By Ashley Morris
For Weekly Surge
I'm a Yankee, yes, and I'm learning a lot about a sacred Southern tradition called barbecue. Despite the Southern belief that we Northerners only associate pork and holidays with hot dogs on the grill (I even had to suffer through a joke about this during a phone interview), I have attended many a pig pickin' at summer gatherings. But I never really got the "pig" skinny on barbecue until now - right before this weekend's Beach, Boogie & BBQ cook-off on the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base - coupled with Labor Day, one of the nation's biggest barbecue holidays.
South Carolina, the birthplace of barbecue according to Palmetto State barbecue biographers, is the perfect classroom. Where hog-wild barbecue master judges and marshals are bred with a serious pride and purpose - a title that means something more than a paper certificate handed out to wannabes west of the Carolinas. Where your heritage can be identified by the type of barbecue sauce you prefer just as well as your address in the state. And the only state in the country where one can find the four main barbecue basting/finishing sauces that exist represented according to region: tomato-based, light tomato-based, mustard-based and vinegar and pepper.
Birth of Barbecue
Once upon a time (according to a history page on www.scbarbeque.com written by Lake High Jr., president and founder of the South Carolina Barbeque Association), Spanish settlers in the 1500s introduced the pig to Native Americans. The Native Americans then returned the favor by demonstrating their method of slow cooking with smoke. Thus, the first signs of the barbecue practice in the Spanish colony of Santa Elena (today's Port Royal in Beaufort County). "Early humans would throw things into a fire, but that's called roasted because it gets that smoked taste," says High of barbecue's long history. "So barbecue is something everybody responds to."
Everette Brown (middle) accepting the trophy for the Grand Champ at the 2006 Beach Boogie and BBQ. –Courtesy Photo.
Those early colonists perfected the original or so-called "plainest" barbeque of the four sauces, vinegar and pepper, which still reins supreme in the coastal and Lowcountry areas of South Carolina - its popularity even extends north into North Carolina and Virginia and dips south into Georgia.
Mustard-based barbecue - the style most distinct to South Carolina - can be traced to the state's German settlers in the early 1700s in the Midlands (from Upcountry, but also slowly sneaking west into the Upstate and south into Lowcountry). Germans commonly used mustard. "More people are eating mustard-based sauce. So that's an area that's growing," explains High, "especially in the western part of the state because it's moving into a territory that's been heavy tomato sauce and that's just not an exciting sauce."
Most of the Upcountry/Pee Dee region and north into our Carolina sister leans the way of a light tomato base, which emerged around 1900 when tomato ketchup became a more readily available condiment. It adds a little sweetness to vinegar and pepper. Light tomato, incidentally, is North Carolina's signature sauce.
The fourth sauce, heavy tomato, seems to be the ugly stepchild of South Carolina - the more modern variant that evolved on grocery store shelves to fool folks in the rest of the country into thinking Kraft Foods is barbecue. "It has its benefits because it covers up the mistakes, the bad smells," says High. "Just the same way when you wash a dog with tomato sauce after he's been sprayed by a skunk. It's like adding sugar to wine; that's the best way to cover your mistakes in winemaking. Mustard does the opposite: it complements pork." (High, who says he's had a lifelong love for barbecue, admits he's "biased toward mustard.")
While everyone has a bias on barbecue, High is pleased that the SCBA is educating barbecue buffs on at least the fundamental fact that the state fires off all four sauces in existence. Education merging with appreciation, however, may be a more slow-going process. "You used to go into a barbecue house and there'd be one sauce automatically sitting on the table," he describes. "Now, because we're educating folks on the four kinds of barbecue, people take pride in that, so you'll see two to three or four sauces on the table because they realize customers like four different kinds of barbecue."
Scott Jones, food editor for Southern Living. –Courtesy Photo.
High reset the standard of barbecue four years ago when he founded the SCBA to revise what he called a double standard South Carolina held as having the best barbecue in the nation, but the worst judges. "They didn't know what they were doing!" says High. "Judges were usually the local DJ for publicity or the mayor's wife."
Now, through the SCBA, High says the organization has run about 600 people through training sessions during the past five years, but it loses judges along the way - especially lately, because of high gas prices. Certification is only achieved after completing seminars and judging four live contests. Certified judges usually oversee anywhere from two all the way up to all 24 cook-offs scheduled in the state per year. A barbecue event's marshal has moved on to actually organizing the event from beginning to end for a humble payment of $125.
Facts & Myths of Barbecue
Fact: Cooking barbecue is about "low and slow."
That's low temperature and slow cooking, the perfect mantra for making barbecue, as described by Southern Living food editor Scott Jones. "It's about maintaining the proper temperature, or keeping it at a low temperature, so the heat is constant over a smoker."
