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Here's an interesting article from AZcentral.com
Barbecue: Old ways, modern technology
John T. Edge
Cox News Service
May. 16, 2006 12:00 AM Archibald's Bar B.Q., perched on a red clay bluff in Northport, Ala., is the archetypal ribs-and-chips joint. Reached by way of Watermelon Road - a narrow blacktop wending south from traffic-slogged U.S. 82, the throughway that bisects neighboring Tuscaloosa - it's housed in a cinder-block building with a catawampus orientation, emerald gables and a creosote-sluiced chimney.
Landmarks, glimpsed at 40 mph, read like tableaux from a countrypolitan songbook: tin-roof shacks shaded by candelabra-top cellular towers. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods abutting lumberyards. The Lucious Concrete Co. Queen Esther's School of Cosmetology.
Somewhere along the two-mile stretch spanning the U.S. 82 turnoff and Archibald's, Watermelon Road becomes Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. No marker denotes the switch. The street signs merely change. And soon, after topping a hill and rounding a bend, Archibald's - skirted by a gravel parking lot, fronted by a brace of pine picnic tables - comes into focus. Cords of hickory flank the pit house. The chimney trails spirals of hickory smoke. advertisement
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Inside, Paulette Washington, daughter of founder George Archibald Sr., spears pork shoulders from the maw of the pit. Working alongside niece Vershonya Archibald, she focuses on the ribs. Every few minutes, when the flames leap through the grill, she reaches for a garden hose and sprays down the embers. On a chopping block set just inside the pit door, Paulette hacks rib slabs into four-bone servings, while Vershonya arranges nests of white bread on parchment-lined paper plates, shovels on smoke-charred pork, and swabs everything with a thin, orange-hued, vinegar-based sauce.
"Tell me what you want," calls Washington to a customer. "You like those small end ribs, don't you, those crispy little triangles at the tip? We ran out of those, but I'll fix you up; don't worry."
At the five-stool counter, black and white, young and old get their fix. They clamber for seats and clamor for sandwiches of sliced pork shoulder and Sunbeam white. The scene is timeless. And so is the savor. Same as it ever was, since that day in 1962 when the late George Archibald Sr. stoked the first pit and welcomed their first customer.
Technology or tradition?
Proof of Archibald's faithfulness to tradition emerges from the pit each day. But the drive from U.S. 82 to the front door sketches a South in transition. The portrait is problematic, for when Southerners talk of barbecue, we focus on the history and ignore the reality.
Among our iconic eats, we have long valued barbecue as the bulwark, the food we cleave to, the dish we value for its primal - some might say primeval - appeal. Current reality, however, is complex. Wood, once the primary fuel for cooking, is often supplanted by charcoal. Pits, long favored for reasons both sentimental and savory, are losing ground to convection smoke boxes. Pitmasters, once proud citizens of the working class, now stand on the same footing as betoqued chefs.
Somewhere on the horizon, a Buck Rogers barbecue future hovers. At the helm is 27-year-old Sean Brock, the chef at McCrady's in Charleston,
S. C. On his menu is a white-tablecloth dessert that calls to mind barbecue Dippin' Dots - made by steeping a pork sandwich in vinegar sauce and dripping the strained concoction into a reservoir of liquid nitrogen where, upon contact, it freezes and form savory BBs that smack eerily of smoked shoulder.
All of which is to say: The future of barbecue in the South may not be sketched by Archibald's. Ditto such wood-burning standard-bearers as Fresh Air in Flovilla; Sweatman's in Holly Hill, S.C.; B.E. Scott's in Lexington, Tenn.; or Craig's in DeValls Bluff, Ark. The quirky appeal of those places, the dedication of those pitmasters, the curious piquancy of those sauces, none are well-suited to replication.
Yet proprietors try, believing that even a barbecue restaurant can benefit from business models and economies of scale. Fresh Air, a sawdust-floored roadside shed smoking since the 1920s, has taken its shtick on the road, opening locations in, among other settings, a strip mall. Craig's, a six-table joint, now bottles and sells its black-pepper-spiked sauce in supermarkets. Zach Parker, son of Ricky Parker, the pitmaster at B.E. Scott's, plans to develop a franchise strategy while earning his MBA. "I see what McDonald's has done and I wonder what we can do," says the budding entrepreneur, a freshman in high school.
