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What
Is North Carolina-Style BBQ?
by H. Kent Craig ©1999
For as long as there's been civilization,
for as long as people have raised domestic pigs as livestock,
civilized human beings have also eaten those same-said
domestically-raised pigs, usually by cooking them slowly over an
open fire-pit of some sort. Then how and why did
extremely-slow-cooked pork carcasses evolve over the past three
hundred years into a carnivore delicacy to be found virtually
nowhere else save within the geographic boundaries of the State Of
North Carolina? That's a question I've been researching as well as
pondering all my age of awareness life, and still remain basically
clueless as to exactly why.
You would think that virtually any State, any location with a
predominately rural culture, would have evolved by sheer haute
gourmet tastefulness and preferences for the finest ways of cooking
and preparing pork flesh a meat dish that would be very similar to
NC-BBQ, but that's not the case. I've traveled and eaten pork and
beef BBQ in a majority of these Fifty States, and no where outside
of North Carolina do you find barbeque the way it's cooked and
served in N.C.
NC-Style-BBQ General Knowledge
All NC-BBQ is very slow cooked pork carcasses, generally cooked for
a minimum of 16-18 hours at a very low temperature for pork, often
250 degrees or slightly less, sometimes up to 300 degrees but never
more than that. With the (very real) safety concerns about parasites
in pork, it's important for the pork to be cooked completely
through, obviously; if you ever see any pink meat in NC-BBQ,
quit eating it right then, and raise hell. After cooking, the meat
is pulled from the bones, and then pulled apart into bite-size
chunks, and then usually chopped further with a large cleaving knife
until a texture is reached that suits the chef. Almost never is
"real" NC-BBQ ever served sliced, except at certain
restaurants that cater a lot to non-NC-natives and the clientele
demands such.
By slow cooking at low temperature, the meat is allowed to "age"
without drying out. Almost never is any kind of sauce applied during
cooking, save a tad of vinegar-based with a few spices only "sauce"
which isn't meant as a flavoring agent, only as a hydration aid to
prevent excess binding of the outside part of the meat. I've never
cooked a hog in my life, NC-style or any other way, not for a
pig-picking (more on the cultural grail of NC-style "pig-picking's"
later) or any other reason, so I'm not going to claim to know let
alone understand the culinary alchemy that takes place by staying up
all night and maintaining the vigil of monitoring the carcass until
the next day. All I know is that cooking NC-style pork BBQ is a
great job for insomniac carnivores with enhanced taste buds.
Eastern-NC-Style
It's easier to be a Master Chef at the New York Academy Of Culinary
Arts & Sciences, it's easier to be a Professor Of Sanskrit at the
Sorbonne, it's easier to be a Master Steak Chef at Blackie's in DC,
than it is to be a Master BBQ Chef Of Eastern-NC-BBQ. That's because
Eastern-NC-Style BBQ is plain whole-hog pork meat, with just
the tiniest bit of vinegar-based "sauce" which isn't a sauce at all,
applied as a moistening agent. Eastern-Style BBQ is usually one of
two grades; either excellent, or close to inedible. When you have a
fine-chopped (almost to the point of being ground at times, without
use of a mechanical grinder) plain meat dish, with just enough
vinegar "sauce" to wake up your taste buds and nothing else, the
meat, the grade of the meat, how the pig is butchered and prepared,
the pain-staking slow-cooking process, everything culminates to when
it hit's your tongue with either an "ahhhhh" or a "yecchhh!".
Most times Eastern-Style is served with cole slaw, as a side dish if
served on a plate, or atop the BBQ itself if served in a sandwich.
Craig Claiborne, the former NY Times food critic and a
converted fan of NC BBQ, often said an Eastern-Style BBQ sandwich,
with the astringency stress of the (usually slightly hot pepper
flavor but not much) vinegar sauce balanced with the cool blanche'
of the cole slaw made such an Eastern-NC-Style sandwich a true
delicacy, an epicurean delight.
