Hold the sauce!
Also check out Texas Monthly‘s The 50 Best BBQ Joints . . . in the World!. And Daniel Vaughn’s work is a must read. He’s the “Barbecue Editor” of Texas Monthly, and author of The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue (check out this radio interview on the topic).
“Hold the sauce!”
Yes, yes, and yes. I have always loathed barbecue sauce and could never for the life of me understand why you would spend hours upon hours slowly cooking and smoking meat, only to cover up those delicate flavors by dousing your meat in glorified ketchup. It’s the equivalent of taking a perfectly cooked ribeye and dumping A1 sauce over it. A little sauce on to moisten pulled pork is okay, but if you have red gloppy sauce on your fingertips when you’re done eating, something has gone terribly awry.
have doubts whether Bourdain can cook as well as he writes about it. Attempted a number of recipes (with a bench scientist’s unswerving exactitude to protocol) in his latest book “Appetites” and they’re either mediocre or fatally flawed. The KFC recipe is a lazy rip-off (he calls it riff) from another recent cookbook. He found his calling as a writer not a chef
I live where BBQ pretty much doesn’t really exist outside of Tony Roma’s chains. I’ve always been interested in trying the Carolina style, since I’m a big fan of mustard.