Change in barbecue does not come easy. Veterans speak of new and onerous health codes that preclude expansion. Of skyrocketing building costs that rule out renovation. Of the fraying of family tethers that have long bound one generation of pitmasters to the next.
Traditions and techniques, even among the high holy pits, are open to interpretation, re-evaluation. Some of the grand old houses have adopted modern means. In Georgia, the developments are, for curators of traditional ways and veteran patrons with keen palates, discomfiting:
At Harold's, down near the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the Hembrees now cook hams on flip-top electric pits. "We're cooking 30 hams a day," says Billy Branyon, grandson of founder Harold Hembree, in a tone that might be interpreted as defiant. At Old Clinton, north of Macon, the Coulter family has ripped out the original, dogleg-shaped flue pit and installed a gas-fired and wood-fueled Southern Pride convection box, manufactured in Illinois. "We wanted to make sure we got it right every time," the pitmaster says when asked of the change. "No more chances."
In their wake, a new generation of neo-traditionalists, working for the most part in the suburbs and exurbs, has claimed the craft. Some are shysters, cooking shoulders in crockpots and fanning wood smoke toward the street. The best, however, respect the ways of our forebears - even as they tweak tradition, collapse provincial borders and borrow liberally from competition-circuit techniques.
"These folks cook to win," says Gina Hart, a dentist, about Sam & Dave's BBQ 1 in Cobb County, Ga. In between bites of pulled pork sandwich, she adds: "They've won a lot of trophies, so you know they're good. Barbecue is different now than when I was coming up. It's in vogue now; and they're putting a little bit of the chef in it."
Fronted by a red, white and blue cement pig on wheels and set in a fading strip mall, BBQ 1 is a three-table take-away that dishes out a catholic menu: pulled pork shoulder and Brunswick stew and molasses-baked beans for Georgia traditionalists; beef brisket and Texas toast for patrons who consider the Lone Star State to be the epicenter of barbecue culture; macaroni and cheese, making a play for white linen gourmets by way of fat rigatoni noodles bathed in heavy cream; and thick-cut, Louisiana-fried Zapp's potato chips.
Bone-in pork shoulder, cooked for 14 hours in a Southern Pride rotisserie box set in a tin-roof shed in the back parking lot, emerges hickory- and oak-suffused. It tastes of local tradition. But talk of rubs and sauces with pitmaster David Roberts, a one-time organic vegetable broker who worked alongside Guenter Seeger at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead, and you know that this is not your daddy's smoke shack.
"We use rubs on our meats; that shows our competition-circuit side," says Roberts of his partner's grand champion prize at the 2004 Shoot the Bull Georgia National Beef Barbecue Championship. "And our sauces are all over the map. That stuff in the yellow bottle is based on a western North Carolina sauce. The red bottle, the thicker stuff, is Kansas City-style. The world of barbecue is big."
BBQ 1, which opened in 2004, enjoys a distinct advantage over Harold's and Old Clinton. David Roberts is not bound by tradition. No one's grandfather secured a county commission seat on the strength of a good stump speech and a plate of BBQ 1's pulled shoulder. Roberts can and does goose his coleslaw with crushed pineapple. No third-generation customer deems that an act of blasphemy. The net is that, compared to Harold's and Old Clinton, certainly compared with Archibald's, BBQ 1 owes little debt to history.
'We try to ? stay provincial'
That same freedom informs the work of David Larkworthy, chef and co-owner of 5-year-old Five Seasons Brewing in Atlanta, set in an old T.G.I. Friday's restaurant, in the shadow of I-285.
The wood-paneled interior, accented by free-form teak tables, recalls a treehouse. Monstrous fermenting tanks spur drunkards' dreams. The menu is scattershot: yakitori this, pizza that. But study the daily specials and a trove of unconventional barbecue reveals itself.
Among the delights: pork ribs marinated in a mix of apple cider, mustard powder and other aromatics, cooked for an eternity in a sealed plastic bag submerged in a water bath and finished on one of the three fig- wood-fueled, Japanese-made Komodo smokers installed on a concrete pad behind the restaurant.
