pressed to find better pork ribs than the ones they turn out all across Memphis. Some locals like to mix their smoked pork into spaghetti sauce. Others will toss a log of bologna or some wings into the smoker and call that barbecue too. No one, though, disputes the authenticity of a pulled pork sandwich. The alchemy of smoked pork shoulder, creamy coleslaw and a glug of good sauce, all tucked inside a pillow-soft white bun, can make anyone a believer.
Kansas City BBQ
This burg has never met a meat it didn’t like. Beef, pork, mutton, turkey, chicken—they’re all welcome. Sauce is the thing here. Though every pitmaster has his or her own secret sauce recipe, the building blocks are the same: tomato, molasses, salt and a mix of fragrant spices. Those bottles of sweet, mahogany-red barbecue sauce sold in your grocery store? They’re hat tips to Kansas City. This town is crazy for pork ribs lightly glazed with sauce. The true barbecue aficionados, though, know to order a plate of “burnt ends,” the cooked brisket tips dipped in sauce, returned to the smoker and transformed into a barbecue trinity of smoke, sauce and meat.
Carolina BBQ
Here there’s a kind of barbecue civil war going on: In central South Carolina, sauces skew toward the sweet-and-sour tang of yellow mustard and vinegar; everywhere else in these two fabled states, thin sauces constructed of tomatoes and vinegar predominate. One thing everybody agrees on, though, is that Carolina barbecue equals pork. In some towns, the whole hog takes center stage; in others, it’s chopped pork shoulder that receives top billing. Whether you prefer your ’cue plated solo, mixed with crispy pork skin cracklings or tossed with cabbage as “barbecue slaw,” all of it warrants a pilgrimage to the Carolinas.
