 | |
provided by:
For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.True barbecue is slowBarbecue cooking may have come about in part as a form of multitasking. Carolinians cooked whole hogs over low heat because it was the best way to ensure that every last bit got cooked without ruining any of the faster-cooking parts. Legend says they also did it because doing so enabled the cook to run off and see to other tasks.
Barbecue cooking requires a temperature somewhere around 250 degrees. (Significant argument surrounds the “correct” cooking temperature. Some argue for 300 degrees or so, others for something in the neighborhood of 180 degrees. As long as you keep the temperature from fluctuating, you can cook great barbecue at about any stop along that range.) By contrast, you grill using a fire that’s a good 500 degrees.
Barbecue cooking also owes something to poverty. If everybody in the South had been able to afford tender cuts of meat, high-and-fast cooking would’ve been fine. The need to turn the dregs of a pig into something tender and tasty brought about the slow-cooking technique.
Cooking meat slowly, at low temperatures, is what makes tough meat tender. Slow cooking gives meat’s fat time to render and its connective tissue time to break down. Both those processes lead to softer, easier-to-chew, and more delectable cooked meats.
The story behind your pulled pork sandwich may not be entirely appetizing, but the result is the reason people travel hundreds of miles or plan their vacations around their favorite barbecue spots.
True barbecue is smokedWithout smoke, there is no barbecue. Smoking means adding seasoned hardwood to a fire so that it heats up and smokes, releasing its flavor into the meat.
The smoke flavor that ends up in your ribs or brisket depends on the wood you use; pecan is going to give a flavor much different from apple, for example.
You add wood usually in the form of chunks or smaller chips that have been chopped and dried for the express purpose of flavoring your barbecue. Then again, you can run around your backyard picking up sticks from under your oak tree and throw those onto the fire.
One of the hallmarks of slow-smoked meat is a pink ring and, in many cases, a pink tinge throughout the meat. The ring around the edges of the meat comes about because of the gasses released from the smoking wood, which react with the muscle tissue to create the color. A pink tinge in deeper areas arises because of the way the proteins within the meat unfold at lower temperatures. Cook at high temperatures, and the meat’s color seeps out early, but when the meat creeps up on the temperature required to loosen the pigment, the color has nowhere to go because the other elements of the meat have already settled in and shut themselves off
| |
provided by:
For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.