On occasion, when Larkworthy finishes his ribs, he makes smoked potato salad, mounting a coil of dryer venting to the top of one Komodo and conducting cool smoke to a potato-filled second. After a few knife chops, he mixes in mayo and mustard.
"We do things that are unorthodox," says Larkworthy, who grew up cooking whole hogs in Westport, Conn., and went to college at Florida State in Tallahassee. "But we don't do them without study; I work to understand the barbecue ideal. Then, based upon seasonality of ingredients and availability of good pigs, we shift the properties around."
Larkworthy knows his limits. "We try to stay Southern, stay provincial," he says. "It's not barbecue until it's kissed by smoke; but that still gives us latitude." To prove his point, Larkworthy offers a beggar's purse of smoked pork shoulder, wrapped in a cracklin' corn bread crepe, the bundle tied with a green onion and served on a lozenge-shaped raku platter, the whole affair glazed with a sesame oil-spiked vinegar-cut sauce.
Keeping the smoke alive
The road that leads to Archibald's does not dead-end at BBQ 1 or Five Seasons. In truth, the road branches. Take the right fork and you loop past Fresh Air, Sweatman's, B.E. Scott's and Craig's before finding your way back to Archibald's, a citadel of tradition that dishes out both nostalgia and great ribs. Take the left fork and the country road widens into a four-lane. The scenery on the highway may not be pastoral. But in many cases, the destination is worth the drive, for the best of this new generation of barbecue pitmasters are students of the time-honored form.
These new traditionalists know the stations of the cross.
They cook to meet standards that are both empirical and reflective.
And their numbers may soon be legion.
Ask Nick Pihakis of Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q - a hickory-pit-focused family of restaurants rapidly expanding through the South from a base in Birmingham - to tell you about his favorite barbecue and, even though he's proud of his product, he won't feed you the company line.
Instead, Pihakis will tell you about his recent visit to Archibald's and his audience with Paulette Washington. He'll enthuse about the smoke curling from the chimney. He'll wax about the char on the ribs.
And he'll offer - without bidding - directions to their door
Barbecue: Old ways, modern technology
John T. Edge
Cox News Service
May. 16, 2006 12:00 AM Archibald's Bar B.Q., perched on a red clay bluff in Northport, Ala., is the archetypal ribs-and-chips joint. Reached by way of Watermelon Road - a narrow blacktop wending south from traffic-slogged U.S. 82, the throughway that bisects neighboring Tuscaloosa - it's housed in a cinder-block building with a catawampus orientation, emerald gables and a creosote-sluiced chimney.
Landmarks, glimpsed at 40 mph, read like tableaux from a countrypolitan songbook: tin-roof shacks shaded by candelabra-top cellular towers. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods abutting lumberyards. The Lucious Concrete Co. Queen Esther's School of Cosmetology.
Somewhere along the two-mile stretch spanning the U.S. 82 turnoff and Archibald's, Watermelon Road becomes Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. No marker denotes the switch. The street signs merely change. And soon, after topping a hill and rounding a bend, Archibald's - skirted by a gravel parking lot, fronted by a brace of pine picnic tables - comes into focus. Cords of hickory flank the pit house. The chimney trails spirals of hickory smoke. advertisement
Inside, Paulette Washington, daughter of founder George Archibald Sr., spears pork shoulders from the maw of the pit. Working alongside niece Vershonya Archibald, she focuses on the ribs. Every few minutes, when the flames leap through the grill, she reaches for a garden hose and sprays down the embers. On a chopping block set just inside the pit door, Paulette hacks rib slabs into four-bone servings, while Vershonya arranges nests of white bread on parchment-lined paper plates, shovels on smoke-charred pork, and swabs everything with a thin, orange-hued, vinegar-based sauce.
"Tell me what you want," calls Washington to a customer. "You like those small end ribs, don't you, those crispy little triangles at the tip? We ran out of those, but I'll fix you up; don't worry."
At the five-stool counter, black and white, young and old get their fix. They clamber for seats and clamor for sandwiches of sliced pork shoulder and Sunbeam white. The scene is timeless. And so is the savor. Same as it ever was, since that day in 1962 when the late George Archibald Sr. stoked the first pit and welcomed their first customer.