When and wherever Eastern-Style NC BBQ served, in addition to cole
slaw, two things are also invariably served with it, those being
sweetened ice tea so strong as to where a cup or pitcher full of
melting ice won't dilute it much, and "hushpuppies". "Hushpuppies",
again, seem to be a peculiarly North Carolinian' culinary invention,
though, equally again, even though I've never found them for sale at
any restaurant outside of North Carolina, one would have to think
that fried cornbread balls, which are all that hushpuppies are,
would be almost universal in taste appeal and popularity.
Hushpuppies are merely cornbread-dough-batter elongated "nuggets"
about the size of a small cheese stick, deep-fried very quickly in a
super-hot grease bath, which gives them a flavorful golden-brown
crust with a yellow and equally flavorful soft middle, and are as or
more addicting than great BBQ by themselves. Even if a restaurant
has acceptable-to-OK BBQ, if they have great hushpuppies and
superbly-brewed iced tea, they'll do a decent business. An open
speculation and question: as easy to fix, cheap to make, and as
tasty as fresh-made hushpuppies are, I don't understand why a
national restaurant chain, say Burger King or similar, hasn't picked
up in them and made them an alternative side dish?...the Country
would go crazy over them, over hushpuppies, if they did.
Western-NC Style, AKA "Lexington"~Style
Western-NC-Style (also know as "Lexington"-style, after the city
whose core group of highly-rated Western-NC-Style BBQ restaurants
perfected and popularized the genre) BBQ differs from Eastern-Style
in two distinct ways: 1) it's always made from pork shoulders only,
ala' Memphis-style, and not from whole-hog carcass, and 2) unlike
Eastern-Style which uses vinegar and the barest traces of hot pepper
and miniscule amounts of flavorings if any in a "wetting agent" a
sous chef would have a hissy about if you called it a "sauce",
Western-NC/Lexington-Style definitely uses a real sauce, of
which heavy doses of ketchup are added to the vinegar base
universally, and often a small amount of sugar is added as well.
You'll often think you taste God-knows-what in
Lexington/Western-Style sauces, because Western-Style chefs have
been known to put pretty much anything you can think of edible in
their own special sauces, from white lightin' (the alcohol of which
is burned off during the cooking of) to turtle-meat-stock-soup
(turtle meat is generally too rare and expensive for this use
though), to any number of combinations of going to the spice rack
and dumping stuff in the vinegar-and-tomato-catsup base to see what
comes up tasty.
Other than using pork shoulders, which gives the "base meat" less
fat and more texture in the eating of than whole-hog BBQ, the way I
generally explain the difference between the two styles to
non-natives is this: Eastern-Style has no "help", it's just
perfectly cooked meat sitting there by itself. It's got to be
perfect meat prepared exactly, or it'll gag you. Western-NC-Style,
on the other hand, is like Texas-style beef BBQ; you can take very
average or even slightly under-average meat cooked just so-so, and
with a great sauce a la' Lexington/Western-NC-Style, disguise
the poor meat under/inside the taste-bud-tingling sauce.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy both styles equally, hell, I enjoy
all great BBQ equally, whether it's pork, beef, or Cape Buffalo.
And Western-Style, when the meat is great and it's cooked great and
it's served blended with a great sauce, is every bit the equal of
the best Eastern-Style. It's simply harder to cook Eastern-Style to
a superb degree of palate pleasing because it's either great, or at
least very good, or it ain't.
When you eat at most Lexington/Western-Style restaurants, you
usually (but not always) can get hushpuppies, though at
Western-Style ones they tend to add fresh onions and other similar
ingredients (which I personally don't like in the batter), while
Eastern-Style ones are usually plain. You are also usually served
some sort of home-made, hand-cut from fresh potatoes french fries at
Western-Style joints, whereas most Eastern-Style ones usually give "storebought"
french fries. Both kinds often fried in the same deep-fat-fryers as
the hushpuppies are, which gives them a unique (but pleasant)
aftertaste. Eastern-Style restaurants a lot of times will have a
signature, traditional Southern dessert, such as banana pudding,
while many Western ones won't, depending. The strong, sweet ice tea
should be the same west of the 1-85 & NC Highway 220 junction (as
good a dividing line as anything else) as at any place east of it,
weak tea equally disappointing customers no matter where within the
border of The Tar Heel State they're eating at.
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