Cooking meat on a gas grill is not barbecue: That is grilling and is a perfectly acceptable way to prepare food. Ask Ooog and Ughh our Cro-Magnon forefathers if raw brontosaurus tasted better than cooked brontosaurus. Unless they were Japanese.
Meat is good. Pork, beef, chicken, ham, sausage, turkey, game, ribs, brisket, steak, breasts, loins, wings, don’t matter.
Slow and low. Slow means more than 20 minutes, more like a couple of seven to twelve hours. There should be a ring of blue smoke in the meat. Smoke it over the burning embers of some kind of wood. Mesquite, Oak, Apple wood, Pecan, Hickory, don’t matter as long as it isn’t painted or treated with deck stain.
Sauce. Goes on last, or is optional. Taste is everything. If you want to eat raw fire, the suicide level, just leave the meat out and gnaw on raw habanero peppers with a Premium Unleaded chaser.
In Texas and Georgia the sauce is tomato based. North Carolina and South Carolina is more vinegar based with mustard sometimes. Okra is a South Eastern thing. Beans are South West. Coleslaw is all of the above. Onions and Pickles are the condiment of choice is Texas. I don’t know why, but they work just fine with brisket to clear the palate.
Beer is the beverage of choice, but since I don’t drink on the road, iced tea is the ticket, or Dr. Pepper. “Sweet” or “Unsweet” is not a personality question. They mean do you want sweet tea, meaning it has sugar in it, or unsweetened tea. In either case, the tea is cold, icy cold. Lemon is the common accompaniment.
Napkins or Serviettes? Nope. Paper towels on a roll at each table. Tear off what you need. Removing your hat, tie and blazer is perfectly acceptable, along with jamming a length of paper towel in the collar of your shirt to protect the front of your garments, especially when ribs are involved.
Football? Hell Ya! Especially high school football in the smaller Texas and Carolina towns. Here, high school football is an addiction bordering on spiking crank. Grown men and women start tailgate parties on Wednesday for Friday high school football games, then start dissecting the action Saturday morning. I’ve overheard too many hearty discussions about the Friday game over Saturday breakfast to be amazed with grownups jawing about 14 year old kids like they were NFL prospects that just haven’t been scouted yet.
Soccer? Faggots, Girls and Foreigners play that.
Biscuits. These are the reason for life. In The Bible, God, in Romans II said, “Woman, get me some biscuits!” Sausage gravy is the equivalent of eating drywall compound with meaty bits. Grits, are simply hideous. Eat a handful of sand, make sure its hot and add some heavy cream to it. Same taste, same texture.
Water with meals? Servers seem to insist on it. Your glass is kept in a perpetual state of full by a person dedicated to keeping your water glass topped up. Doesn’t matter if its a tin roof juke joint, or a white tablecloth place, you’re getting water. However, with the drought in this neck of the woods, some of the chains are asking if you want ice water first. Frankly, in some towns, I’d rather drink anything but the water. La Grange, Houston and Dallas for instance has water that tastes like bleach and sand.
More later
RoadDave 