Technology or tradition?
Proof of Archibald's faithfulness to tradition emerges from the pit each day. But the drive from U.S. 82 to the front door sketches a South in transition. The portrait is problematic, for when Southerners talk of barbecue, we focus on the history and ignore the reality.
Among our iconic eats, we have long valued barbecue as the bulwark, the food we cleave to, the dish we value for its primal - some might say primeval - appeal. Current reality, however, is complex. Wood, once the primary fuel for cooking, is often supplanted by charcoal. Pits, long favored for reasons both sentimental and savory, are losing ground to convection smoke boxes. Pitmasters, once proud citizens of the working class, now stand on the same footing as betoqued chefs.
Somewhere on the horizon, a Buck Rogers barbecue future hovers. At the helm is 27-year-old Sean Brock, the chef at McCrady's in Charleston,
S. C. On his menu is a white-tablecloth dessert that calls to mind barbecue Dippin' Dots - made by steeping a pork sandwich in vinegar sauce and dripping the strained concoction into a reservoir of liquid nitrogen where, upon contact, it freezes and form savory BBs that smack eerily of smoked shoulder.
All of which is to say: The future of barbecue in the South may not be sketched by Archibald's. Ditto such wood-burning standard-bearers as Fresh Air in Flovilla; Sweatman's in Holly Hill, S.C.; B.E. Scott's in Lexington, Tenn.; or Craig's in DeValls Bluff, Ark. The quirky appeal of those places, the dedication of those pitmasters, the curious piquancy of those sauces, none are well-suited to replication.
Yet proprietors try, believing that even a barbecue restaurant can benefit from business models and economies of scale. Fresh Air, a sawdust-floored roadside shed smoking since the 1920s, has taken its shtick on the road, opening locations in, among other settings, a strip mall. Craig's, a six-table joint, now bottles and sells its black-pepper-spiked sauce in supermarkets. Zach Parker, son of Ricky Parker, the pitmaster at B.E. Scott's, plans to develop a franchise strategy while earning his MBA. "I see what McDonald's has done and I wonder what we can do," says the budding entrepreneur, a freshman in high school.
Change in barbecue does not come easy. Veterans speak of new and onerous health codes that preclude expansion. Of skyrocketing building costs that rule out renovation. Of the fraying of family tethers that have long bound one generation of pitmasters to the next.
Traditions and techniques, even among the high holy pits, are open to interpretation, re-evaluation. Some of the grand old houses have adopted modern means. In Georgia, the developments are, for curators of traditional ways and veteran patrons with keen palates, discomfiting:
At Harold's, down near the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the Hembrees now cook hams on flip-top electric pits. "We're cooking 30 hams a day," says Billy Branyon, grandson of founder Harold Hembree, in a tone that might be interpreted as defiant. At Old Clinton, north of Macon, the Coulter family has ripped out the original, dogleg-shaped flue pit and installed a gas-fired and wood-fueled Southern Pride convection box, manufactured in Illinois. "We wanted to make sure we got it right every time," the pitmaster says when asked of the change. "No more chances."
In their wake, a new generation of neo-traditionalists, working for the most part in the suburbs and exurbs, has claimed the craft. Some are shysters, cooking shoulders in crockpots and fanning wood smoke toward the street. The best, however, respect the ways of our forebears - even as they tweak tradition, collapse provincial borders and borrow liberally from competition-circuit techniques.
"These folks cook to win," says Gina Hart, a dentist, about Sam & Dave's BBQ 1 in Cobb County, Ga. In between bites of pulled pork sandwich, she adds: "They've won a lot of trophies, so you know they're good. Barbecue is different now than when I was coming up. It's in vogue now; and they're putting a little bit of the chef in it."
Fronted by a red, white and blue cement pig on wheels and set in a fading strip mall, BBQ 1 is a three-table take-away that dishes out a catholic menu: pulled pork shoulder and Brunswick stew and molasses-baked beans for Georgia traditionalists; beef brisket and Texas toast for patrons who consider the Lone Star State to be the epicenter of barbecue culture; macaroni and cheese, making a play for white linen gourmets by way of fat rigatoni noodles bathed in heavy cream; and thick-cut, Louisiana-fried Zapp's potato chips.
