An outsider's look at N.C. BBQ

Again, gotta love Google Alerts. If not for it, I would never have come across this blog piece.

"For (American) Northerners there remains a number of unfounded misconceptions about the South. People are fat. People are rednecks. People are racist. Yes, they are, and some of us above the Mason Dixon line hit those marks too," writes Nick Schonberger. "Despite consistent bad mouthing and classist snobbery one thing is universally acknowledged as better down South — the BBQ."

He gets some names and stuff wrong (Allen & Brothers instead of Allen & Sons in Chapel Hill; referring to ECU as "East Carolina State University"), but the romance is there.

To wit:

An almost mystic pull to down home, no frills, dinning, brought me to North Carolina for a weekend in May. Having toured Texas BBQ and Memphis, and sampled a number of places throughout Virginia, I’d largely ignored North Carolina in the past. Yet, the style is the most frequently copied (and ruined) in my regular BBQ consumption. “Carolina Pulled Pork” sandwiches litter menus at bars and taverns up the Eastern Seaboard, and given this an opportunity to investigate the authentic origins of the ubiquitous dish proved impossible to resist.

... Rolling through North Carolina, it became obvious that while blanket statements can define the taste, technique, and texture, there’s no accounting for individual twists and turns in the make up. ...

.. [w]e gathered remaining strength and hit Greenville. A ghost town. A place where even the locals are quick to tell you to leave. One did. A single toothed proprietor of the town’s Skate Shop. He told me, frankly, that there wasn’t a single good thing to eat within miles. I suppose his lack of teeth made living there possible. The best thing in town was a giant sculpture of a Pirate. The rest was genuinely frightening.

Three days. 8 giant meals. Hundreds of miles driven. The lesson learned, people in North Carolina certainly take BBQ seriously, and certainly place a highly localized stamp on a plate of pork.

Barbecue with 'single-minded devotion'

This article from the Los Angeles Times is almost a year old, but it bears reading again.

"The moon was high over the loblolly pines when Keith Allen arrived for work at 2 a.m. He built a fire of hickory logs, and a plume of rich blue smoke creased the black night sky.

"When the fire had produced glowing red coals, Allen shoveled them into a pit below two dozen hog shoulders on a metal rack. For the next nine hours, he shoveled more coals, stoked the fire, and turned the shoulders as they cooked a ruddy, smoky brown.

"Long after first light, he was still at it. With a cleaver in one hand and a knife in the other, he chopped the pork with a rhythmic whump, whump, whump. Then he plunged two gloved hands into the steaming meat to mix in a homemade sauce of vinegar, salt and red pepper.

"And that, for purists, is the long, hard, wearying way of making genuine pit-cooked Eastern North Carolina chopped barbecue. ...

"Only 20 to 30 barbecue restaurants among hundreds in the state still cook with wood, says Bob Garner, author of two books on Carolina barbecue. 'But nobody does it to the degree Keith does – he’s one of a kind,' Garner said.

"Allen’s painstaking methods – cutting his own hickory, manning the fire for hours, chopping his own meat and making his own sauce – have their roots in a time-honored process. Pigs have been roasted over wood coals in North Carolina since the 17th century.

"The process evolved generations ago into the hickory-smoked, seasoned and chopped pork dish known as North Carolina barbecue. (Sauce in the eastern part of the state is vinegar-based; in the west, it’s tomato-based.)

"But purists say the delicacy is being compromised by modern shortcuts. That’s why holdouts such as Allen are so significant, Garner said.

" 'He pursues it with a single-minded devotion,' Garner said. 'That’s his niche, and he’d be a fool to change now.' ..."