A windy guttural day with little to aspire to as the briskness of a walkabout brought revelatory thoughts about food. My good friend Erik, himself a chef and self described food snob, recently offered up this question...what cooking class, if any, would you most like to take?...and i was at a loss, because personally I wasn't sure I wanted a new cuisine in my repertoire. I would rather improve my skills in Italian, Pan Asian, Euro-influenced, Mexican...but new? Sushi, maybe. And traditional French (but I don't eat that way so what would be the point?). I know I want to bake better-breads, cakes, cookies, pies, pastries (ala Monica) and work on my Tapas resume. More improvement than anything new, and then I thought of barbecue. Not the beer belly hotdog slinging barbecue of yore, but the BBQ of the south-good old fashioned down on the farm, dukes of hazzard deliverance style BBQ where you take brisket, shoulder, ribs and slow cook it in an open pit, then slather it with secret sauce! That's what I'm talking about! So,yes, Erik, show me THE BBQ!
Having just been to Kansas City, home to fabulous BBQ and lousy baseball, I now consider myself an expert amateur on the eating of said culinary delights. Not an expert on process, but an expert in the way that eating at five different places in four days will give anyone an opinion on anything. We ate at a diner, at a wedding reception, at a swanky bar, and at a grease spot next to a racetrack and military base. The variety of establishments equalled the degree of quality we encountered and traveling with another couple gave us the opportunity to try multiple things on the menus. We ate pulled pork (sandwich and just the meat), beef brisket, pulled chicken, long and short ribs, beef ribs and pork ribs along with the requisite sides of cole slaw, potato salad, curly fries, tater tots and, my favorite, baked beans with carmelized bacon fat swimming in them (YES!). I managed to pass on eating the ribs because of my cannibalistic fear of gnawing meat off a bone, but did scrape some off of Brennan's plate that was fantastic. It was all terribly good, a whole new world of food had been opened to me that is almost entirely regional, reaching maybe to colorado but certainly into texas, tennessee and oklahoma. After four days of a nearly vegetable-less diet, my digestive system was on its knees begging for mercy.
There are as many ways to BBQ as there are BBQ joints, and in Kansas City there are over a hundred such places. There's different rubs, sauces, agings, smokes, methods, and everyone has their personal favorite and it's always the best. Much like Alaskans love of smoked salmon, mine is always better than yours and we could spend hours talking story about the methodology. Same as Olkahoma Joe's, Pat's Pig, The Smokehouse in KC all one up the other in the all important medium of bullshit.
It's not terribly creative but the difference between a moist tender melt in your mouth pulled pork sandwich and a tough stringy dry one is method and the folks at Oklahoma Joe's have nailed it. They've been in business over fifty years and I'm sure the 'pitmaster' has been there as long perfecting his art behind the scenes where no one watches. I applaud his talent and his drive to be the best but most of all his love for what he does because that first hung over day in kansas city, that succulent sandwich and beer that i had at his place was the best I've ever had.