Bone-in pork shoulder, cooked for 14 hours in a Southern Pride rotisserie box set in a tin-roof shed in the back parking lot, emerges hickory- and oak-suffused. It tastes of local tradition. But talk of rubs and sauces with pitmaster David Roberts, a one-time organic vegetable broker who worked alongside Guenter Seeger at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead, and you know that this is not your daddy's smoke shack.
"We use rubs on our meats; that shows our competition-circuit side," says Roberts of his partner's grand champion prize at the 2004 Shoot the Bull Georgia National Beef Barbecue Championship. "And our sauces are all over the map. That stuff in the yellow bottle is based on a western North Carolina sauce. The red bottle, the thicker stuff, is Kansas City-style. The world of barbecue is big."
BBQ 1, which opened in 2004, enjoys a distinct advantage over Harold's and Old Clinton. David Roberts is not bound by tradition. No one's grandfather secured a county commission seat on the strength of a good stump speech and a plate of BBQ 1's pulled shoulder. Roberts can and does goose his coleslaw with crushed pineapple. No third-generation customer deems that an act of blasphemy. The net is that, compared to Harold's and Old Clinton, certainly compared with Archibald's, BBQ 1 owes little debt to history.
'We try to ? stay provincial'
That same freedom informs the work of David Larkworthy, chef and co-owner of 5-year-old Five Seasons Brewing in Atlanta, set in an old T.G.I. Friday's restaurant, in the shadow of I-285.
The wood-paneled interior, accented by free-form teak tables, recalls a treehouse. Monstrous fermenting tanks spur drunkards' dreams. The menu is scattershot: yakitori this, pizza that. But study the daily specials and a trove of unconventional barbecue reveals itself.
Among the delights: pork ribs marinated in a mix of apple cider, mustard powder and other aromatics, cooked for an eternity in a sealed plastic bag submerged in a water bath and finished on one of the three fig- wood-fueled, Japanese-made Komodo smokers installed on a concrete pad behind the restaurant.
On occasion, when Larkworthy finishes his ribs, he makes smoked potato salad, mounting a coil of dryer venting to the top of one Komodo and conducting cool smoke to a potato-filled second. After a few knife chops, he mixes in mayo and mustard.
"We do things that are unorthodox," says Larkworthy, who grew up cooking whole hogs in Westport, Conn., and went to college at Florida State in Tallahassee. "But we don't do them without study; I work to understand the barbecue ideal. Then, based upon seasonality of ingredients and availability of good pigs, we shift the properties around."
Larkworthy knows his limits. "We try to stay Southern, stay provincial," he says. "It's not barbecue until it's kissed by smoke; but that still gives us latitude." To prove his point, Larkworthy offers a beggar's purse of smoked pork shoulder, wrapped in a cracklin' corn bread crepe, the bundle tied with a green onion and served on a lozenge-shaped raku platter, the whole affair glazed with a sesame oil-spiked vinegar-cut sauce.
Keeping the smoke alive
The road that leads to Archibald's does not dead-end at BBQ 1 or Five Seasons. In truth, the road branches. Take the right fork and you loop past Fresh Air, Sweatman's, B.E. Scott's and Craig's before finding your way back to Archibald's, a citadel of tradition that dishes out both nostalgia and great ribs. Take the left fork and the country road widens into a four-lane. The scenery on the highway may not be pastoral. But in many cases, the destination is worth the drive, for the best of this new generation of barbecue pitmasters are students of the time-honored form.
These new traditionalists know the stations of the cross.
They cook to meet standards that are both empirical and reflective.
And their numbers may soon be legion.
Ask Nick Pihakis of Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q - a hickory-pit-focused family of restaurants rapidly expanding through the South from a base in Birmingham - to tell you about his favorite barbecue and, even though he's proud of his product, he won't feed you the company line.
Instead, Pihakis will tell you about his recent visit to Archibald's and his audience with Paulette Washington. He'll enthuse about the smoke curling from the chimney. He'll wax about the char on the ribs.
And he'll offer - without bidding - directions to their door
