The Great American BBQ

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The meat: Whatever you're barbecuing, bring it to room temperature before putting it on the grill. Don't trim off the fat (except for any huge chunks barely attached); during the long, slow cooking process, it will moisten and flavor the meat. Much of it will cook off, and the rest can be trimmed before serving.

Season the meat if you want to. After it comes of the smoky fire, it will have lots of flavor of its own, and many addicts prefer it plain. Others choose from several options. Dry rubs are patted into the meat before it's cooked. The components vary with the cook: salt (some swear that salt dries and toughens the meat, but most dry rubs contain it), brown sugar, paprika, pepper, chili powder, dry mustard, etc. Marinades are liquids in which the meat soaks before cooking, from an hour to overnight. In addition to flavorings, some marinades contain an acid for tenderizing (vinegar, lemon juice) and, since acids are drying, an oil for moisturizing. Basting sauces (or sops) are brushed on the meat as it cooks, to flavor it and to keep it from drying out. Table sauces are served with 1988 the meat, and are sometimes used as bastes during the last 20 or 30 minutes of cooking.

Cooking: Barbecue the meat fat-side-up. A beef brisket should cook for about eight hours, as should a Boston butt (the upper portion of a pork shoulder). The cooking time will vary with the size of the cut and the heat of the day; it will go faster with hot summer sun beating down on the grill's metal cover, more slowly on a cool fall day.

Ribs should be done in four to six hours. If you're cooking several racks of ribs, stack them one on top of another, and rotate them during cooking (put the bottom slab on the top). During the last 30 minutes of cooking, turn the ribs fat-side-down, and baste them with the sauce of your choice.

Recipes

Asking a barbecue man for his sauce
recipe is like asking
to borrow his wife.

—Georgia barbecue man

In fact, there are as many varieties of barbecue as there are barbecue cooks, every one of whom will make two claims about his or her sauce: It's the best in the world, and you'll never figure out what's in it. So anyone who claims to have recipes that are typical of anything at all, or even particularly good, is in for some very hard times.

These aren't bad.

Central South Carolina Mustard Sauce

3/4 cup water
3 tablespoons minced onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup prepared ball-park mustard
1 teaspoon dry mustard
3 tablespoons ketchup
4 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper 

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