To be exact, temperature is usually set between 210 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit and cooked for 10 to 20 hours over hot coals or wood chips. During that patient period of time, some chefs will baste and prod; others will let the barbecue gods take over. "I'll let it cook for 10 to 11 hours and never open the lid," says Everette Brown of the Swinetime BBQ Team, 2006 Beach, Boogie & BBQ champions. Brown has been competing for six years, but was taught how to cook whole hogs at age 8.
"The better the meat, the better the end product," says High. "It has to have been babied correctly. All barbecue is cooked with a sauce of some type that's used for basting, and that's either put on the outside and it soaks in or they have these big injectors that inject the juices in the inside of the meat. So that means your basting sauce has to be good, too - something that complements and supplements the pork.
Otherwise, it's just roast pork... Good barbecue
is good barbecue; if it's cooked right, it's good - regardless of a basting or finishing sauce."
The slow process, says Garland Hudgins, marshal of this year's Beach Boogie & BBQ, is "a labor of love. You can't rush the love. And that's part of the beauty of barbecue."
"Barbecue will never change and get 'quicker,'" says Jones. "You can't rush barbecue. That's one of the core parts of barbecue."
High tells me of his recent interview/research day with British writers from Men's Health who interpreted barbecue as "the antithesis of fast food." He wholeheartedly agrees.
(Note: Smoked meats, as in a smokehouse, are much different from barbecue in that the temperature is much lower and the process lasts a number of days. It's almost used as a way to preserve meats.)
Myth: Barbecue is a verb and interchangeable with the word grilling.
Big no-no in barbecue's Bible. Barbecue, first and foremost, is a noun. So when we mistakenly say we're going to "barbecue" (verb, plus insert name of meat), we actually mean we're going to "grill" a meat over a high temperature unit for a mere sliver of time in barbecue language - 45 minutes to 1 hour, tops. More specifically, barbecue traditionally refers to pork (shoulder, butt or whole hog), so to even utter the word barbecue as an adjective to describe beef or chicken is unacceptable. The better version: as a transitive verb phrase, such as barbecued beef.
As if that's not enough to swallow, High also maintains that barbecuing is not interchangeable with the word slow-cooking. "Barbecue is slow food, but different from the concept of slow cooking food with good ingredients," he says. "Barbecue traditionally was stuff that did not cook well quickly, but had to cook slowly to tenderize it. So it's not always the best of ingredients - it has lots of cartilage. But in low temperatures over a long period of time, that cartilage melts."
Myth: Professional chefs make the best barbecue.
Hold the hog, backyard barbecuers doing this as a hobby have been known to out-cook professional chefs with a Johnson & Wales degree. Book smarts is only a chapter of know-how out of this difficult process.
Brown says he's happy to keep his barbecue a hobby for now: "I'm scared to get into it for a living - that I won't like it anymore."
He recommends beginners get started by playing around with the baste basics, as he did - vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper. Brown throws in a little Floridian datil pepper for some spice. But that's as far as he would release of his award-winning secret recipe.
Professional barbecuers that are doing it right on the restaurant front include Sticky Fingers, a Memphis-style barbecue and ribs place that first opened in Mt. Pleasant in 1992, and has an outlet on an outparcel at Coastal Grand mall. Catering manager Brock Johnson gave me a sneak peek of the Myrtle Beach location's kitchen smokers, which actually use hickory wood chips. (I witnessed the piles of chopped wood outside behind the smokers.)
Pork shoulders for Sticky Finger's pulled pork are seasoned and cooked overnight at 240 degrees; chicken and ribs are barbecued for several hours. An Arkansas native, Johnson says he prefers shaking a dry rub seasoning to finish his meats, which is what he grew up on outside of Memphis. I must say, after digging into a platter of samples - from a vinegar and pepper basted chicken quarter to Habanero Hot basted ribs - I loved the sweet-spicy mustard taste of Sticky Fingers' Carolina Classic sauce.
Fact: Holidays are the perfect time for barbecue.
"When you go home for dinner and you ask what you're having for dinner, your wife is never going to say, 'barbecue,'" says High, "which is why you find it around holidays like Labor Day and Fourth of July when you have a lot of time to cook it. It's a lot of work!"
Hudgins agrees.
"Making true barbecue to feed a crowd for a reunion, a church picnic or an old fashioned pig pickin' with family and friends is a labor of love," describes Hudgins. "It's sharing good eats with good company. Sometimes it's the simple things in life that bring the most pleasure."
"There is such a feeling of community and fellowship," says Jones, "hanging around the smoker and the build-up. Around holidays, it makes sense because that's when people have more time."