Category Archives: BBQin…

My newest post is a result of watching the newest show on the Food Network, called Heat Seekers. The show has two chefs traveling the country looking for the hottest foods they can find. The chefs went to a barbeque place, and they did pulled pork that was smoked with hardwood and covered in straight up chipotle sauce. People claimed it was so hot they had to dumb it down. Here is my version.

I bought two big pork shoulders and brined them overnight. I just used straight up salt water as a brine. No other flavors were added.

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I think it’s safe to say that Americans take their barbecue seriously. Get most US food-lovers into conversation about it and they’ll bang on for hours about the relative virtues of the different styles.

In Texas and Kansas City – cattle country – beef is popular, particularly ribs and brisket, with big, sweet, hot and smoky sauces. The variations between the two can be discussed endlessly and with positively rabbinical precision. In Memphis, the hog is favoured. Great slabs of pork, slathered in enough sauce to satisfy big, Kung Fu Elvis at his most unhinged. But for me, the barbecue of the Carolinas is the best.

I was lucky enough to live in various parts of North Carolina over a few years and I’ve never forgotten the experience of driving off the main roads to some grape-vine publicised pit, hidden in a mountain hollow or a coastal backwater, to see a legendary pork-master slaving like a kobold in the smoke. Furniture in these places usually stretched to the plastic and folding. Tables were covered with newspaper if you were lucky and iced tea, on the rare occasions it was available, came in jam jars.

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He was born into barbecue. Not literally. He wasn’t smothered in hot sauce upon birth. But for Jonathan Brannon, pitmaster at Texas BBQ Company, he was destined to at least know how to barbecue properly, if not do it for a living. He’s now doing the latter, as the fulltime pitmaster (yup, that’s what he’s called) since the beginning of the year.

His grandfather, Billy, owned two barbecue restaurants in Arizona and Texas. Brannon’s family moved to Massachusetts from Arizona in 1997, when his dad David’s high-tech company relocated him. After 9-11, when his industry took a hit, Brannon’s dad figured, “It’s in the blood. Let’s open a restaurant.” David Brannon opened Texas BBQ company in August of 2006, and worked the pits full time until Jonathan took over. ..

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